A Three-fold Practice to Managing Anxiety, Building Empathy and Cultivating a Positive Relationship With Our Selves
It’s funny how if we don’t catch ourselves right away we can be a half mile down the track before we notice again – incessant mental loops.
What are we doing to take care of ourselves?
Choice paralysis is a real thing, and can make it really really hard to pick a direction and stick with it.
Focus is so important – so many areas to explore and directions to pursue, but can’t do them all.ย Need to pick 2-3 and focus in, else no real meaningful progress can be made – efforts too diffuse.
Dealing with anxious energy – do we have a physical outlet ?ย Sometimes we start feeling anxious when we’ve spent too much time at rest, but it’s more a sense of restlessness than anxiety – it’s like a physical thing as opposed to consternation about the future or possible outcomes.
It can be hard to pick something and stick with it, and just see how it develops as you go without analyzing every little thing to exhaustion.
I’ve found a threefold approach can really help cultivate a sense of mastery over those feelings – not that I am immune!ย ย – Certainly not, but it helps to have a reliable practice to break the cycle.
Deep breathing, shamatha, tonglen are the technical names, but its’s really quite easy.ย Part of the anxiety comes from having energy with no outlet.ย You are thinking about and through things, but with no actual outlet for that, you end up circling around.
You can do these anywhere really, but if you are doing too much you can get distracted, which takes away from the practice – that can be a real difficulty with our society.ย Facing and resolving these feeling strikes us as difficult, whereas distraction is always readily available.ย so we tend to distract ourselves to get past it in the moment, which doesn’t resolve anything and keeps us circling around over a longer term.
So I prefer to sit where I have some quiet.ย Or lying down can be nice.ย Once you feel you’ve attained some control / some ability to work through the feelings on the fly, then you don’t have this restriction as much, and you can catch yourself a little more actively as you go through your day.
The first step is the deep breathing.ย Really focus on using your diaphragm to breathe, not your chest / lungs.ย if you are sitting, make sure your bellybutton is moving out as you breathe in.ย It is okay to exaggerate this motion as you are getting started.ย but this is how you breathe when you are at rest, so it calms the physiological system and helps to induce a sense of relaxation.ย During this time, pay attention to the physical feelings of stress you are holding in your body, and focus on relaxing them, and feel the tension drain away.ย Like if you’ve been carrying it in your shoulders and they are all bunched up, let them relax and feel some of that physical stress get alleviated.ย Try to summon a sense of appreciation for how nice it is to be able to relax yourself in this way.ย Helps to actually smile at each of these parts, appreciating the work they do for you and their good function.
Beyond lowering cortisol in your system and feeling physically better, these steps all help influence your mindset towards something more positive, more workable.
Once you feel a bit more relaxed, then bring to mind your anxiety.ย Let it whip around a little bit, you’ll see it reaching towards various things – I’m anxious about this, I’m anxious about that, but try not to engage – try to avoid chasing the thoughts and following them through to conclusions – that’s half the issue.ย you cannot think these things through to conclusion.ย They literally just circle around, because they are unable to be resolved through thought alone.ย So the shamatha part is seeing how your anxiety is either being driven by thoughts of the future or thoughts of the past, and staying in the moment of now rather than being swept away with them.ย Recognizing the anxious thoughts, you smile at them, and send both them and your self feelings of love and acceptance.ย These thoughts are happening inside of you because they are important and you care about the outcome.ย they are trying to help protect you.ย They are serving their purpose and you won’t forget about them.
Often, we have trouble accepting the thoughts as they are, and so we work to solve them, work to change ourselves in some way as to remove them.ย Repressing / suppressing never works, only acceptance can really help.ย So we smile at them, and offer ourselves patience.
The feeling you will eventually develop towards these is like welcoming an old friend at the door – ‘ah, hello my anxious thoughts.ย It’s nice to see you again.’ย Sometimes it can feel a little bittersweet, and that is totally okay – very good actually.ย you’re not trying to bliss out on a feeling, but rather recognizing the limits of what they are good for.
Once you have rested in this feeling for a few minutes, allowing all the different iterations to start to arise, and greeting them with a smile before moving on, then you are good to start the tonglen.
Another reason the thoughts tend to cycle is because we sometimes struggle with finding something more worthwhile to put our attention to, especially when the thoughts inducing our anxiety feel so central to our being – like, of course you are going to circle back to ruminating over major life decisions if you don’t have something else to focus on, especially when they feel overwhelming at first.ย So the first two steps of the practice are to root your feeling in something tangible that you have control over that also helps maintain a more relaxed and calm state – your breathing, and practicing equanimity in regards to your thoughts and training your self to smile rather than react with further nervousness / anxiety to noticing those feelings – the shamatha.
The tonglen gives you an outlet for your latent energy, and helps you identify beyond yourself, further lessening the impact of the self-centered anxiety.ย So, tonglen is another breathing practice.ย You start by focusing on a loved one.ย Parents, siblings or children are often good choices.ย When you breathe in, reflect and focus on all the sources of their sadness, discomfort and misery.ย Ailments, all that.ย When you breathe in, picture drawing all of this into your being, absorbing it from them, almost like a sponge.ย When you breathe out, send them all of the love you have.ย You may break it down to specific ailments, and do one breath cycle for each.ย Like ‘bad back,’ ‘difficulties with parents,’ ‘difficulties with kids,’ etc.
As you breathe in, consider how these things would affect and take away from the quality of their experience, and when you breathe out, picture sending them the best feeling you could imagine – sounds a little hokey, but as close to pure love as possible.ย Forgiveness and acceptance of how they are also mix into that feeling you are sending out as well.
Next, you pick someone who you really like, a good friend, etc, and repeat the process.ย And then someone who you like but aren’t great friends with.ย And then someone you are just acquaintances with.ย And then someone you barely know, like the person you get your coffee from in the morning.ย And then someone who you don’t like, who has wronged you in some way.ย And then, finally, someone you actively detest.
It can be a challenging practice, for all the obvious reasons, but it is very rewarding.ย You will grow past a lot of grudges and conceptions about people that tend to be pretty limiting.
There are some other nifty downstream effects of it as well, once you start factoring in things like neuroplasticity.
You can also do it for groups of people, countries, animals, whatever.ย there’s really no limit, as long as you moved through the chain of breathing joy and loving-kindness for someone you are quite close to down to your most bitter enemy.ย this is also a great way to build empathy, as you will undoubtedly uncover new perspectives on people and things as you consider their hurt and trauma.
It is a far more satisfying practice than ruminating on considerations of ourselves, and if you spend even 5 or 10 minutes doing this practice you will feel noticeably freer of whatever was bothering you before, because it sets a cleaner ground work for relating with ourselves, and then shifts the focus away from ourselves.
It also tends to be not a frustrating experience, as sitting meditation can sometimes be, because it’s a pretty straightforward practice; it’s hard to feel like you are doing it wrong.ย You are actively guiding your thoughts rather than trying to observe and or silence them.
All in all, a good use of mental activity.ย So, to recap, we calm the bodies, appreciate our anxiety, and shift our focus to something greater than ourselves.ย This doesn’t calm and completely remove the anxiety right away, but with some repetition you will find it becomes easier to calm and nurture yourself, easier to smile at the anxious or negative thoughts and move beyond them, and easier to shift your focus to something more productive.ย Which tends to be the opposite result of consistently indulging the thoughts with no other recourse – they can become all-consuming.ย So this is a good practice for cultivating more positive feedback loops in your brain.