Shifting Anxiety
I was a longtime sufferer of anxiety. Yoga, meditation, being consciously present, and spending time in nature helped. I followed a call to initiations into Reiki, shamanism, mediumship, and spiritual awakening. While these paths changed many things about my life, they also gave me more ways to tune out the noise and connect with only what I perceived to be true and beautiful. And the anxiety covertly persisted.
I didn’t even realize how ingrained it was until it became clear that my adrenals (the glands that produce adrenaline, one of our body’s first defenses when “under attack”) were dangerously over exhausted, and that they’d been suffering for years. I attuned my spiritual healing focus more acutely to my childhood trauma, loops in thinking, expectations, and disappointment. While the meditation, shamanic journeying, and simply being present helped, I continued to find myself sometimes reaching a state of agitation that I couldn’t explain or heal.
Our thoughts can create the circumstances that cut us off from our own wisdom in the moment. We always know what to do to reach balance, but that knowing is often clouded by what we’ve been conditioned to believe is true (or should be true) about ourselves and the world. Those misshapen beliefs can then trap us in anxiety.
Ice tree by KB
My anxiety was especially strong when I felt that I was being confined. I would imagine that the confinement was due to circumstances outside of myself—my bad choices, my past, other people, circumstances, responsibilities, on and on. Until the Ancestors (the capital “A” for the healed and enlightened ones) showed me that it had to do with perspective.
The Ancestors asked me to see and feel myself in this confinement. What would it look and feel like to be boxed in? I tuned in with my mind’s eye and saw myself with a cube around me. It made me hunch and get smaller—my body, my breath, my awareness, my presence. I could feel the sides of the cube against my arms, my back. From inside myself I could feel that what I really wanted to do was to breathe, stretch, and expand. The Ancestors said, “Shift your perspective. What if the box became a window that you could move through?”
Huh? I was confused. How? Why? How can I do that? My logical brain couldn’t explain it. Of course, the Ancestors wouldn’t explain it—it was my work to do—but I trusted the message enough to attempt it. First, I tried to visualize it to see if it was even possible in my imagination. I saw myself in the box. Then, my perspective shifted the dimensionality of the cube—in a way like origami—so it came up off of me and became a flat window to one side of me. Ah, I could breathe a little more deeply.
I looked at the window and knew that on the other side were freedom, possibility, and solutions to the feeling of confinement. This possibility of freedom had remained unimaginable while inside the box. There was just no way out from that perspective. My insides fluttered as I, in my imagination, opened the window and went through it. I didn’t find an answer or a task on the other side, but only expansion. I could take up space and become the possibility.
What my mind had created as confinement quickly dissolved when faced with this expansion.
I started practicing this perspective shift whenever the anxious feeling of confinement came over me. I saw the box, I felt the box. Then, in my mind’s eye I morphed the box into something else, something that I could work with—a window. Sometimes I passed through it, and sometimes I waited. Some days the unknown of open possibility felt too daunting to enter. But what a relief to be out of the box! I’m not sure that I can say much more about how I felt when I tried it the first or the second or the third time. As if there had been no box at all. As if there had been no real reason for the box. As if the box had been made of only what was untrue, so of course it could be dismantled easily.
All of our conditioning can trick our minds into believing something about ourselves—about our core selves, our lives, our needs, our worthiness, our ability to know what’s best for us—that is untrue. That untruth confines us in an anxiety that separates us from our own innate knowing and paralyzes our ability to move forward in the moment and, sometimes, even in our lives. Yet, we always know what to do. We carry the wisdom to break out of this feeling, take a breath, and continue to be and move forward in the world. Our thoughts might tell us otherwise, but, since we control them, we can control how we see what they’re showing us.
When we release ourselves from the prescribed boundaries of the box and bring ourselves out to the open world of expansion, it might take some time to feel a new kind of grounding, to tune with the rhythm of possibility, but it can happen. If you decide you’d like to try this kind of perspective shift in your own moments of anxiety, just tune into your connection to Earth, remember your connection to the cosmos. When you align with the world tree’s roots you can eventually gain grounded steadiness in this new, unfettered place of possibility.