Familiar suffering gets so much traction in you because it provides an illusion of certainty. Anxiety not faced head on festers, resulting in you looking around for resolution; looking to discharge the discomfort, you seek certainty. You wish to be certain that this anxiety can be ignored, set aside, left behind. Yet it can’t. You can’t be totally rid of it. You must transform your stance about the fact of it in your life. The fact that anxiety isn’t the trouble. That it is mostly the survival instinct doing its thing. Your willingness to allow habit to continue to dictate your response to the anxiety is the real problem. Your deep habitual reactions to anxiety are accepted with no requirement that they offer any sort of constructive result. You mistake this repetition of pattern as certainty. But what it does is lock you into a clear pattern. A pattern of suffering. Be willing to explore your anxieties without desiring certainty. Allow yourself to contemplate just how uncertain you actually are about your anxiety. At first this may frighten you. Don’t allow it to scare you back to habit. You know all of what habit has to offer and it’s insufficient. What often happen is that your anxiety gets tied to one or more awful preconceived outcomes. Avoid making this connection, Say, “I’m tempted to believe that my worry about X means Y will happen.” Be aware that you are connecting your current situation to scary outcomes. Focusing on the now moment allows you an option to outcome-based thinking. Hear the birds, feel the morning air, taste your food. Let your awareness of your anxiety be only that, awareness. Don’t connect anxiety (using habit) to scary outcomes as a way to fake certainty which is then somehow going to offer relaxation (but really only gives familiar suffering). Keep saying NO to the thoughts that arise asking you to habitually process anxiety. Keep saying YES to exploring anxiety with a fresh perspective. Anxieties will always be present. You decide how loud they are. You decide how you react to them. You decide. From Eloheim
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 19:47:52 +0000
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