I never really struggled with anxiety, until my mid-twenties.
I always thought myself as a happy and relatively balanced person. Then in my last year in the university I was faced with these feelings of anxiety, which totally surprised me.
It wasn’t that I never had experienced anxiety before, but rather that I had not paid that much attention to it. Without better understanding of it, I had allowed it to flow freely through me, like any other feeling, and had naturally bounced back to that place of balance within me.
But this time these feelings of anxiety were truly affecting me. I felt uncertain about my future. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life after my studies and felt like it was hard for me to figure this out.
It wasn’t until in the midst of an anxiety attack, I experienced an insight, and was led to a deeper truth where my experience was coming from, that I was able to let go of my anxious feelings.
From anxiety to awakening
I remember lying in my bed thinking that I can’t survive. I was experiencing my first anxiety attack. During the second attack however a thought popped into my head to see whether or not I could find answers to the anxiety I was experiencing.
I got up and opened my laptop. Looking for an answer how to get through an anxiety attack I came to a website and stumbled upon words that went something like this:
“No matter what you are feeling, you will survive the anxiety attack.”
For some reason I immediately recognized this to be true and saw the deeper truth behind those words.
I knew that despite of my feelings and thoughts that I couldn’t make it, I would survive. I recognized that I was not experiencing the reality as it was.
After this insight my anxiety completely vanished. I remember calling my mom and telling her about my experience and after that going outside for a run, enjoying the fresh and cold air and the darkness of the evening.
Where our experiences come from
After this experience I found a new kind of strength within me. I didn’t completely understood what had happened, but I felt like I had found something. It wasn’t until three months after, I came across this understanding of the Three Principles — that explain us our human experience — I understood.
This understanding just made sense to me. It explained me how our experience was coming from our thinking — Always. Without any exceptions.
Without thought there was no experience.
I understood that the anxiety I had been experiencing was a result of me getting caught up in my anxious thoughts about the future. It had nothing to do with me or my outside circumstances.
I understood how focusing on these anxious thoughts for too long did cause a reaction in my body, from where my experience of anxiety attack came from.
I understood how the insight I had experienced allowed me to immediately let go of my feelings of anxiety and freed me from this cycle.
The power of an insight
We can have an intellectual understanding about something, but until we truly experience it to be true, it will have from little to no effect on us.
When I saw with the eyes of my soul that my anxious feelings in the moment told me nothing about the reality it stopped making sense for me to continue thinking about those stressful thoughts — That was the end of my anxiety.
When we gain these insights, new thoughts, they change us. We begin to see something new and it just stops making sense for us to continue with our counterproductive behavior.
Insights are part of our design, something that we can always count on. The more aware we become of this, the more grateful we become and the more we begin to see these insights in our lives.
Having a calm mind as our natural state of being
The more my understanding where my experience was always coming from deepened, the more I began to see how having a calm mind was my natural state of being.
Even in that period of anxiety in my life, I could see that I always, sooner or later, came back to that place of balance. By focusing more on my feelings of anxiety, rather than the feelings of peacefulness in my life, I innocently was experiencing more of these feelings of anxiety. Yet, I could see that there still always were those moments of happiness, peace and calmness.
After this insight of mine, when I learned to take my feelings of anxiety less seriously, it became easier for me to let go of my negative feelings, so that I could quicker bounce back to my natural state, and enjoy my feelings of balance again.
Healthy relationship with our feelings
Today, I have a healthy relationship with anxiety.
I know that it’s part of being human to experience all the feelings of our human experience. I know that there’s nothing wrong in having anxious thoughts or feelings, and as soon as I recognize them for what they are, I come back home.
Our feelings of anxiety tell us nothing about us nor our outside circumstances, and everything about where is our thinking in the moment.
It’s not that anxiety makes us suffer, but it’s always our thoughts about the anxiety that does.
Recognizing this allows us to experience the full spectrum of our feelings, without getting too caught up with them, so that we can know that we are all ultimately fine. And even if and when we do get caught up with our feelings, we can see how these feelings are only temporary.
We can have our human experience — all of it — without our experience having us.
This way, we can more easily return back to our feelings of balance and happiness, to this natural state of our being, and spend more time appreciating, enjoying and being grateful for this experience of life we are here gifted to experience.
With love,
Heidi
