This YouTube testimonial features Curtis describing decades-long, low-grade anxiety rooted in childhood (he was the child of an alcoholic). He recounts coping strategies that masked his distress, progressive bodily symptoms (notably chest pains despite normal medical tests), and a specific exacerbation when noisy neighbours regularly disrupted his sleep. After moving to a quieter location but still struggling with ingrained mental patterns, Curtis began the Gupta Program. Through the program he learned to observe and change attention and thought patterns, experienced a noticeable decrease in anxiety, and reached a turning point where obsessive monitoring (especially at night) ceased. He expresses gratitude to Ashok Gupta and the program/community and plans to continue using the method to address long-standing anxiety patterns.
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Hi, I'm Curtis. Before I started the Gupta program, I was struggling with a chronic low grade anxiety, probably since I was a little kid. I was the child of an alcoholic and as an adult I developed a lot of coping strategies for dealing with the anxiety. So I think from the outside I looked like things were fine, but from the inside there, there was always this sense of danger. And I was always aware of what was next, sometimes as actual worry, worrying about what's next. But even when it wasn't worry, it was still this kind of obsession, planning, not being present. And that created a lot of problems for me. I felt like I wasn't really living my life. I wasn't present with the people that I care about. I wasn't present for experiences. I would go on vacations and kind of feel like they were being wasted on me just because I wasn't there. I was always thinking about what's next physically. As I got older, this started to manifest in my body. I developed weird chest pains, I had all the tests, everything came back. You're perfectly healthy, nothing's wrong, heart's fine, lungs are fine, all that, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I was convinced that it was related to the anxiety. Then in last summer in like June or July, some new neighbors moved in and we shared a wall with them at the time. And what would happen was at about 10:30 at night, the father would get home from work and the kids would go crazy. Complete chaos. Not the sound of like happy children greeting their dad, but screaming, like screaming bloody murder. Just very little kids. I didn't understand it and it was very disconcerting to the point where if I didn't know better, I might have called the police saying, you know, I think there's something bad happening next door. It was that upsetting to me physiologically. It would go on for sometimes an hour or more and really, really disrupted my sleep to the point where I was worrying about whether or not this chaos was going to start at 10:30 every night. And there were nights when I just wouldn't sleep well. But even on the nights when it didn't happen, I found that I was worrying all day long, wondering and am I going to be able to sleep tonight? And it really kind of turned my world upside down. I was exhausted all day long. I was becoming paranoid. I was constantly monitoring for sounds coming from next door. Is it going to start even during the day? And it just got really, really bad. It affected my relationships and I didn't know what to do. I know that There are people who are actually homeless, and I don't want to compare myself to them, but it did feel like I didn't have a safe place to go home to, and that's really upsetting. So I started the Gupta program. I also moved to a much quieter place. But even though the physical environment had changed, all of the mental patterns were still there. So when I would go to bed, I would still be hyper focused on, can I hear any sounds? I would obsess. I would worry that all of those thinking patterns were there. So by doing the Gupta program, I was able to see that what was happening to me, the physical sensations and the thought patterns were things that I had created and I could uncreate them because by focusing some attention on what my brain was doing and where my focus was going. So right away, I felt a sense of hope and control that I hadn't had in a really, really long time. Pretty soon the anxiety started to decrease. I noticed an actual noticeable decrease in the anxiety. And a couple weeks ago, the big victory for me, the big turning point was I realized I went to be one night and I realized that for probably a couple weeks, but I hadn't realized it yet. I wasn't thinking about, you know, are there sounds like I wasn't doing that obsessive monitoring, that paranoia was gone. And it was. It was so wonderful to realize that I wasn't doing that anymore. I think sometimes the absence of suffering or pain can be invisible. You know, we notice when we have it, but we don't notice when we don't have it. So it felt like such a gift to realize, you know, that I had turned that corner, that going to bed was just going to bed. It was, this is what it's like for normal people when they go to bed. And that was. That was great. So I'm so grateful to Ashok and the Gupta Program and the whole Gupta community for helping me turn that corner. And I'm really, really excited now to use the Gupta program to deal with those thought patterns that are related to that low grade chronic anxiety that has been with me for most of my life.
