Today I will be talking about anxiety, the most effective meditation for recovering from anxiety and how and why it will work for you.
I am going to explain the two basic reasons for anxiety, and how to resolve each of these. I am also going to explain the purpose of anxiety in our lives, explaining the reason for it and the purpose it serves.
If you have been unsuccessful with resolving your anxiety, here is the solution which I am sure you have not yet tried.
It is unlikely you have ever heard of what I am about to tell you before, or really understood how to do it if you have. If you had, you would have had success already.
Your anxiety is actually a cry for help. Something inside you needs attention. The attention it needs is for you to simply feel it. If you give anxiety the attention it needs, anxiety will calm down.
The more often you do this the more often you will succeed and the more your fear of anxiety will lessen, and lessen.
But it will help you to understand the following article so that you can do this for yourself.
You can experiment with this alternative approach using the following tried and proven exercise for yourself.
Whenever you feel anxious:
- Do not try to stop, fix or avoid your anxiety.
- Do not try to change it.
- Do not analyse or bother yourself by thinking about it.
- Feel the physical sensations of anxiety wherever and however they exist within your body.
Ignore your thinking for now. That doesn’t matter. Thinking about it is only a shallow distraction from the feeling of anxiety as it is in your body. And you need to feel that to heal it.
Only by feeling it (not thinking about it) will the anxiety dissipate and eventually end.
Only give importance to the feeling of it in your body and not to the content of your thinking – just keep coming back into the raw physical feeling of it.
Understanding more common anxiety
A common misconception is that anxiety is a psychological condition and therefore will be resolved on that level.
However, there is a bit more to it than that.
Approaching it on that level means you analyse or think about it which doesn’t actually help much. It’s just too shallow an approach to get to the guts of it and resolve it.
With closer consideration, anyone suffering from anxiety will know it is very physical.
Anxiety is what you feel somewhere in your body. Usually it is felt right up through the central core of your torso and mostly centralised from your stomach, up through your chest, and into your throat.
Then as it intensifies, you feel it radiate from these areas out through your chest and arms, jaw and face, and then dissipate towards the outer edges of your body. You can often feel it all through your nervous system.
It can feel like – just being on edge or fearful, or as though you are in some undefinable danger – and as it increases it can feel a bit like an electrical scream within and throughout you.
Clearly, and the point is, anxiety is primarily a physical disturbance and so can only be resolved on that same physical level. If you break your leg you must set the bone, you don’t go to counselling and think about it.
What is anxiety?
As the distress of unresolved tensions accumulates over time, these tensions are held and felt in your body as a presence of underlying distress. This distress and its disruption to the chemistry of your body also contributes to how it feels inside of you.
These disruptions to your chemistry and the tensions of distress are the two basic combined forces making up your anxiety, and they keep one another going.
Underlying distress is held and is felt to varying levels of intensity in your body. This distress both stimulates and is part of the chemical responses that add to how you feel, and in turn, your chemistry alerts you to this underlying distress. There, you have anxiety.
Why does anxiety become so physical?
Because we ignore or deny it and basically pretended that something that does bother us, doesn’t, or is okay, or didn’t really happen.
Often others, like the perpetrator of our distress, have encouraged this confusion in us for their own ends.
And so, we fool ourselves by mentally ignoring whatever has disturbed us, either internally, externally, or both.
But the body isn’t fooled and the body doesn’t lie.
That’s why, regardless of our denials, the body remains distressed.
It doesn’t agree with our thinking. It knows the truth, and you feel it.
And what you feel doesn’t match up with the lies you tell yourself in order to cope, so this only adds to your underlying anxiety.
Our felt distress or anxiety is a result of whatever we ignore or deny or tell ourselves to. Then that build-up of the feeling of anxiety in our body drives all our thinking about it to try and resolve it. But any failure to resolve it adds to our distress, from which we develop all sorts of anxious reactions. Then projection of our distress onto the world and to other people just increases, which again only adds to our anxiety.
Listen to your body.
All this is the result of the wrong approach to anxiety – that of trying to fix it through thinking about it rather than just feeling it in our body and thereby enabling it to dissipate naturally.
So why is our body making such a drama over these tensions or stresses we hold or suppress deeper within our bodies?
Because over time, it’s going to make us mentally and physically sick, and in its own way, the body knows or senses this.
We forget that the body we are, is nature itself and so is very intelligent, and as the body is nature, so we too are nature.
And nature’s primary drive is to survive.
So the anxiety we feel in our bodies is a natural intelligent alert to help us survive. It is not our enemy but our protector.
