Discover the Truth Behind Where Your Anxious Feelings Are Coming From
“I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that you don’t know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.” – Eckhart Tolle
At the heart of my coaching practice is my wish to help people re-discover their authentic selves, and to help them understand the role thought plays in driving their behaviours and how they experience life.
It was this knowledge that led to the biggest change in my own life, leading me from a life coloured by insecurity and hyper-vigilance, to one of ease, peace, compassion, and a greater trust in my innate resilience.
We feel 100% of our thoughts, how many of them are you suffering from unnecessarily?
Thoughts are transient energy – they come and go – but they come pre-packaged with an emotion. We have thousands of thoughts flowing through our minds every day. It is only when we focus in on one that we really feel it.
We might spend time analysing a particular thought, or believing it is a problem we need to solve. The attention we give to it creates momentum and more thoughts are generated. This can keep us stuck in low-energy emotions.
When we’re stuck, our ability to find new ways of dealing with challenges is limited. In fact, if we have a goal we wish to achieve but “think” is impossible, we might inadvertently create obstacles!
When you realise you don’t have to believe every thought you have, it helps you to move out of your own way as you uncover innovative and creative ways to achieve the success you are seeking.
Why do we all have different fears?
We often find it hard to understand why others don’t perceive or feel the same fears we do. For example, there are many people too terrified to fly, they can only see the possibility of a disaster in their mind and experience sensations of anxiety and panic at the very thought of flying.
Whereas others perceive flying as just another form of transport. They have a place to go and view flying as the fastest way to get there. There are also those who enjoy flying and experience great excitement and joy. So what is the difference between them?
It is simply how we “think” about flying, and the feelings that come with that thinking. If the thinking is fearful, our brain triggers the stress response.
The stress response, or the fight/flight/freeze response, is our body's emergency reaction system. It includes physical and mental responses to our perception of various situations.
When the stress response is triggered, our bodies release the stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol, which give us extra strength and energy to respond and survive whatever threat we are facing.
Our organs are subconsciously programmed to respond in certain ways to situations that are deemed threatening or challenging. What is most amazing about this is, it all happens automatically, unfortunately, though, it does this regardless of whether it is a real or imagined threat.
When we play out our thoughts in our mind and get caught up on the troubling ones, we experience the emotional sensations they evoke in our body and get a rush of stress hormones we don’t actually need.
Being aware that our thoughts are formless energy shaped to look and feel real by our imagination, means we no longer need to take them so seriously.
What is our subconscious mind?
Research has shown we spend 95% of our time in our subconscious mind, which psychology describes as the part of the mind that is not currently in focal awareness.
Our subconscious mind has what is called a homeostatic impulse, meaning it keeps your body temperature at 37 degrees Celsius, keeps you breathing regularly, and keeps your heart beating at a certain rate.
All of which is amazing, however, it also keeps you thinking and acting in a manner consistent with your conditioning.
Your conditioning is what you have been taught, your cultural and societal beliefs, and any traumatic events you may have experienced in the past, all of which shape your perspective of life.
All of your habits of thinking and behaving are stored in your subconscious mind. It has memorised your comfort zones and functions to keep you there, which is not conducive to growth or change.
Coming to understand that thoughts and long-held beliefs can dissolve in an instant, means you no longer need to suffer them or let them sabotage your hopes and dreams.
How often does your overthinking get triggered by people or situations?
We all have stories we tell ourselves when dealing with someone we perceive as “difficult” or something we perceive as a “problem” or an “obstacle” in our lives.
Our minds are very good at visualising worst-case scenarios, especially when trying to figure out how an interaction with someone might go, or the outcome of a situation that is troubling us might be.
We often try to figure out how to deal with a person or fix a situation, only to get caught up in a storm of thoughts and worries in our mind.
We become certain of a particular outcome and trapped in a cycle of feelings – anxiety, despair, guilt, shame, fear, or anger, only for the situation to turn out completely different from how we thought!
I had experienced this many times until I finally saw my predictions of the future rarely turned out as I imagined, and since we can’t actually predict the future, why suffer in trying to do so?
Now as I catch myself. doing this, I simply let my focus on my thinking soften, and as my mind begins to settle, I usually have a clarifying insight that leads to whatever step I need to take to help the situation, or to the realisation that it was only my thinking causing me to believe there was a problem in the first place.
Are you hypnotised by your thinking?
Have you ever caught yourself in a thought storm, feeling like you’ve been suddenly woken from a hypnotic state?
This has happened to me many times, especially while driving. I often find myself nearing my destination with no recollection of the journey there.
In the past, I would have berated myself especially if I’d get lost in negative thinking, annoyed that I could not keep control of my thoughts. Understanding now, that I don’t have a choice of which thoughts pop into my consciousness, only the ones I give my attention to, has brought me a sense of freedom and great relief.
Now I’m much more aware and compassionate of my self-talk. I no longer try to control or monitor my thoughts or change the negative thoughts to positive ones as quickly as possible, as suggested in many self-help books I’ve read.
My attempts to do this in the past were draining on my energy and usually left me feeling annoyed at myself every time I got caught up in “negative” thinking. Now when this happens I allow myself the mental space to fall back into the awareness of where my mind has brought me, getting present allows me to settle, and as I untangle my mind from the worrisome thoughts, new thought begins to flow, bringing me back to well-being and more peaceful sensations.
How many hours a day is your mind at peace?
Our default state of mind is one of peace, with loving, light-hearted feelings. This state is the one before our intellect, before our experiences in life, before our learning and belief systems, and we have the capacity to return to it in any moment.
Our mind often becomes overactive with thinking that makes us “feel” fearful and insecure.
Our capacity to imagine the worst possible outcome of any situation causes us to have a lot of unnecessary worry.
Worrying doesn’t make us any safer, instead, it keeps us locked in feelings of anxiety and robs us of our peace of mind.
When we let our thoughts flow, like clouds in the sky, it brings us back into our natural state of peace and ease. Within this space, we have access to our innate wisdom, which holds the answers and solutions to any questions or problems we may think we have.
As we are all unique in our thinking, no other person views the world as we do, or can fully understand what’s going on in our mind!
Our thoughts about life have been individually shaped by our childhood, culture, levels of learning, and our life experiences, all of which lead us to our own unique perception of the world.
I am happy to say through my understanding of how my mind works, my world looks a lot brighter and a lot less scary than before. I now experience life with less fear, pessimism, and turbulence. I am much more grateful and hopeful. I am more at ease and approach life in a more graceful, light-hearted way, enjoying a much more peaceful mind.
What I have learned most throughout this journey is, no one else holds the answer that is right for me. I can only find it within.
Softening our focus of attention on our thinking expands our intuition, allowing us to tap into our innate wisdom, making it easier to hear the answers to any question we have.
Developing our ability to rest in the stillness and peace, at any moment throughout our day, no matter what the noise (be it from our inner turmoil or our perception of our outer environment), leaves us with greater space for insight, inspiration, and creativity for whatever we wish to experience in life.
Thanks for reading.
Angela
