0:00:06.9 Juan Alvarez: Would you like to be a better parent or a partner? Are you ready to break free from unwanted habits and get over the burden of the past? Maybe you would like to develop a healthier relationship with money or with food, or be able to lead with compassion. In all those matters, mindfulness can be a catalyst of change and the resource that you can always tap into. My name is Juan Alvarez and I’m an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher, a teacher and a guide or a companion for people looking for attainable ways of being more present, peaceful and conscious in their lives. I’ve dedicated my life to exploring how mindfulness and meditation improve our relationship with the world and with the people around us. So tune in if you want to build a solid meditation routine and learn different techniques that will also enhance the only practice that truly matters when it comes to being purposeful, life itself.
0:01:13.2 JA: Welcome back friends to Life Is The Practice. Today we are going to explore how the practice of meditation and mindfulness helps us to free ourselves from anxiety. I will briefly share my personal journey from having chronic anxiety to being free and at peace. We will talk about what anxiety is, how it works, and what techniques helps us to resolve it for good. My client, Molly Rampe, founder and CEO of Choice Network, is also joining us today sharing her experience and learnings. I want to clarify that nothing that you will hear today can be taken as medical advice. These are personal experiences and perspectives, so please, you should not hesitate to visit a competent doctor if you feel bad and think it could be helpful. Let’s go.
0:02:01.7 JA: When my father died from a relatively quick cancer, I had just turned 20 years old. This event deeply conditioned my life in many ways. Shortly after, I started experiencing anxiety, shortness of breath and chest tightness, you probably know the symptoms. As soon as I opened my eyes in the morning and began to think about the problems I had to face, the anxiety would kick in. Sometimes it was intense and other times softer, but it was always there. Always.
0:02:32.4 JA: I sought support in natural remedies, psychotherapy, and conventional medicine, but nothing worked. My doctors diagnosed me with pervasive, generalized anxiety and prescribed anxiety pills, which offered temporary relief, but no solution or comfort. At this time, I also started my path with meditation with not much gain. I was inconsistent in my efforts and lost faith in the practice. Meditation doesn’t work for me, I thought. In my early 30s after a more profound life crisis, I took the practice seriously. That’s when everything changed for me. Today in my mid 40s, I have been free from anxiety and away from pills for about 15 years and do not think that this have been easy years. Nope.
0:03:18.9 JA: Despite going through many challenges and difficulties, I have learned to face life internally differently, a way that does not lead to anxiety. Mindfulness has been the key. Okay, before I get more serious with the subject, let me give you some insight. Why does a Spanish guy like me take anxiety medication? Because of Hispanic attacks. [laughter] Okay, sorry. I couldn’t resist. Let’s keep going.
0:03:49.4 JA: To free ourselves from anxiety, we must understand what it is and how it works. According to Dr. Philippe Ortuño, director of the Psychiatry Department at Clinica Universidad de Navarra, anxiety is a normal emotion that is experienced in situations in which the subject feels threatened by an external or internal danger. It would be necessary to differentiate between fear. The subject knows the external and the limited object that threatens him and it’s prepared to respond and anxiety. The subject does not know the object being the threat internal and a response difficult to formulate.
0:04:27.3 JA: Dr. Ortuño definition continues. The anxiety is abnormal when disproportionate and too prolonged for the triggering stimulus. Let’s explore this definition in detail. As the doctor mentions, anxiety is an emotion. Emotions are the body’s response to our thought processes. We could say emotions are how our mind feels in the body, the energetic reflection of thought. As Dr Ortuño tells us, anxiety is fear of something that we don’t know and that therefore we cannot face. Anxiety is usually associated with an excess of future-oriented rumination. We often feel anxious when our attention is excessively occupied with thought processes related to anticipating and solving problems that do not exist or trying to control things that cannot be controlled. What we commonly call worry. The etymology of the word worry already gives us some clues. It comes from the term “wyrgan”, which in all English of West Germanic origin means to strangle.
0:05:30.2 JA: It seems accurate, don’t you think? Some examples of these thought processes could be, how will I do everything I must today? What if I run out of money? What if others criticize me? These thought processes, sometimes compulsive, are reflected in our bodies as the emotion of anxiety. Therefore, anxiety is the effect, not the cause of our problem. To solve the problem, we must look to the source, to what is happening with our attention and the excess of future in our thought processes. When we treat anxiety without going to the source, we remain at the surface level, which is not enough to curate. So where does this excess of future in our thought processes come from? When we live immersed in what is known as the egoic state, we experience ourselves as independent and separate from the rest of life. We identify with the eye and living as this separate self brings an undercurrent of existential scarcity clouding our consciousness of oneness.