Our anxiety is an alert from within ourselves – to prevent physical deterioration into disease and prolonged mental imbalance or illness.
If we know how to listen to and respond to this, we will be more able to maintain optimal health – and to recover from and evolve through life experiences and difficulties.
Pause, to let this resonate inside you – to consider for a moment.
There are also our deeper more persistent anxieties which are there to alert us to past, unresolved harm that still exists as distress held within our body. We are supposed to feel these sensations in order to heal these from our bodies and from our life, not react to these and fight these.
The body has no natural resistance to the presence of these felt sensations because we are not supposed to resist them. Our ongoing felt-sense of these in the body is the natural meditation our body does and this is how we process the effects of life experiences and stay mentally and physically healthy and whole.
Then there are our more immediate or spontaneous daily anxieties to alert us to what harm is currently happening – to when others are trying to influence or manipulate us, are lying to us or in any way are of some danger to our well-being. We are supposed to notice these feelings or sensations in our body – and then respond to these to avoid harm to us.
Any animal knows this – and depends on this to survive – but we have learned to avoid and ignore our anxieties and interpret these as somehow wrong or bad or a sign of weakness.
When they are not.
So, they have become louder, more extreme and overwhelming for us, to the point of causing madness or insanity unique to our species alone. We need to listen to ourselves, to our anxiety, and respond to it, not try to be rid of it.
Pause, take your time to consider this, don’t rush.
Anxiety and all this complex transference of information is what is happening in our bodies all the time, and all before our thinking even becomes involved.
Once our thinking becomes involved, it is too often in the form of misguided reactions to something or someone outside of us or to a state felt inside of us.
These mental or emotionalised reactions or analysis only exaggerate and prolong the anxiety, and you get stuck there.
That is why most of you have been unsuccessful with resolving your anxiety. It is unlikely you have ever heard of doing this before, or know how to, or known that it is truly safe to feel your anxiety. Or that it is actually the correct thing to do.
If you want to heal it, which you do:
here again is the solution which most of you have yet to try.
- Do not try to stop, fix or avoid your anxiety.
- Do not try to change it.
- Do not analyse or bother yourself by thinking about it.
- Feel the physical sensations of anxiety wherever and however they exist within the body of you.
Ignore the contents of your thinking for now. That doesn’t matter. Consider it as just noise. Thinking about it will only distract you from feeling the anxiety as it is in your body. And you need to feel that to heal it.
Only by feeling it (not thinking about it) will the anxiety dissipate and eventually end.
Your main mistake is you have been trying not to be anxious when the truth is, you are.
You cannot be what you are not, so stop distressing yourself trying to be.
That will only increase your anxiety.
The solution or trick is to be exactly as you are. You need to give into that and feel the way you already feel. Only then will you begin to process the anxiety and enable it to change. And in this way, it will change but only in its own time and in its own way.
All you have to do is feel the sensations of it in your body. Nothing more, and your body will do the rest. Continue to try this for yourself. Try it again and again, and also listen to or read this article again and again, until you really start to get it. When you do get it, you will be amazed at how at ease you will become with anxiety and you will come to understand it, listen to it, and be guided by the intelligence of it in your life.
The more often you respond by feeling your anxiety rather than thinking about it, the more you will enable your body to absorb it and the more easily you will find calm in your anxiety.
Now if you want to fully heal your anxiety and any deeper reasons for it being there, I only recommend a meditation that is not using techniques or any thinking process to meditate. If you meditate using a technique it will distract you from what you need to be feeling and will only suppress or modify your anxiety or numb you to it for a while. Which is the opposite to what you really need.
Just as the numbing effects of drug therapy has been historically proven to postpone and so prolong the healing process, techniques applied to meditate are also designed to change how you are or feel. So again, they are diversions from or suppression of the anxiety which you need to feel in order to heal or resolve it. Like drug therapy, their use only puts off the inevitable.
Eventually we need to enable the body’s natural healing process of any condition suffered to occur. And this natural process is accessed or triggered by you purely feeling however you feel within the body of you.
Now some of you will need to dig deeper, into understanding trauma-based anxiety.
So far, I have talked about the type of anxiety experienced by most people some of the time.
But there is a more severe form of anxiety, and when you have it you suffer it most of the time. It is always just there, in the background, felt deep down inside your body. It regularly inflames into overwhelming levels of anxiety, like panic, paranoia and terror and various other conditions such as allergies, phobias or overthinking.
