From Fear to Freedom
I remember the many times I sat in a grand lecture hall while an undergrad at Penn in the middle of an exam hoping all my studying would result in an okay grade when the panic attack would hit. Suddenly the page was blank and my mind was blank and my body could do nothing but stare back at the blankness with a racing heart.
I remember how my thoughts would so often obsessively race… no matter how much yoga I did or traditional talk therapy I tried, my mind would seem to outsmart itself and find new pathways back toward the oh-so-familiar discomfort.
I remember the many times I didn’t speak up because it was too uncomfortable, too anxiety-inducing.
I remember…
I remember…
I could go on.
I struggled for most of my life with anxiety, and at times it seemed debilitating. I felt so much pressure to be perfect and exceptional from a young age that it became part of my identity. And with that, Anxious Anna became part of my identity too. This character was highly functioning to uphold its perfect persona, but ultimately my high accomplishing self was on a mission to find a better way to live than this. Surely this was not how life had to be, right…?
It wasn’t until I felt like I’d tried everything other than medication that I found the methods I now utilize for myself and in my coaching practice. Within a week of delving into the first of these methods, my entire inner experience turned around so intensely that a few closest to me were shocked by the shift in energy they sensed in me (in a very good way!). I suddenly became open and free and spacious, which previously may have arisen here and there spontaneously but had felt inaccessible to regularly maintain. Metaphorically, it felt like going from being weighed down with a chain inside to floating freely through clouds with ease and lightness.
I also realized through this inner work that so much of our inner experience is made up. Completely made up. Our minds make up stories that aren’t real. So much of what happens is neutral, and it’s our minds that ascribe meaning and interpretation and layer that on top of what objectively is happening. And there’s absolutely no way to know what will happen next, it’s just that our mind likes to think it can know.
Next time an uncomfortable thought arises in your experience, test out this little experiment and see how you like it:
Is that absolutely true?
What if it isn’t? What if it’s just a story?
What if it never really was?
How does that feel? Is there a sense of any spaciousness inside as a result of this brief self inquiry?
“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. The entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.”
Now this may all make sense on an intellectual and conscious level and we can turn around and face these stories our minds have been telling us. However, addressing the root of these feelings and thoughts at an unconscious experiential level is often what is most effective in creating deeper lasting change, and I am so grateful to have found effective tools for facilitating such evolution.
While nowadays the feeling of anxiety still arises because it’s part of the range of the human experience, I no longer identify as Anxious Anna. Anxious Anna was just a story, and that story isn’t real and doesn’t have to be true anymore. I am simply Anna, and anxiety sometimes arises. But it no longer holds me back or haunts me. Instead, it visits me less and less, and when it does visit I’m able to welcome it with more love as it moves through me and goes on its way.
