Antidotes to Anxiety
Who are you when capitalism stands still? Who are you when separated from your social networks, the embodied presence of human beings who choose to spend time with you? What beasts of fear arise in the space of slow down?
Question your catastrophizing and the assumptions of your daily story-teller.
Ask, True Or Not True :
The Guise of the do’er - If I perpetually cook, clean, fold, return, respond, wrap-up and complete, everything will be ok.
If I let the Spector of the unknown say her piece, I will collapse.
Working is the only way I can conjure my worth.
I am alone.
This practice allows us to right-size our responses and acknowledge which inner narratives to trust.
Discover your anxiety’s physical address:
Ask where does it live?
Shallow breath
Tight Jaw
Dry tight forehead
Squeezey hurt belly
Cold Hands and Feet
This asking allows us to locate our body’s involvement in our emotions, notice these signals as requiring attention and find meaning in physicality.
Address the somatic aspects of emotion through practice:
Ask, How can I affect the physiology of my emotional experience?
Build your relationship with subtle, mysterious breath, your constant companion.
Relax your belly - unbutton your jeans
Focus attention on sensation, watch it change, evoke time and passage with this awareness
Side-step fear by visiting an up-regulated cousin like excitement - you don’t always need to calm down. Dance or masturbate.
Mindful movement with breath awareness - the magic all-systems salve
These questions make you the expert in your physio-emotional terrain.
Insist on connection:
Zoom your mom, yeah you heard me.
Make eye contact at the grocery, practice eye-smiling, befriend your crows-feet as you do this.
Send a letter
Be in the woods
Find yourself near water
Share a song with someone you think of more in the last 8 weeks than usual.
To you for whom some of these points of connection are unavailable, I love you in your city apartment, in the loss of your mother, or as a resident of a desert.
Remember that difficult emotions have positive intentions:
As Tara Brach so artfully describes in her series “Sheltering in Love”
Fear wants to protect you from being hurt or struggling.
Shame wants to keep you from being separated from your society or your family.
Anger wants to protect you from feeling hurt, guilty or sad.
Rather than push these tender monsters away, invite them in for tea. Thank them for having your back, albeit perhaps a bit too hard. If misplaced or outsized, request that they take a nap by the fire after having been dully acknowledged. If right-sized and resonant, trust in your heart’s capacity to hold them in concert with the great beauty and awe of your aliveness. Trust them to move and change. Know your mortality as a champion of your motivation and thrust to live vividly af.
Godspeed and Sweet Dreams,
Hilary Elizabeth