A five-step practice for when anxiety hits: pause what you're doing, step outside and look at the sky, breathe into your belly, let the anxious sensations be there, and notice the thoughts attached to them. The speaker emphasizes accepting anxiety without shame and using your body and breath to create space around it.
Watch this video when you're scared or anxious or stressed or overwhelmed or whatever word you use. Ready? Here we go. Step number one is stop whatever you're doing, if you can. You know, maybe you're in the middle of a meeting or the middle of some high stakes conversation or something. Even then you might be able to pause and get away. You never know. But most of the time, most of our anxiety is experienced just throughout our day. You wake up anxious, you feel anxious in your office, you feel anxious around your family, you feel anxious when you're sitting in your car alone. So what's the first thing you do is just take a moment to stop whatever it is you're trying to distract yourself from with the anxiety. So you're listening to a bunch of stuff and trying to figure something out or just escape or listen to the news or, ah, you know, you know. Have you noticed how when we get wound up and anxious, we like, do things that keep us wound up and anxious? Like, oh, I'm so stressed out. Let me check my email. Now's a good time. Yeah, so just pause for a moment and then do this if you can. Here we go. We're in motion now. Look out, go outside, step outside if you can. And I don't know, maybe you're in like the urban jungle. There's nowhere to go, it's intense. Loud noise everywhere, I don't know. But even then, still stepping outside, you know, no matter where you are, no matter what urban jungle you're in, you can look up and see the sky. Maybe you have a little patio, little deck, a little yard. And then breathe. Turn towards the anxiety, towards the fear. You gotta meet it. If you run from it, it will control you forever. You'll be running for your whole life. Even as you achieve more, even as you accumulate more, even as you impress more people and prove something and finally maybe get enough credit, enough love, enough respect, enough accolades, enough achievement, enough money, the anxiety will still be there. How do you know? Because it's still been there, hasn't it? No matter how much you've done, how much you've achieved. So let's turn towards it. Start with the breath. And you start by softening. You're so tight. We tighten up against the anxiety. I want to feel this, I want to feel this, I want to feel this. Just start to open a little bit more, soften a little bit more. Place I like to bring my attention is right here to my belly. Notice this. You can breathe in. Notice how the belly isn't like so you know, we're taught to, like, tighten our belly. Keep a tight belly so you look tough. Just soften it. Steven Levine, an amazing meditation teacher, and his wife, Andrea Levine, they teach a lot together, but he has a meditation called Soft Belly, where he just has you slow down and soften your belly. He hardens so much for me. I'll notice there's a lot of hardening around the ribs. Like, I get tight and I kind of want to constrict. And we armor ourselves and. Okay. And then we do a lot of pretending and posturing. I'll talk about that in another video. But this video is about being real, about being real with yourself, moving towards yourself. Stop hiding and pretending and posturing, at least with yourself, and just name it. I'm anxious, I'm scared, and let go of the shame. Everybody's scared. There's a great song by Aura called Everybody's Scared, so dance in the dark. You know why everybody's scared? Because the mind produces fear. The mind's looking for a threat. It's looking for a loss. It's looking for what could go wrong. And then we're reactive to that. So you got to get out of the mind for a minute, get into your body, get into your breath and soften. Just start to allow things a little bit more. Allow the sensation of anxiety. Where do you feel it in your body? Is there a tightness? Is there a squeezing? Is there a burning? Where is it? Is it here? Is it here for me? I'll often feel anxiety right in there. Is it in there? Maybe it's in your throat. And if your mind's like, I don't have time for this. I gotta figure it out. I gotta go. I gotta. What's the. Give me the audiobook that's got the answer. What's the other video that tells me how to zap anxiety away forever. Well, try it. How many times have you already tried it? How many times have you tried to run with some fancy technique or new tool or new technology, and then we just got to come back? There is no escape. The liberation comes when you willingly go into it. And then you start to expand and realize, I'm okay. Not because you told yourself a thousand times in your mind, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. That doesn't work. It's that feeling of that wind. That's why outside's so good. It's the seeing of the sky slowing down a little bit allowing, dropping that shame and knowing. To feel anxious is to be human. To feel emotions is to be human, to soften. And then as you soften, you stop trying to figure it all out with your head. Insight starts to come. Like, profound wisdom will come to you. Not from someone you're listening to, but from you. The wisdom might say, wow, I'm really afraid of loss. For me, what will come is I'll see what I'm attached to, what I'm identified with. It's like, oh, if this project goes well, then I'm okay. I'm identified with that project. My bank account has money in it. I'm okay. I identified with my bank account. That person likes me. I'm okay. I'm identified with being I'm okay. Who I am is this person's opinion of me. Whoa, that's problematic. So you start to see those things, but only from a place of softening and moving towards. So maybe put this one in your bookmarks, in your favorite list, and come back and watch it when you're anxious, when you need to. Thanks for being with me. Till we speak again. May I have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon.
