Exit Anxiety and Discouragement

Anxiety draws you into what you feel anxious about. Discouragement draws you into what you feel discouraged over. In any circumstances where you feel either of these painful states, make it your first priority to free yourself internally before you attempt to free yourself from the circumstances that trigger them. Otherwise, no matter how hard you work to get yourself out of, you get yourself more deeply into the circumstances you want so much to avoid.

In both instances, you consciously or unconsciously envision yourself headed into a life you want to avoid. Anxiety and discouragement form your imaginative capacity, for that is what emotional states do. Because you experience as real whatever you vividly imagine to be real, you effectively place yourself in the experience of circumstances that you believe yourself to be in.

And yet, you may actually be in a far more advantageous position than you realize, and on your way into your greatest hopes being realized, while you dwell in the visions wrought by anxious or discouraged feelings. You then literally remove yourself from the stream of events leading you in the direction you want to go in, and place yourself in a stream carrying you in the exact opposite direction.

Living free of anxiety and discouragement proves simpler and easier than most realize. When you focus your attention upon the present state of your feeling, you not only sense how you feel, but also sense how to release yourself by small degrees from a painful, unhappy emotional state. You can simply let go of the painful feeling, little by little, and find your way into peace.

One challenge here is redirecting the focus of your attention from the vision wrought by anxiety or discouragement, and focusing it on the way you feel instead. This requires very alert vigilance over the focus of your attention. You have to be aware of what you are paying attention to if you would direct the focus of your attention.

Another challenge here is the common belief that how you feel about your circumstances is based on your circumstances as they are, not on how you mentally envision them to be. Much of our thinking occurs unconsciously. We don't realize that we are thinking when we are thinking, and respond to our thoughts as though they are reality. For instance, you might think of your child behaving in a way that causes your heart to overflow with love. In that moment you will believe that your child is whom you imagine your child to be. Then, when you arrive home from a long day of work and your child behaves in a manner you find disturbing, you might wonder, "Who is this child? What happened to my beautiful angel?" Then your mental reflections of your child might portray him as a nuisance, as a vicious child, as a child who does not care about others.

As one practices becoming more aware of one's thinking, one discovers the great creative power of thinking. You bring about what you think about. You can actually see that, not just believe it. You see, for instance, that thinking of your child as loving places you in the experience of having a loving child; that thinking of your child as uncaring about others places you in the experience of having an uncaring child. Beyond this, you then begin relating to your child in a manner consistent with your mental vision of him. For instance, you treat him like an uncaring child, which ends up discouraging him from expressing his caring side; so your mental visions become self-fulfilling prophesies.

One of our major tasks in life, if we are to live life to the fullest, is to harness the vast creative power of our minds. Instead of permitting circumstances to dictate what you think, you can direct your mind to dictate your circumstances. Thus, the parent who notices himself resentfully thinking of his child as uncaring can intentionally let go of the thought in order to avoid contributing to that possibility becoming a reality.

The more attention you give to a thought, the more reality you give to the thought. By redirecting the focus of your attention from what you think to how you feel, you can avoid giving more reality to a thought you do not want to live in.

Paying close attention to your thoughts and feelings reveals that your feelings shape your thoughts. When you feel inspired, encouraged, hopeful you envision scenes in your head that support those feelings. When you feel anxious, discouraged or frustrated your mind engages in mental scenes that support those feelings. To shift your thinking, shift your feeling. Do this by redirecting attention from what you are thinking onto what you are feeling. Then you can gradually improve how you feel and, by so doing, liberate your mind from creative thinking that sends you into the very circumstances that you want to escape or avoid.

Before one can effectively direct the creative power of the mind, one must experience a profound awakening from the dream that circumstances are the cause of how you think about your circumstances, and that when you think about your circumstances you are actually looking directly at things as they are, rather than at a mental reflection. As long as you believe that your circumstances produce your thoughts about your circumstances, you cannot use your thought to produce the circumstances that you want. As long as you believe that viewing your thoughts is the same as directly viewing the reality you are thinking about, you cannot withdraw reality from the thoughts you do not want to live in.

Recognize the story about your life that you live inside your head. You can release from the tragic stories that feed your discouragement, anxiety and humiliation as easily as you can switch from a thought about the stars to a thought about the sky. When you see your story as your story you can let it go, particularly when you see how poorly it makes you feel.

Paying close attention to your thoughts will reveal how much you react to the story in your head, and how much you have related with that story as your inescapable reality. What you tell yourself about yourself, the vision of your life that you hold, is like a suit that you try on. If it doesn't fit, you don't have to buy it. Whatever you believe to be true about your life is, after all, just a belief. You can discard beliefs that aren't working.

We face two challenges when attempting to release ourselves from the tragic life-stories that keep us feeling down, lost, and bad about ourselves: unconsciousness and attachment. Regarding consciousness, you have to pay close attention to your thoughts to recognize the story about your life that you are gazing upon within, and its impact upon you emotionally and physically. Beyond this, you need to become conscious of the fact that it is just a story, an internal movie of your life that you produce. When you become this aware, you see that you can step out of that story as easily as you step out of a hole in the ground that you accidentally stepped into. The more conscious you are of your inner world, the world of your thoughts and feelings, the more quickly and easily you can leave your sad life stories behind and enter the joy of creation.

