How to overcome anxieties?
Video transcript: How to overcome anxieties?
Anxiety has become a widely common phenomenon in the world. It can vary from a background of restlessness and certain fearfulness and can reach a condition of violent panic attacks as I used to have coming in to the spiritual path.
What causes anxiety?
what causes it? The psyche is like a bottomless pit. So many things can create this pathology. It can be emotional knots created in our childhood as a response to events which above our ability to handle, as it was in my case, it can be a certain response to a growing distress coming from living a life which either doesn’t feel right in its core or is unhealthy and yet accepted and it can be so many other reasons.
Can you overcome anxiety?
The important question is can we overcome it? My own case shows that the answer is yes.
How to overcome anxiety?
How can it be done? How can we overcome it?
​
​Perhaps it is best to start with the question of how to deal with it before we speak about overcoming it. There are 3 levels of dealing with it. One is soothing the symptoms when the emotion is strong. Second is to heal the database, meaning to try to fix the virus that causes that emotion to rise. And third is to find that part of us which is entirely untouched and unrelated to that or any other emotion.
3 levels of dealing with anxiety and difficult emotions
The first, dealing with the emotion, is a nice tool to have in your toolkit. For instance, deep breathing to the belly has an almost magical affect in rounding up the edges of anxiety or any strong emotion.
​
The second refer to the various therapies and healing systems which try to undo the pathology that lead and leads to the arisal of that emotion.
​
These two are very important and I no doubt recommend to learn and do both, but in my own experience, what freed me from anxieties was the 3rd level.
My own story with anxieties
in my late teens I had very strong anxiety attacks which I had nothing to do against. I was recommended to take medications, which I refused. I was tormented. In that condition I went to india when I was 20-21. Going to my first vipassana I was in true dread that I will lose my mind in that retreat. Losing my mind was the theme of my anxiety attacks. Despite my fear I had no choice but to go to the retreat because I couldn’t continue with how I was.
​
I didn’t lose my mind in that retreat but I saw on one hand how powerless I was against the mind but also that the solution might come from that direction, if at all.
​
I moved deeper into meditation through a more advanced and systemic teaching and I dedicated my life to meditation. After about 2 years I was already quite advanced spiritually and was absorbed in meditation, and indeed many changes has happened on the level of my relationship with the mind and life but still, despite that newly found depth, I was still powerless against those anxiety attacks when they came. I was then in goa and I experienced an awakening which changed my life in a total way.
​
A friend came to my room between two retreats and beaming she told me – beloved all is well! I said yeah of course, I know. but she said, no you don’t. all. Is. Well.
​
And I got it. I truly got it. A veil was lifted before my eyes. My whole place in life, the whole view of life changed. What happened then, which I didn’t know then to explain, was that the contract of belief in the mind and its messages which was so inherent to me was cut. I was before that point able to be somewhat beyond the mind, but I still fully believed with it and its messages. And then I wasn’t. I realized an amazing yet simple fact, I live in a quiet world. The consequences were more then life changing.
​
The next day I went in the night to the nearby beach and such a dark and quiet place was a perfect setting for my anxiety attacks to pop up. And indeed it did. Until that point when it came I had nothing to do with it other then to hide and maybe try to sooth it and let it pass. It was no match. I thought that despite the newly found bliss the same result will happen. But it didn’t. in the same way that I realized that the mind is just a sentence spoken in my system rather then the truth, the message of the anxiety was seen to be just such a sentence as well. Unreal, unneeded and unbinding. That was the end of years of torment.
Discovering that I am silence and untouched by the mind
I have discovered that me as my essence and life itself where made of silence untouched and totally unrelated to anything I may think or feel. The two exist on different planes. The sharpest sword in the world can’t cut the air. The darkest color can’t paint the air. They just exist on different planes. Knowing myself as that silence I didn’t just find a haven from anxieties, much more then that. I discovered that they are unreal. Only that insight could have liberated me from such a powerful, seemingly powerful, foe.
​
I now see his past presence as a friend who helped me realize that freedom, not a foe.
Healing the subconscious after awakening
Following that awakening, which stayed with me and is the foundation of my existence, I still decided over the years to go to multitude of therapies and healing systems to clear that subconscious. Myself I was rooted in a plane untouched or related to anxieties or my psychological make up in general, but nevertheless, since that is also a valid part of who we are, I decide to do extensive work to heal and cleanse it, which is what I related to as the second level.
The answer to the question how to overcome anxiety
Therefore to answer the question how to overcome anxiety – the true solution is to know and actualize yourself as the deeper identity made of silence, our essence, our soul. A complementing process is indeed to heal and cleanse our psyche, but liberation as I know it is reached through that insight.
The insight to freedom is reachable
That insight, that awakening, is entirely reachable because it is not about sitting meditation for 10,000 hours, or to reach some sublime state of being. It is your natural condition, that silence is who you are right now. You just need to realize it, and there is a concrete, step by step way to do it.