Conversations with the Guide

Anxiety Assignment 1 - Batch 7
3/22/2023

A thought occurs, fear beginning as nausea in the belly and runs through the body bringing weakness into my limbs. Anxiety is setting in. Some part of my life is threatened by a change. Change often brings anxiety, the security of what I've created is in flux.
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“Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and the door shall be opened to you.” I’ve often suspected that even the folks who deeply and sincerely believe the truth of those words don’t really get the magnitude of that truth. What Jesus was telling us, very simply and succinctly is “how” it works. Literally. Actually. Truly. We have the life we’ve asked for. Not that we asked at some point in some distant past that we can’t remember. We have the life we’re asking for in each moment. In this practice we hear, “What you practice is what you have.” “What you do is what you get.” Comes to the same thing. Yes? Ego wants us to believe that everything is up to us, that we get what we get because we’ve tensed up a lot of muscles, worried, stressed, agonized, fretted, and made it happen. If it didn’t happen, it’s our fault. But, much as we’ve been duped into believing that, it’s just not true. We don’t “do” anything. Not in the way egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate wants us to believe. Life does. Life is. We, as expressions of Life, participate. Just like everything else. There’s not a single thing in life that we can “make happen.” We believe we can and believe we should, but believing doesn’t make it true. Believing just makes us unhappy. With that for consideration, back to “your anxiety.” When we believe that we are the creators of our world, we are bound to be anxious! Can’t be avoided. Why? Because we know it’s not true. In our heart of Hearts we know we’re not in charge, have no control. We know we’re no more in position to make our life be what we want it to be than we were at age three. And, we’re far, far less happy than we were at three! We feel anxious and scared and worried, holding our world together with tensed muscles in the stomach, hoping and praying all will go “well.” Realizing the futility of that approach can inspire us to turn to what is so. We can focus all our attention on what we have, what we’ve been given. We can be grateful and trust that, always having been provided with all we need, that will continue. We can expand our focus to ask that as we continue to be grateful and to enjoy all we’ve been given, that the same will be true for all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings feel Love. May all beings end suffering. Ego fear begins to dissipate and is replaced with a sense of surprise at how obviously well-cared for and loved we clearly must be! Now we are having rather than wanting, now we are receiving rather than worrying and longing. Yes? I often promise t-shirts for awareness practitioners that say, Change Is Good. Change is good. Change is how the generous, lovingkindness of Life opens us to be able to receive more! Give it a go, huh? Gasshō
 
Noticed anxiety presses action to avoid fear of making mistakes, losing or looking foolish. Notice that urgency of action produces mistakes. Pausing and watching the little girl appears painfully embarrassed by making mistakes. Ego keeps her alone wondering fearfully what to do to avoid making mistakes. No mistakes? R/L Gassho
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That’s correct. That’s what she needs to see/get in order to free her from ego’s ability to frighten and control her. We each went off to whatever version of kindergarten with a range of emotions from excitement to terror. There, most of us had it clearly pointed out that there is a right and a wrong—for everything. Right is the standard. Knowing is the way to be right. You need to know so that you will be right, so that you’ll be the right person, so that you will be acceptable and loved, so you will survive. Learning? Absolutely not! School has nothing to do with learning. School is where you find out about competition, judgment, evaluation, and comparison. It’s where you find out what’s important in life and, most of all, exactly how you are flawed and lacking. You may be smart, but are you attractive? You may be athletic, but are you bright? You may get good grades or be musical or artistic, but aren’t those just other ways of describing nerds, dorks, geeks and other unappealing types? (I could become self-conscious about revealing too much about my youth, but the rate of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people tells me nothing much has changed, except perhaps to be worse.) So, that’s the kind of child abuse—and yes being a child going through the process of socialization is abusive—we’ve all navigated. And, for most of us it instilled, among other horrors, the horror of making mistakes. Now, we get to bring not just the more experienced perspective of a grownup to the situation, we get to bring conscious, compassionate awareness. Best of all? We get to learn! We get to be curious, find out for ourselves rather than being told by someone else; we get to see, to realize. We get to be in this great big world and love it, be fascinated by it, in each moment. We get to be alive rather than held in a shrinking fear that we will be wrong, do something wrong, make a mistake. There’s nothing wrong and there’s no such thing as a mistake. HA! Here we go. Gasshō
 
The most prominent sensation in the body is a pervasive BRACING. Anxiety seems to equal bracing -> feeling unease/something wrong -> looking to conditioned mind to make it better which involves worry, planning, projecting - an exhausting conversation w/ego. I could work with the content endlessly or investigate the bracing. R/L
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YES! That’s it, precisely and beautifully. We can either follow egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate through a list of stuff, content, things, situations, and circumstances that turn out to be longer than our lifetime, never getting anywhere except more suffering, OR we can investigate the specific. Which specific? We don’t all have “bracing” as an issue. “Bracing” won’t always be your issue! True. But we each have our current version of “bracing.” We each have what we can see as the current ego focus holding us in “stuck,” causing us to suffer.  That’s where we start. We start with wherever we are, whatever we just stumbled over. We give whatever that is all our attention until it dissolves. What’s under that will be revealed. We do the same process until we become like all good detectives, thrilled with the next mystery to solve. Gasshō
 