Before we examine the joy of creation further, we need to deal with the second challenge facing one who wants freedom from a tragic life story: attachment. When you begin to pay attention to your thoughts with the intention of waking up to reality, you discover a feeling of temptation in connection with your sad life story. It attracts you. A part of you desires to dwell in it, to wallow in it. Feeling sorry for ourselves feels somewhat self-nurturing, like receiving warm sympathy from another person who pities our plight. You have to choose between the comforting feeling of sympathy for your sad story and your liberation from that sad story. What motivates us to let go of our sad story is the increasing drain it places upon us. It incapacitates us, prevents us from creating what we want more than a sad life story: a triumphant destiny.

Your attachment to your sad story may be deep and it may be strong. It requires sustained discipline to remain vigilant of our thoughts and feelings to see that the story is just a story, not reality. As you continue paying attention to your thoughts and feelings you discover they have the creative power to actually shape your experience of reality. For instance, you see that the more you live in a sad story of your life in your head the more that story grows increasingly real and inescapable for you.

As you release yourself from your sad life story in your head, you release yourself to work creatively for the triumph that you want. You finally have to choose between feeling sorry for yourself for not writing that book you want to write, and writing the book. You have to choose between feeling sorry for yourself for not making more money and applying yourself to tasks aimed at making more money. You have to choose between feeling sorry for yourself for not spending all the time with your children you believe they need and deserve, and actually making adjustments aimed at improving the balance in your life. You have to choose between entertaining a story about your marriage that keeps you feeling sorry for yourself for being stuck in a dissatisfying marriage and freeing yourself from the sorrow you feel by no longer entertaining that story.

You don't have to suffer in a sad life story. As you release yourself from the unconsciousness and attachment that keeps you in your sad story, you liberate yourself to work in your natural state of joy for what you want. Joy is your natural state. You don't have to make yourself happy, you just have to stop making yourself miserable with the sad and scary stories you weave for yourself in your head. Living in sad stories is self-punishing and self-defeating. Telling yourself that you cannot stop living in your sad story is just another sad story.

The way to freedom is through alert awareness directed to your mind, perseverance and discipline. But you can only gain freedom slowly, by small degrees. If you have been living in sad life-stories for years, or decades, you have cultivated the habit of slipping into them when you encounter adversity or loss. Each time you extricate yourself from a sad story you enter more fully into your life of natural joy and free yourself a bit more from the habit of slipping into sad stories. This takes constant practice.

You need to get enough rest because a fatigued state has no defense against self-defeating stories. You need to pay particular attention to your speech or you can talk yourself more deeply into identification with your negative stories without realizing it. Listen to the story about your life that you describe in your speech, particularly when you feel sad, anxious, or angry. Every time that you emotionally complain to someone you portray yourself as a victim of their behavior and send yourself more deeply into that sad story. If you are not feeling emotionally balanced, it is usually best not to speak. Speaking when you feel emotionally positive sets you up for disappointment, because you create a story for your life that is too easy and pleasant. Then, when reality comes crashing in, your emotions swing to the opposite polarity and you feel yourself plunging into emotional darkenss.

To speak from emotional balance, you need to be in emotional balance. To determine if you are in emotional balance, you need to pay close attention to your feelings. Practice living in an anxiety free state, in a state free of discouragement. You even have to feel free of strong desire, because desire unbalances you. When you strongly desire something or someone, you close your eyes to the truth and focus only on what you want to see. The opposite of desire is fear, and fear underlies desire. The more you desire something to happen, the more you fear it not happening. Anxiety underlies all unbalanced emotion and desire.

What we want to be is realistic. When you are realistic you are naturally joyful. You are not hoping for something to happen and you are not fearing that something will or won't happen. You are at peace in the present moment. Examine your feelings all the time to determine if you are really at peace in the present. Observe your thoughts to notice the story playing in your head. Employing this discipline of self-awareness will gradually free you from the emotional suffering that you have been habitually imposing upon yourself all these years.

Some people believe that they need desire and fear to motivate them to take action, but fear either immobilizes you or drives you into unbalanced, destructive action and desire blinds you to the truth about what you are really doing, what you are really after, because it clouds your judgment with denial. A little desire and a little fear can be motivating, just like a little regret can motivate you to make different choices in the present. Wisdom here comes down to measure. Living in too much fear and regret drains you of motivation and brings on hopelessness and despair. Permitting desire to drive you blindly prevents you from recognizing important factors that would cause you to alter your course if you faced them. For instance, a married man with children may feel desire for another woman, but when he considers this desire in the context of his overall circumstances, he realizes that the cost of pursuing the satisfaction of that desire would cost far more than it is worth.

When you feel desire, look at the story playing in your head. It involves you in the satisfaction of your desire. The more you dwell in that story, the stronger your desire grows, until it unbalances you, blinds you to relevant factors that deserve your serious consideration, and drives you to pursue a satisfaction that is not worth the cost. A little desire can guide you to create a condition that you want. But you have to let the desire go and return to balance, to the peaceful state of freedom from anxiety in the present, to orient yourself to reality. Then you can either decide to sacrifice satisfaction of that desire for a larger cause, or you can pursue a course of action that integrates that desire into other desires for a whole and balanced life that permits you to enjoy the journey without the pain and drain of self-defeating desperation.

Haven't you learned from life, by now, that desperation is self-defeating? It arises from the story of yourself as a victim, as helpless, as hopelessly dependent. The more you live in this story, the more true it becomes, as the very things, people or experiences that you feel so desperate for recede farther and farther from your reach. As you release yourself from the story that fuels your desperation, you release yourself from the desperate plight you believed yourself to be in.

For all you know, whatever you are going through, your life is working out fine right now. You are headed in the direction of your greatest dreams coming true. You need only release yourself from the sad, sad story that portrays your life as less and that plunges you into the anxiety and discouragement that prevents you from doing all you can to create all you want.