0:06:34.5 JA: When we are trapped in the egoic state, we never feel whole. Instead, we are constantly saying to ourselves, I’m not good enough. When we live in the egoic state, the experience of the present moment seems incomplete to us. There is a persistent hunger, a feeling that we perpetually lack something that we hope to achieve in the future, something that will finally make us feel fulfilled. When we have no control over our attention, the mind has room to assert itself, leading us to involuntary, unnecessary and unconscious thoughts that do not serve. We find ourselves preoccupied with an unattainable future in which we will have reached fulfillment. This permanent rejection of the present moment, the existential emptiness and the fear of not getting what we need to be good enough shows up as anxiety in our bodies. We end up on a hamster wheel frantically running to nowhere, perpetually trapped in the anxiety cycle.
0:07:33.5 Molly Rampe: I operated from a place of anxiety as a small child, always trying to be the best at everything. You know, a 4.0 student volunteering. I always felt heaviness on my chest and my shoulders. My whole being was scarcity. It was always fear and anxiety even when I had it all. When I finally got married and I had a child and I felt like those were the things that would get me to have it all, I still felt like it wasn’t enough. So just always operating from that place of scarcity, holding it in my body, right in my chest, it was with every decision I made came from a place of fear.
0:08:19.7 JA: In this case, the egoic state of scarcity led Molly to live from the fear of not being good enough, which drove her life through anxiety. In my case, the scarcity pattern manifested itself in future laden thought processes such as, I’m not going to have enough money. I’m not going to have enough time. I’m not going to find a parking space or even catastrophic thinking, what if I go bankrupt? What if I get sick? What if my partner leaves me? It all combined to create in me a constant, deeply and present state of generalized anxiety and obsessive worry. Sometimes obsessive focus on the future is a response to the permanent insecurity so many of us feel as individuals. Living from the ego separates us from the primary universal system of life, which gives us confidence. Instead, we are driven into permanent existential fear, which drives us to try to control life in an attempt to regain a sense of ever elusive security.
0:09:20.8 JA: In my case, I went well beyond healthy and necessary time management, becoming obsessed out of fear with planning what had to happen every day, week, and month, and this of course, only brought me more tension and anxiety. Molly and I have both experienced what it is to live in a egoic state that activates anxiety-provoking thought patterns based on the future. Of course, there are many other examples, but our experiences probably feel familiar to many of you. If this whole ego thing is new to you or you want to go deeper, I recommend you listen to episode five, the ego, taming our inner critic, in which I explain the subject in detail. A link is available in the show notes. If we analyze everything we’ve learned so far about anxiety, we can conclude that anxiety is what manifests in our bodies as a result of how we learn to relate to life mentally.
0:10:16.7 JA: Obsessive focus on the future, preoccupation with worry and fearful rumination about life and feelings of permanent insecurity. However, if we change how we relate to the world, our inner experience also changes. Every time we replace ego with alignment, we are replacing the future with the present. We are replacing fear and apprehension with inner peace. Fortunately, this is precisely what is achieved by practicing mindfulness. No one is born with anxiety, much as we have learned to live with a specific egoic patterns, we cannot unlearn them. Many times we hear people say that anxiety runs in my family, which is true because the patterns of the egoic mind pass from parents to children generation after generation, just like we inherit values, beliefs, or our preference for one football team or another, but this does not mean we should resign ourselves to living with anxiety as if we can do nothing to heal ourselves because we were cursed.
0:11:18.8 JA: As Jim Folk, Director of Anxiety Center explains anxiety is caused by behavior, not genes. There is no scientific evidence that anxiety has a unique genetic component and it is not true that your biology is doomed to anxiety. If we integrate anxiety as a part of our identity, we give up and assume that we will have anxiety for the rest of our lives, then there’s nothing to do. I have also observed a tendency among some people to frame anxiety as something incurable that, at best, can only be managed. In other words, let’s just say that the idea of curing anxiety is not very popular in fields that have made anxiety management a very lucrative business. Very good.
0:12:05.5 JA: Now that we know what anxiety is and how it originates, we will look at how mindfulness helps us curate. The first thing we have to do is to become aware of how anxiety manifests in each of us. In order to do this, we must develop the ability to observe our thoughts and familiarize ourselves with the central narratives of our egoic patterns, such as fear of not having enough money, fear of failure, or fear of not being good enough.