The old double-bind fits any content: "You have to, but you can't" seems to be the story behind sensations of anxiety, and particularly scary is "You are conditioning, you must drop conditioning." Grateful to have guidance, time, and willingness to see the stories I'm believing. R/L Gassho
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And, very good to see that all “you”s are not created equal. The “you” of “You are conditioning” is not the “you” that can drop conditioning. In fact, the “you” that is scared by that message is “ego identified” and not only couldn’t drop conditioning, wouldn’t want to drop conditioning. However, the “you” that can see that process and is aware of the story, the fear, and, let’s face it, the bamboozle, can, would, will, and does drop conditioning. Ah, it’s the old “case of mistaken identity.” Those kinds of “you have to X, but you can’t X” situations are double-binds only for ego. They use the “logic” that ego uses. It’s a logic that only exists in the faux “reality” of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate. Inside that imaginary, dualistic structure there’s only one “you,” the “you” of ego, playing all the parts. Step outside that fiction and we can see we have no problems because all the problems only appear to exist inside that fictional structure. We don’t need to see the stories, we need to see the process. “Double-bind” is the “bracing” of the last conversation. Gasshō
 
I picture a little anxiety-fear-urgency wheel spinning endlessly in space, whispering/ranting into the void. (It exists only when I think it.) Listening to it from identification with a separate self is suffering (and there's nothing wrong with that). Compassionate awareness says, "Stick with me, kid. I'm always here."
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“Stick with me, kid,” equals “turn attention from the suffering wheel and give attention to thisherenow,” yes? It’s true that there’s nothing wrong with attending to a suffering wheel spinning endlessly in space, but why do that? As soon as we realize we don’t need to suffer, we go from “it’s wrong to suffer” to “suffering is a process I don’t choose to indulge.” It could be argued that it would benefit us if there actually weresomething wrong with suffering. Not wrong in the sense of “making a mistake, gonna be punished,” but along the lines of don’t smoke in bed or don’t leave candles burning around the house when you go to bed or don’t drive drunk. These are behaviors that have great potential for causing a lot of misery. We can certainly do them if we want to, but perhaps not complain when we burn the house down or wind up in jail. Giving attention to a suffering wheel might fit nicely in the same category? Gasshō
 
This Practice further unveiled the big lie ‚ there's something wrong. An unnamed, unidentified, always looming "wrong" that works on this human when unconscious, usually in early morning sleep, resulting in a tightly wound, dense, black/red knot at the base of the sternum. Great to catch and release. Gassho R/L
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Such a perfect description. “An unnamed, unidentified, always looming ‘wrong’….” We could add “vague,” yes? I hope everyone will watch for this. It’s a huge piece of how suffering is created and maintained. There’s this shadowy, amorphous, nebulous feeling. We should say, “feeling.” What is it? I don’t know. It just feels like there’s something there, something off—something wrong. Is there? NO. But we’re trained to be distracted, to start looking. While we’re searching around for something that isn’t there, the ego voices are making suggestions. “Well, maybe it’s that argument I had with…” “There’s the presentation coming up…” “I probably shouldn’t have had that extra helping of spicy sauce…” “This is how I used to feel around my in-laws…” Sooner or later a hook will get set and we’ll be reeled in. Is there anything to any of it? Not a bit. Here’s something we might all play with: If there’s a problem, a difficulty, someone unhappy with us, something we forgot, etc., let’s wait for Life to inform us rather than rooting around in conditioned mind with ego trying to figure it out. Gasshō
 
Headline "These sensations are uncomfortable/wrong, I don't like this". Sensations arise with varying degrees of intensity, location, shape, and size. A conversation in mind interprets the sensation through a dualistic lens (that's bad/wrong/problem), a solidified sense of self emerges, and it desires to escape and change the sensation. R/L
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Ah ha! An elaboration on the previous theme. The helpful addition here is that we have only two ways to go with a dualistic lens, good/right or bad/wrong. Since duality is the “world” of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate, and since we’re heavily conditioned to identify with ego, bad/wrong is going to be the conclusion at least 99 out of every 100 times. Absolutely the ego voices will point out that good/right exists, but it’s not in me, not in this, not in that, not in them, not in now, not in here. Ego/I, as noted, is a non-stop conversation about “I don’t want this, I don’t like this, I want something else, other, different.” The thing we begin to catch onto as we pay closer attention is that the ego voices just rant on. What they’re saying has nothing to do with anything other than the program they are. It’s fun when they say something so out of keeping with the moment that we hear them for what they are, but that rarely happens. We’re trained to look/listen to/believe them and they frame the world we live in. A simple question along the lines of “What’s so bad about this? What’s wrong with it?” can really throw a spanner in ego’s works. We quickly get to see that it is, in fact, a program, quite unable to interact creatively or presently. Gasshō
 
