Anxiety is a buildup of fear in your being. Fear and all other emotions are energy. E-motion = Energy in MOTION.
Fear is a particularly powerful emotion as its purpose is to fire our bodies into fight-or-flight mode during times of danger. It shuts down the systems in our bodies that are not required for our immediate survival such as our digestive system, gets our adrenaline pumping so we feel less pain and pumps blood to our muscles so we can best defend ourselves or run as fast as we can to get ourselves out of immediate danger. It takes a powerful burst of energy to do all of those things within a split second. This is the energy that you are feeling if you suffer from anxiety.
Emotions were never meant to cause suffering. They are supposed to work like this: we find ourselves in a threatening situation such as a possible attack down a dark alley, the energy gets pumped in that makes all the necessary biological changes and we run for our lives. The perceived fear and the energy behind it have done their job. Now the next time you are about to walk down a dark alley, your previous frightening experience would get triggered along with a feeling of fear. This is also a natural part of your mind’s make up; it is a warning system to help you avoid future potential danger. It is not designed to traumatize you. If you perceived it as a warning and consciously decided whether you would continue to walk down that alley or not, you wouldn't experience any resistance or get caught up in the feeling of fear therefore you wouldn't experience any suffering.
Problems occur when you get identified and caught up in the fear and the thoughts that it produces. Lets stick with the dark alley incident as an example. If you kept going over this incident in your head, it would be the same thing as reliving it from your mind’s perspective because our minds can’t tell the difference between real and imagined. You would be strengthening the association between fear and alleyways while simultaneously creating a buildup of fear in your being.
A cycle gets created in which the intense build up of fear gets triggered by even the smallest or most illogical feared situation. Even those completely illogical future projections would cause you significant suffering as your attention would be pulled in by the power behind the fear’s energy causing you to ruminate about the disastrous possible (illogical) outcomes. The stronger the energy; the more it pulls your attention/focus, and remember our minds cant differentiate between real and imagined so that’s why, in the moment, it all seems so real and possible. Without this buildup, your fearful thoughts would not have the power (buildup of energy) behind them to take you over and cause you to suffer and get caught up in them.
Have you ever had an experience in which you get so caught up in the mind’s fearful thoughts and then when the energy subsides, you think to yourself, ‘what was that all about?’ When the energy subsides, your focus relaxes and you can see things from a different/logical perspective.
Anything is possible, both good and bad, but if the bad (fearful projections) don’t have a buildup of energy to attach themselves to, they can’t attract/pull your attention in and take you over. The thought would simply pass through your mind just like any other thought that didn't have a high charge attached to it.
So it’s the buildup of fear (energy) that is the cause of anxiety and therefore it is this that needs to be dealt with. This energy, just like any other form of energy, cannot survive on its own. It needs your focus/attention to fuel it. It needs you to get involved with it and to think about all of those fearful situations to keep the cycle alive. Without your focus/attention, it would lessen in intensity and fade away. Your thoughts are energy, if you break free from unconscious habitual thinking, you can choose what you want to fuel with this energy.
You need to allow the fear to flow through you without any resistance at its fullest intensity. This can be really challenging at the beginning as you would be so used to getting involved with the thoughts that they fear produces or maybe you attempt to block it out or distract yourself in some way from it. When allowing intense emotional energy, it will consistently grab at your attention and it will succeed pulling you in and getting you caught up in your thoughts. When you notice this happening, bring yourself back to allowing the energy to flow freely and being aware of the thoughts that are popping up but abstain from putting your attention on anything.
Your mind will want to comfort you and maybe persuade you that everything will be alright in order to obtain temporary relief but temporary is all that it can offer. Another common relief method would be trying to convince yourself using logic that your fears won’t happen but this is also getting involved in the cycle and would be counterproductive.
You will experience the physical effects of fear mentioned above also such as increased heart rate and so on, just the same as if you were experiencing a bout of anxiety but this could be more intense as you would be allowing it at its fullest intensity without any attempt to block it out or distract yourself from it.
If this energy has been compounded for years or more, you can’t expect it to disappear overnight. It can take a few months of intense releases before you see proper results. Just think about all of the energy that you put in, this is what needs to be released. The time each release would last can vary depending on your ability to abstain from feeding it and your ability to see it out until the energy subsides, but a rough estimate would be between 20-40 minutes. You will feel the fear as it is passing through you, it isn't pleasant but it is what needs to be done if you want to free yourself from it forever.
Familiarize yourself with when you are feeding it (adding to its strength) or releasing it (taking from its strength). It’s not easy to just go straight from habitually getting caught up in its momentum to being able to release it at will. Go easy on yourself and aim for steady progress. Results are subtle as they happen progressively. One day you will notice that you don’t react the same to things that would have previously triggered intense fear in you and that will be the beginning of a life without illogical fear.
Hi @conditionedminds would you please mention about the source of this article, or if these are your own thoughts, then you can mention this at the start of this post.
These are my own thoughts, to put very simply.
Anxiety are sometimes very helpful also, it gives us strength and power which we need the most.
Oh, I had a classic case of feeding anxiety, getting lost in my thoughts after washing my hair. I was thinking up upsetting scenarios that will likely never happen. I went and did some work on my fan-fiction. Got my mind off those anxious thoughts sure enough, now I can't put my tablet down, I'm reading and self-editing like crazy. Better that.
Great info my friend ;)
Thanks!