This type of anxiety is the result of deeply suppressed trauma held in the body. This is often from childhood disassociations from abusive events. It is where, although you have no known reason for the level of distress experienced or the mental disorders suffered, there is however, the deeper feelings remembered by the body – as though some horrific event must have occurred.
Such feelings suggest it has.
You just don’t have the descriptive memorised details, but you do have the felt memory in the way it had affected you and in the way it has left you traumatised or feeling a bit crazy at times, if not, secretly crazy all the time.
Fortunately, throughout the last 35 years of my work I have discovered how you can heal from the more severe anxieties of trauma. Clients and students of my approach, who had suffered traumatic anxiety, achieved unprecedented success in recovering from and healing the effects of their traumas and therefore from their anxiety.
I also discovered how the healing process is the same for common anxiety as it is for trauma-based anxiety. For trauma-based anxiety it is certainly tougher going and takes more time and persistence and requires more support. There are more tendencies to block out, ignore, fear and avoid the pain which you actually need to feel in order to heal. And the feelings that emerge during your healing of anxiety will be the last thing you want to feel.
But learning how to feel these in your body will be what inevitably heals you.
Therefore, even though these two levels of anxiety are very different in their intensities, it is more your deeper, unknown reasons for resisting certain feelings or sensations of distress that are making it harder to embrace the healing process, and to persist with just feeling your underlying anxieties when they erupt or occur.
These anxieties can seem irrational, though they are not. You just don’t know their cause yet. The underlying presence of these make your thought-reactions more complex, and tricky, offering lots of reasons to stop, to give up or avoid your distress or pain, and therefore cease further processing or healing of these.
If it is deeper trauma you are healing, you can expect incomprehensible distress and confusion to arise during your life and during your healing. But eventually it will pass. Each time you feel it in your body you decrease the amount of stress held there. Each time, the energy of it will decrease until eventually it will end.
Whenever anxiety arises, the sooner you settle into the deeper feelings of it in your body, the sooner you will ease your pain each and every time, and the more you will heal what is within you.
No matter how hard it is to continue your healing process, it is feeling how it feels to be you, (not thinking about it) that has been proven to work and again and again. Both with many thousands of clients attending my clinics and for others during more than 200 meditation retreats which I have run over these past 35 years.
Giving in to and feeling the anxiety itself has been proven again and again to enable the body’s natural purge of the effects of trauma-based anxiety. Purely feeling any distress or pain that arises triggers the body’s natural healing process. Your body, which is nature itself, has the only complete healing process there is operating within it. That’s why it works. And as you are the body, as you are in fact nature, that is why it will work for you as well.
Where you can go to learn more on this for yourself.
The Undo app has been developed to educate and guide you in how to access or trigger this natural process.
Undo will introduce you to the uniquely physical meditation which the body does naturally, as the basis of the healing process. Undo also provides a specific exercise and real to life information under the title of ‘The Significance of Illness’ that will take you further into applying what you have begun to learn from this article.
So you can take this further for yourself now.
The Undo approach has resulted from carefully following and learning from what the body does whenever it needs to recover. This is why, this meditation is so effective with helping to resolve anxiety.
You will learn how and why you need to embrace and resolve anxiety at its source of origin in the body in order to heal. The Undo approach explains and guides you through this healing process and actually triggers the body’s natural way of resolving it. And so it works.
It works by taking you deeper – beyond all techniques to change it and beneath all thinking about your anxiety – into the underlying and quiet feeling of anxiety within your body. This immediately reduces the distress associated with anxiety which you cause yourself by your thoughts about it and your efforts to change it. Feeling it in this way continues to disperses its intensity until it eventually dissolves completely.
This approach and knowledge is so important because …
It has been completely overlooked and therefore has been unavailable until now. And so you and so many others have continued to suffer unnecessarily.
When the healing of anxiety, distress or deeply penetrating trauma is required, all our applications of therapy are too shallow. Relying too heavily on thinking, overrating its use and purpose as a problem solver or healer, they only touch the surface of our pain and distress and are unable to achieve complete recovery.
Traditionally, and due to overthinking we have overlooked the natural healer we all are, within and for ourselves, and have not understood how it is triggered into action by the natural act of simply feeling the pain or anxiety within our bodies.
By experimenting with this unique approach for yourself you can now begin to access and trigger the healing force of nature within your body. Your body is fully equipped for you to do this for yourself.
You can trust your own body. It never lies or misguides you. However it feels inside of you is how it should feel and be. The presence of anxiety also indicates your body is going through its own healing process. So stop fighting it and go along with. And give it a chance to recover, and you will.