0:12:33.8 JA: We must also bring awareness to the effects of thought on our bodies, learning to observe emotions and familiarize ourselves with the interplay between thoughts and emotions, the think-feel process. We do this by observing how this process plays out within us. When this type of content happens in the mind, the body reacts this way. This observational skill develops with the practice of meditation. There are two fundamental techniques that we use for this. The meditation of presence, which helps us to strengthen our concentration and the ability to be present and above all, the meditation of inner presence, which specifically allows us to develop the skills of observation of emotions and thought.
0:13:17.2 JA: Once we have developed our ability to manage our attention and observe our inner experience, it becomes easier to realize how the mind repetitively plays the same thought patterns allowing us to detach from the mind. We don’t energize those thought processes with our attention and don’t believe the story often catastrophic or scary that the thoughts bring. We can’t think our way out of our anxiety because the thinking process itself is the source of the problem. Instead, we turn our attention to our bodies and process the emotion freeing ourselves.
0:13:52.6 JA: We do this through a very simple shift. We withdraw the attention from the mind, bringing it to the body and observe with acceptance the evolution of the emotion. Nothing more. When we don’t feed our thoughts with our attention and instead focus on the body, the body wisely restores our energetic balance. We call this practice surrender. I like to coordinate this process with the breath and I find it especially useful to join surrender with the exhale. I become present in the body with the inhale and I surrender with the exhale. We learned to develop this skill with a meditation technique called alignment.
0:14:32.2 MR: So when I see like wait, that’s the ego telling me there’s scarcity. That’s the ego in fear. That’s my mind making up this story. It’s all a narrative in my mind. I think the difference is now I see it right away and I know what’s happening. And so then I’m just using my breath to dissolve it and I’m welcoming in the abundance. Whenever those moments of scarcity and they look like fear that I’m going to fail, that I’m not good enough, that I’m not credible enough. Whenever those feelings are coming, I’m taking a breath and I’m letting them go. So they still come, but now I see it and I feel it and I free it.
0:15:24.9 JA: Mark Twain said, “Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.” I think we can all relate, like how often have we wasted time and energy on unnecessary fear-based thought processes, but remember, what happens in the mind is not a true reflection of reality. Instead of taking my thought process so seriously, I return to what is real. Through my breathing, I return to the present and surrender to the intelligence of life. I replace the fear of the mind with confidence in life itself. With each exhale, I let myself rest in the vital process that sustains and guides me. Does this sound a little woowoo to you? Okay. Let’s take a more scientific approach and review your personal data. How often has your fear-based thinking helped you effectively in your life, and how many times was it completely redundant and unnecessary? If we analyze what we have lived up to now, we can locate unmistakable patterns.
0:16:29.6 JA: We can glimpse some intelligence at play, organizing the experience exactly how it’s meant to happen in his poem, Desiderata, Max Ehrmann expresses it this way, and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be. This does not mean that life passes without difficulties or adversity, not at all. But when we look with perspective, everything that has happened to us is necessary and makes sense. Like that time that you had a difficult love breakup and then found your ideal partner, or when you were fired from your job and went on to start a business far better aligned with your values and talents, or in my case, when the death of my father triggered the anxiety that ultimately pushed me to explore how to heal myself so that I can share it with you today.
0:17:24.6 JA: In the moment, we rarely have perspective, but when we look back, we realize that the algorithm of life is perfect, sometimes tragic comic but perfect. This allows us to surrender to life confidently, one breath at a time, no matter how uncomfortable our present challenges are. Of course, there will be times when you may experience a specific anxiety when you find yourself in a very stressful situation. Unavoidably, you will experience anxiety until you become aware and take charge of your experience, but you don’t have to accept the chronic anxiety that many of us experience anxiety as a way of life. You can live in peace. With intention, you can get off the hamster wheel. Of course, you have to work and make a little effort, but it is possible and worth it.
0:18:17.0 JA: If you’re interested in embarking on this path, I invite you to explore my digital course, The Practice, in which I explain in detail the method I mentioned in this episode. Dear friends, I leave you with a brief reflection. By combining presence and surrender, we exchange fear for trust, scarcity for abundance, loneliness for company, and tension for peace. By resting in our essential nature, instead of living from the egoic state, we feast on life, the one life that we share, the one life that we are.
0:18:55.7 MR: My intention every day is to be peace so I can bring peace. So peace in me is wholeness in me, and if I can be whole, then I can see the wholeness in others.
0:19:11.4 JA: Okay, friends. In our next episode, we will talk about how to reconcile living in the present moment with making plans and having goals. The topic of conscious time management. I hope to meet you there.
0:19:27.8 JA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Life Is The Practice Podcast. If you found it valuable, please subscribe. Leave us a review. You might help others live better, and if you want to learn more about the practice, please explore the online course that is available to you at lifeisthepracticepodcast.com. Thank you and be well friends.
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