Name: Steve Mensing
Topic: Minnie and others struggling with anxiety
Sent: 12.31 - 1/12 2001
Minnie:

Without mentioning tech yet, it's important to keep several things in mind about handling anxiety.

(1) If you never did anything else, I mean never did anything else, always allow yourself to fully experience these feelings in any way that you can. Never avoid places or situations where you experience anxiety. Go right to them. After a bit, even if you did not use clearing tech or direct feeling methods like Active Feeling, Focusing, or mindfulness/vipassana, you would begin to spontaniously take the heat and the aversion out of those feelings.

Basically general anxiety can be called "energized future focus" or "goal excitement". This common human hassle is baseically those fearful and uneasy feelings we get from negative thoughts and images about the future. Typical cues include a dry mouth, pacing, poor concentration (we really highly concentrated on the thing we fear),lump in the throat or stomach, sweating, moist palms, shakes, strangeness, dissociation, adrenalin, being outside our bodies and a pile of fears about objects and places (phobias).

In anxiety we'll hear ourselves imagining: "I must perform flawlessly or I'll look like a dope." "I can't stand rejection--I'll be destroyed." and of course those questions like: "What if?"

Somehow it seems if we operate better from apprehension or concern which keeps us aware, ready, and focused where anxiety makes us unfocused and highly aware of how uncomfortable we're feeling.

Anxiety is frequently based on imagining anything but a neutral or positive outcome.

In coming in contact with your anxious feelings ask yourself: "What is the worst thing that can happen? Could I stand it? Generally we can stand anything.

Frequently we are unaware of what we fear--we just feel anxious, on guard, and tense. With our unconscious spewing out evaluations below the level of our awareness we miss that we are often picturing a catastrophe rather than an unwanted result, a valuable learning, or an inconvenience. Through anxious thought streams we view ourselves as one-dimensional persons just having negative qualities alone. We might give ourselves labels like no good, a failure, or worthless instead of intuiting our multi-faceted being with many, many positive, neutral, and negative qualities. Such is the nature of the anxiety trance.

Through the medium of anxiety we demand perfect performances from ourselves rather than just wanting to do our best. This same internal demandingness pressures us and defocuses us from the task at hand.

We people begin to see that they can indeed do their anxiety provoking activity, they begin to spontaneously clear.

Before you even consider systematic clearing, it might be a good idea to check out your anxiety first hand.
Always allow yourself to fully feel it. Avoiding your anxious feelings either by supressing thoughts or avoiding places will fire up the anxiety. Fully feeling brings the fire down.

If there are situations that evoke an anxious response in you, prepractice them over and and over until the charge goes and the trance breaks up. Never try to get rid of anxiety. The idea here is to feel it.

Besides feeling your anxious feelings directly and going straight at those things where you click on the anxiety trances, you might consider jotting down all your thoughts and images about the situation. This objectifies what's going on inside you and can begin to take some of the charge off. You'll get some of that stuff out in the open and you'll see how you've evaluated the situation. Most times that won't pass muster with you.

Another basic human rule that works: If you do something no matter how you feel, your feelings begin to change. If you undertake a worthwhile activity no matter how anxious you feel and stick with it until it is done, you will experience being in control; a change in feelings; likely get absorbed in the doing, and get valuable learnings and rewards. Also you learn firsthand you can start somethingt and stay with it until its conclusion.

Absorption, confidence, inspiration, and motivation generally come AFTER we do an activity and not before.
Avoid waiting for the right feeling or inspiration before you do something because generally these feelings don't come until you're absorbed in the doing.

Anxiety signals that something important better be done. Regard it as a calling no matter how uncomfortable it feels at first.

The major reason why folks hang onto phobias or "I can't stand it-itis" about their energized feelings is because these persons continue to avoid feeling their feelings and do what they better do. Doing something and carrying it out is the fastest way to learn firsthand the reality of a situation. Phobias and anxieties are unmasked as paper tiger distortions when we meet them in the truth of our activities.

Poor excuses: "I tried." "I didn't feel like it." "It was too much." "I couldn't stand it." "It was just too scary."

I've seen people with 12 year history of very severe panic disorder go panic free when they did an about face on their feelings. When they allowed themselves to fully feel them and accept them and follow through on their activities, they broke panic's spine. Panic disorder is the strongest sort of anxiety you can get.
Any of you who have experienced the ultra intensified fear of a bad trip on LSD has an idea of what a panic sufferer goes through. When they face these fears and fully feel them, their life begins to turn around.

In anxiety always know what the worst thing that can happen. Name the worst. Could you cope with it or survive? Stand it? When you know you can at the gut level, this starts to shrivel the anxiety trance.

If you ever catch yourself asking: "What if--" and begin to name some negative event happen, catch yourself and also ask what neutral or good thing could happen as well. The what if questions are right out of worry trances that are fired up by anxiety.

Never clear worry directly, clearing the anxious feelings that engender it. Worried thoughts are just leaves blowing around in the wind. You want to go after the wind.

No physiological difference exists between states of anxiety and excitement. Only our perspective on our physiological state is different. These are the evaluations and labels we tack onto our feelings.
We might want to relabel our our feelings here as energy, up energy, arousal, excitement.

There are few if any guaranteed negative or postive outcomes in life. The universe seems to run on the law of probability (A human projection).

Problems and challenges can lead to learning and opportunities.

If your actions get an unwanted result or you get rejected, it does not follow that you are a failure or a reject. You are always multi-faceted and if you're fortunate you get to see beyond even this "self".

Few events, even so-called failures (unwanted results) are totally negative. If you consider your failures, you would likely find some positive aspects. Failed relationships obviously had some bright spots. Failed jobs offered us absorptions, challenges, and learnings. Mistakes can offer us valuable lessons about how we might succeed the next time up.

The real challenge with anxiety is not so much the fear--it is being able to "stand" the fears. We learn to stand something by standing it, by putting up with it. This builds patience and staying power and undercuts anxiety and fear in a huge, huge way.

Do you greatly fear death? Or do you fear the process of dying? How might you view dying if you sensed it was inconvenient and you could stand it?

Avoiding life's challenges not only reinforces our anxiety and heightens it effects, it cuts us off from valuable and rewarding sources of living.

Persistantly confront your fears. Stay with them and feel them until you've accomplished what you set out to do.

Exagerate your anxieties and fears--blow them up into absurdly larger fears.

All anxiety comes to an end. Feel it from start to finish and soon the charge will go out and the underlying trance will evaporate. Anxiety can't stand in the heat of full feeling and experience.

"Active Feeling and "Mind Surfing in the Now" can be very useful for the long-term integration of anxious feelings.

The Vortex, the Meridian Grasp, and the Circuit Breaker are also useful for handling specific anxiety trances. Evoke your anxious feelings about specific events and unroll them like a movie when you apply these three clearer. Never target worry. Target the anxiety that runs it.

Take care, Steve