Befriending Anxiety

Because all of us know people who are struggling with anxiety, some advice.

Very simple, very easy to follow, but they will need your help sticking to the regime (and if you’re the one struggling, you’ll need a beloved to help you stay on track).

Firstly, you cannot cure anxiety with the same thing that created it. What I mean by this that you can’t talk yourself out of anxiety with your mind, you cannot rationalise or negotiate with it. All that happens when you do this is that you end up in a perpetual conversation with yourself, wondering why you can’t ever move on and feeling bad about it.

Anxiety is not rational, therefore your rational mind cannot help you (and nor can anyone else’s, for those of you addicted to telling friends about all of your worries and hoping it will help).

Let the anxiety be.

There is one simple thing that you need to do:

make your body a safe place for your mind to live in.

This is how:

1. Breathing practice. Every day, at least twice.

2. Exercise. It doesn’t matter what, for how long or where. A walk is as good as a run here, yoga as good as a workout. If you can’t stick to things, don’t - hit the gym for three weeks, then get bored, do yoga for a month, then switch to Park Runs. It doesn’t matter what, it only matters that you do it. Every day for at least 20 minutes.

3. Don’t take anything personally. It’s a hard one this, so practice. You’re good, you have enough friends, you have people who love you. Sometimes someone won’t like you, love you, talk to you kindly. Get over it and move on (never, ever waste time trying to persuade them they are wrong about you).

4. Choose one therapy that helps you and do it. Every month. Massage, tapping, talking therapy, facial, whatever.

Consistency is king.

The world will keep throwing shit at you. The only way to handle it is to ensure that your own body, with all of its chemicals, hormones, joints, muscles and mechanisms is a safe place for your mind and soul to live.

The trouble is that the anxious get distracted very easily. This is why you need someone to help you stay on track.

The trouble is that the anxious don’t like people helping them to stay on track, so they don’t bother with that bit. Then they wake up 3 months later in a mental stew wondering how and when they stopped going for that weekly wild swim that made them feel 100 times better.

Do you see how simple this is, but how hard it is to stick to it when you are an anxious person. If you want to help your beloved with their anxiety, help them to do the 4 things above, that’s all. Every day, every week, forever.

Love them, love yourself.
Instead of hoping for what can never be (a safe, predictable world) let your body/their body become the safe home you/they are longing for.

Light in the Dark

I believe that feeling blue sometimes in a world that insists on being so troublesome is a perfectly normal response.

It’s not to do with a lack of joy. Many of my students know depression, yet they are the most joyful people, they laugh a lot and they see humour everywhere. They have an eye for beauty and they see and appreciate the small things. They are the gentlest people too, their friends and families rely on them for their kind steadfastness. They are often sensitive people, noticing when friends are in need of a hand, finely tuned to the moods of their beloveds, hopeful that they can help when help is needed.

If you are a kind, sensitive, gentle person who knows that joy lies in the tiny things that many people miss and who hopes to give as much as you can to those in need, or to work to spread more joy and kindness in the world, then it seems obvious to me that sometimes life overwhelms you.

You get tired, that’s all. Your gifts, so needed, do not make you a superhero - you can only do what you do in your little corner of the world, you can’t change everything. Plus, the internet lives and breathes on the dark things - why we click them more and make those guys even more money is something that someone will research and understand one day.

You need to rest.
You need to restore balance.
You like to be out, but you also need to be at home, quietly.
You need good food, gentle exercise and warmth.

Of course I will say that you need yoga: to breathe well, to relax your nervous system and to keep your body moving. It will help to restore you and it will help you to sleep the deep, restorative sleep that you need. Yoga teaches acceptance: fighting against the exhaustion, the descent of the dark, is just no good. It will only take you further down and keep you there for longer. There are rhythms in life and we can choose to flow with them or fight them. I recommend learning how to flow.

Look after your gentle, tender, joy-knowing, beauty-loving, compassionate, loving self. You will soon be on the other side.

Tender

We should be very tender with our grief, I think.

We ought to nurture it for the small, fragile thing it is, that holds all of our weight and memory and possibility.

We all have our griefs, all of us. They tell us what we have loved and they remind us of who we were once and the things we have had to let go of as we made our way through life.

We can grieve for someone lost, for parts of ourselves that faded or died, for a future that we thought we would have, for the person we will never be.

Grief whispers quietly of our most secret sorrows and shows us how to be gentle, with ourselves, with others.

Grief does not rage or fight, it does not shout or throw itself about. Grief is what lies beneath.

Grief is the smooth pebble of our knowing, that we keep in our pocket and stroke from time to time. It brings the parts of us that were lost back to being, holds them close, speaks their names.

A life without grief is a life without love, without care, without tenderness. We have all met the ones who run away from their grieving selves, but truly it takes up such a lot of energy and every time they turn around there it still is. Inescapable.

I don’t want my grief to be a hidden, frightening thing. I want my grief to stand as a testament to who they were, to who I was, to what I have lost and to what I still have.

We should be very tender with our grief, I think. It is a precious thing.