anxiety is a good start

this reframe helps a lot

​​Anxiety is the beginning of attention, and attention is the beginning of awareness.

Read that again.

You might be in a better spot than you think.

The interconnected web of sensation and response that is your body-mind-machine is incredible. How you read the data makes all the difference. Machinery is great for delivering information, but it’s the heart that will process the content.

The spiritual heart is imaged in the center of the body, the intersection point for all of your polarities. The metaphor of the spiritual heart is a reminder to pass through your center on the way to any decision or destination.

Yoga philosophy speaks of the Siddhis (from Sanskrit, meaning “perfections” or “accomplishments”) – they are purported supernatural powers or abilities attained through meditation, pranayama, and mastery of the mind. The powers range from subtle — like heightened intuition — to extraordinary, such as levitation, invisibility, changing size, and even the ability to leave and enter other bodies.

I’m 45 now. Sometimes I wake up and wonder, who’s body is this, and why is my mouth tape on my shoulder?

I’m just trying to lighten the mood.

That’s what anxiety is telling you, also. Lighten the mood – not by faking it that you don’t care about whatever has you stirred up, but by acknowledging that you are attributing importance to something, and that you have the right to shift from attention to awareness.

Awareness is a state in which you observe the felt sense of your reaction to something without judgement and without activation of the problem-solving mind. Observe the sensations you assess to be anxiety. Your attention is already on them - now evolve your focus by giving yourself the right to exist with the sensations you are experiencing. You don’t have to act just yet. In fact, the action you would take from the state you call anxiety will not be your best move.

The right to exist is one of the four basic human wounds of soul alignment. I bring it up a lot because it’s relevant for all of us. No one really gets taught what to do with feelings so we all have this wound to some degree. As kids we watched adults hide feelings or over-express feelings.

The right to exist is also a paradox. It’s not the right to check out and bail on your responsibilities. The right is to your felt experience without needing external validation for it. The right is to be with your waves of emotion without drowning.

It takes bravery to be able to go down into your own depths and come back up with insight. To stay long enough, you have to open and relax. Being that kind of swimmer takes practice.

You already have the raw material to do the work. The first Siddhis are your own five senses, perceptual faculties that allow you to receive information from your environment. They are magical. Without them, we are lost – literally. With them, we can learn to orient ourselves, better understand what’s happening around us, and how to respond.

I’m getting better at identifying tracks in the Montana woods. I have friends who know what’s up and around the bend by the way a branch on the forest floor cracks. One guy is a big guy, but in the woods he’s soundless. He sees things I’d never notice.

Getting quiet is how you develop intuition. Intuition is the superpower of being able to trust yourself. To trust yourself you have to feel safe. To feel safe you have to address the right to exist wound. Anxiety reveals that it’s time to practice.

Life will present many opportunities to practice.

The word intuition comes from the Latin intueri, meaning “to look at” or “to contemplate”:

• “in-” — meaning “at” or “upon”

• “tueri” — meaning “to look, watch, or guard”

The original and literal sense of intuition was something like “to look inward” or “to gaze upon.”

Intuition entered English in the 15th century through the Latin intuitio, which in medieval scholastic philosophy referred to the direct apprehension of truth — knowledge that arrives without the need for reasoning or inference.

In order to have clarity, practice looking from your heart to process stimuli received from your five senses. The senses are like weather data. The heart, which represents a centered awareness, which means allowing yourself the right to exist, is a wise mountain man/woman who is at home in the wild.

I look with my heart.

This is what anxiety is asking you to do. I can feel it sometimes, what it feels like to look from my heart.

It’s like all of the parts of my body that I consider disparate elements of a machine are washed with the same warmth. It’s soothing, expansive, and cohesive. It feels like the solution is coming, and I can be sure of that.

Anxiety directs your attention. Steer towards awareness. Look with your heart.

Love,
Benjamin

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