You are not your fear (and how to handle it gracefully)

I’ve had a lot of trouble over the years feeling at ease when speaking in groups. At school, I was painfully afraid to contribute in class. 

As I grew older, that fear developed into anxiety, creating all kinds of unnecessary and restrictive suffering that held me back from sharing my real and alive self. For years, I couldn’t forgive myself because I believed that I was cowardly for not contributing in groups at school.

If you asked me back then why this was happening, I would have told you the story that I had made up for myself — that I was shy, different from other people, not a natural or expressive speaker, an introvert, an anxious person in groups. I would have told you that I had “social anxiety.”

All lies. All subjective interpretations. All judgements. All thoughts. All attempts at creating meaning where there was none.

I took my thoughts seriously. I believed what they were telling me about myself, defining who I was — nothing more, nothing less.

Those thoughts created a feeling of nervousness in me. But it went a step further. Feeling slightly nervous is one thing, but I would often experience full-blown anxiety in anticipation of and during an event. In my seemingly noble desire to be without fear, I resisted any sense of fear that came up. And so, the cycle continued.

We can interpret our feelings to mean that “something is wrong with us,” thereby applying more pressure, via our thinking, to end those feelings. Our egos want nothing to do with those uncomfortable, embarrassing feelings. So we resist. And this creates more pressure and intensifies our anxiety.

What can we do to release this pressure?

We can understand and accept the self-created, fluctuating nature of mental energy.

We can accept that thoughts, which are out of our control, will come up and that they are transient and meaningless. We can realise that we need not follow what they are telling us and that we can create space in our thinking by returning to presence. We need not resist the physical feelings that negative thoughts evoke in us.

Simply put: When we feel a negative emotion arise in us, be it frustration, sadness, or anxiety, we don’t have to resist it. To resist feeling is to add to more thinking, and this will only add more pressure.

Many times, the feelings that arise in us can help keep us alert, especially when interpreted as helpful, and merely as energy. We can be with the feelings, to welcome them. They may hurt initially, but they will dissolve on their own, much like a thought dissolves when we don’t hold on tight.

We can acknowledge the transience and impermanence of thought and be present with them as they come and go.

To think or focus our way out of feeling bad is futile; it will only stir our thinking further, creating an emotionally-adverse reaction.

We need to be open to whatever the present moment offers. We need to be conscious with it and breathe through it. To lean into moments like these can take courage. It is easy to fall into the trap of reacting to our emotions, to snap at someone when we feel anger; to enter into a cycle of anxiety.

But this is our opportunity for growth, to be at ease with the situation, to let go of feelings that come up, and to see that we are not our feelings. Feelings reflect our transient, often nonsensical thinking. That’s it.

Feelings are superb indicators of our state of mind. If we feel good, we know that our thinking is where it needs to be. If we feel bad, we know we are unconscious. We are in our thoughts. We can use our feelings as signposts that direct us to the need to be more present.

If we feel bad, we’re overthinking. We’re allowing our personal mind to interfere and ruminate. 

It’s time to return to stillness, to let innate wisdom arise and guide us back to wellness, as it does so well.

If I find myself in a group setting today, something that feels like anxiety may return, but now I welcome it. I smile at the flawed stories that arise out of the personal, egoic mind and its need for self-preservation. I allow it to come and go like a quirky housemate in my mind who is doing his thing. It is nothing to resist or take personally.

I know that if I had negative thoughts and felt bad in the past, that didn’t make me wrong. If I have a negative mood today, that does not make me a person that needs fixing. It just makes me human.

Many of us feel shame for how we thought, felt, and behaved in the past. We think that our fearful thoughts, which led to fearful behaviour, have defined who we are. We think that we were cowards, losers, or failures, but that is a profoundly inaccurate self-assessment. Our behaviour had nothing to do with who we were. It had to do with how we were thinking. 

Maybe we didn’t understand the nature of thought at the time. 

We were unaware that all we had to do was not take our thinking so seriously.

——————

The above was an excerpt from my recent book:

‘Illusory: Six Things Mentally-Free People DON’T Believe, Which Stressed and Anxious People DO.’

A book about mental health and ‘the three principles,’ which changed the way I thought, and thus changed my life.

Follow my newsletter to keep up to date on its release soon.