Seeing how anxiety stories arise when very young survival needs seem threatened such as perceived possible loss of love or approval, not belonging, someone angry, doesn't like me. Or wellbeing, security feels threatened; health, bank failures, stock market crashes, wars, climate change. Meant not to see: There's no control. R/L
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Precisely! We can’t do anything about any of those things. Even something like love or approval is not ours to control. Everything is as it is and we really have no say in any of it. One would think that given that we would all say, then let’s just eat, drink, and be merry. BUT WE DON’T. Even folks who get the truth of no guarantees, could all be over in any split second, don’t live as if that’s the case. There was a Great Depression. Banks failed. The economy tanked. People were out of work, starving, starved! What did people come out of that experience having learned? You need to be frugal, save for the future. Of course, that hadn’t helped during the Depression. So, do people do that? Do they save for the future? Nope. People agonize about future deprivation, but do little toward what might help. AND, in all of it, what almost nobody does is enjoy life, enjoy the present. Why not? Because almost everyone is living under the direction of a self-hating system that guarantees suffering now and suffering later. Gasshō
 
Anxiety is covered up by shame: "you are 60 years old! You shouldn't be anxious about this [work]." Yet I am. And the emotional roller-coaster that ego-centric-karmic-conditioning/self-hate puts me through is so intense and "paralyzing" that I don't do what I need and want to do. R/L. Gassho.
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Did you read the response earlier about “bracing”? And the one about “double-binds?” Please do. If you choose you can apply all of that to “shame.” That’s the one that’s available for you to tackle now. And, here’s the really good news for all of us about all of this: While the content appears to be endless and endlessly varied, the process for dismantling is exactly the same. I just read that some young person just set the record for arranging a Rubik’s Cube in 3.4 seconds. I bet that wasn’t his first go at it! Dismantling ego is just like a Rubik’s Cube or Ikea furniture. The more we do it, the more familiar, the easier it gets. Gasshō
 
FLASH: FEAR IS BEHIND IT ALL! Every time I trace an anxious, frustrated, or angry voice it leads to some fear. Not being able to handle it all, when will it end, or no one will love me, etc. Then there's "something wrong" voice harder to see. Awareness is freedom. R/L
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Good! Remember, fear is ego. Ego is fear. There isn’t a something called ego that is fearful. There isn’t a fear that we’ve named ego. It’s one thing. So, yes, you’re on it. Ego is behind it all. Ego is the root of all suffering. Fear is how ego protects itself. Get too close to interfering with its power, seeing it for what it is, big jolt of FEAR! Human being learns to back off, stay away, start looking for answers to “what should I do?” As you keep paying attention you’ll see ever more clearly the relationship between fear and something wrong. Something wrong is what we’ve all been deeply programmed to try to avoid. We don’t want to be wrong, hence the terror of making mistakes. Ego voices get their “something’s wrong” schtick going, we start nervously looking around for what’s wrong, we look to ego to inform us, we’re afraid, and ego is running the show. Self-hate is the gorilla glue of it all. There’s wrong, it’s you, all is your fault, you’re cast out, you’re not going to survive. Awareness is freedom and that’s what you’re focusing on. All will be revealed. No Fear! Gasshō
 
As the investigator, I saw details of an episode of ego taking over my body, dark and heavy around my throat/chest physically and stories of fear and inadequacy. Which came first, the story or the sensations? The headline is, "It's a lie. There is adequacy." R/L Gassho
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I’m going to go with a “spoiler alert” because I know you’ll keep paying close attention even if you know the answer. It’s always the thoughts. The tricky part is that the thoughts don’t always come in full sentences. The one we often refer to is the parental LOOK. As kids we’re doing something and we get the LOOK. Not a word needs to be spoken because we know exactly everything that’s being communicated. So, egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate has plenty of LOOK equivalents. You’re going along and there’s something that touches one of the senses and the “meaning” is communicated. Throat/chest gets dark and heavy, memories (stories) of fear and inadequacy start up. We’re on the hunt for “what set that off?” Not in a thinking about/figuring it out way, but in a gotta be right here paying razor sharp attention to see it happen when it happens way. Much fun! Gasshō
 
Noticing resistance to looking at anxiety. "I'm not feeling anxiety. When I try to look I can't find it! Where are those snakes?! I'm supposed to see everything I can about them! I don't want to feel those sensations. I'm not doing it right!" Just simply notice. What a relief!
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Are you saying there’s no anxiety in “Where are those snakes? I’m supposed to see everything I can about them! I don’t want to feel those sensations. I’m not doing it right!” No anxiety there? Really? I felt kind of anxious just reading and then writing it! But this is good. Resistance is your “bracing,” “double-bind,” “shame.” Tackle that resistance head-on and I’m gonna bet you get in touch with some anxiety tout de suite. Gasshō