What 25 years of research have shown us about anxiety is that all anxiety is separation anxiety, and we’ve got to get this; it’s separation that is necessary, as Carl Jung used to say. Learning How to heal Anxiety and Panic starts here for so many of our clients. What you learn in the first half of life is not going to serve you in the second half. In other words, the personality that you’ve created, part of that through fear, anxiety, stress, tension, and so on, that part of you that’s created needs at some point to go. It stops serving you.
And what you need to realize is that all anxiety or separation anxiety starts with a separation from yourself, and that’s where all our programs start. You know, they start with a letting go of our need to control, especially our external environment, and return to the love of self, the love of our sacred selves. At some point, we all start experiencing fear from a very, very early age, and as we grow, as we accumulate experience, we start to doubt ourselves. We start to think that we’re not worthy. We start to think that we’re not good enough, and we block love for ourselves all the time. Why else would you do things for yourself that are not good for you?
We all have a history of Anxiety
For example, your history, your story, the one that you think of is a story from your analytical mind that has calculated and tabulated and mapped your life, everything that’s ever happened to you until now. So anxiety is a subconscious program that runs when you can’t. It’ll set you into running or fleeing or fighting or fighting or whatever it’s going to be in an instant of a second to protect you. But today, there aren’t those saber-tooth tigers chasing us anymore, so our need for anxiety has changed. Although anxiety is still a friend and a companion that comes to save us, we need to get into the body, heart, and mind and remind it that we’re not being chased by saber-tooth tigers, that not every stick on our path is a snake. We cannot let the subconscious programs accumulated from our past, from our memory, from who we once were serve us today, and this is what Carl Jung was talking about.
F9 Fight, flight and freeze responses of the anxious mind
Anxious thinking creates silent, inaudible, hidden but very, very powerful thoughts that create in turn a very visible and loud construct, which is a trembling body, a racing heart, you know, sweat on your brow. Anxiety has led many people to become addicted, to become depressed as they doubt themselves to end their lives. What can start off as a subconscious theme of thought, feelings, and perceptions of yourself and the world around you can construct itself into a diseased body, into broken thinking, and into a hopeless heart. It’s the sympathetic nervous system that is fight, flight, and freeze. You know, it’s an F9 response. It leads us into nine responses, and this is how we get to know the enemy, and by knowing the enemy, we get to know ourselves. So, F9 response is fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn, fiddle, faint, friend, and forget, and we’ll go through those in a moment, but what you need to know is all anxiety is based in fear. FAL evidence appearing real.
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk
Fear activates the sympathetic nervous system into this F9 response, and the amygdala in the brain is very, very quick to respond. So alarm and fear keep us alive, and they can be the difference of a child in a park when you’re small and there’s an unleashed pitbull terrier, that can be the difference between you running around, going up and grabbing the dog’s ear and being bitten, or rather, staying close to your mom, holding her hand. So anxiety and fear can be very, very useful as a response, but when the volume goes up, year after year, and you don’t even know it’s going up, it can be devastating as a constructed effect.
How to heal Anxiety and Panic instead of just Coping
It can lead you to depersonalization, to a thought or feeling that you’re separate from success, you’re separate from happiness, you’re separate from God, you’re separate from other people. And you’re separate from your creative capabilities, and that, of course, leads to addiction. We become addicted to our thoughts. Anxiety creates judge, the critic, the neurotic, all these kinds of insurgents that feed the false self, which is what feeds anxiety. So when a false self is born, anxiety becomes the home language. What do we do when we feel fear? I mean, we hide. And how you do that as an adult human being is you put on masks; you put on an anxious mask, a victim mask, you put on a controlling mask, and you actually have these things work for you for a while, but defense is the first act of war, and it is war on the body, then the heart, then the mind.
And when anxiety gets to fever pitch, those alarms go off on their own, one of those nine instant responses to perceived danger, even when there is no danger, can short-circuit the rest of the body, your creative problem-solving abilities included, and tell you that there’s trouble brewing and, in response to that, give you a cascade of chemicals and signals, like a meta-lightning storm that pop you into fight, flight, or freeze, and these become reactions to life. How to heal Anxiety and Panic starts with awareness!
Anxiety resides in the subconscious
We start reacting instead of responding, and then, soon enough, stress, burnout, addiction, feelings of depression, all of these things accumulate, and those masks become stuck on our faces, we become the persona, but we are on a journey from personality to spirituality. In other words, we’re on a journey from having to externally defend ourselves to an environment that we think is threatening us; rather, we can go inside, turn the volume down on the subconscious program, and, in so doing, we experience a new sense of who we really are, and that’s the beginning of the return to your sacred self, which is the return to love. If all anxiety is separation anxiety, you’re separating the loving parts of yourself with the fearful parts of yourself. Now, at the end of the day, there are a myriad of emotions, and we’re very complex human beings, but bring it down to two prime emotions: fear and love, and the good news is that who would have thought you could cure anxiety with love.
You let go of a need to control with reestablishing a sense of self-love. It was almost too simple for us to see that, we almost missed it, but today, we understand that that is the cure, not the treatment or the coping mechanism for anxiety, which you will not need once you return to love. So, what’s the first step in all of this? Stop, stop and become aware, and from that awareness, you can develop tools. There’s lots of tools, and we’ll go through them just become aware of who you really really are, and never forget who you really are again. You’re not the persona; you’re not a controlling, egotistical, judgmental, or even a victim, for that matter; you’re a divine image of God. You’re a person that seeks out peace, love, bliss, and joy. So where energy goes, attention and focus flow. So, we need to focus on who we really are, so that’s tool number one. We’ve got to get out of the body. Whenever there’s a stimulus in our environment, the first thing that happens is a thought.
When we have anxious thoughts, we’ve got to get out of our heads and into our bodies. To do this, we need to breathe purposefully, with intention, showing your anxiety insurgence that you’re there, that you’re managing the show, that you’ll stay in your prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, that you’ll remain in charge. When we start showing anxiety that it doesn’t need to take over and run one of those F9 subconscious programs, the volume gets turned down. So, getting out of the head and into the body is when we can stop, be still, and know, we can use breath work, we can use affirmations, but definitely rehearsal and practice are how we get good at anything and everything. You don’t just pick up a guitar and play Stairway to Heaven; you rehearse, you practice.
Locking Anxiety into a safe space
So, you can seek a place in your body, a safe place, where all these alarms and bells and whistles and lightning storms of neurons and fear chemicals are just going off, find a safe place in your body and move your energy and focus there. I ask a lot of people to look at their energy centers; you know, those chakra points or energy discs. You know, at least know that you have three: your root, your heart, and your mind, and you can go into some of these to find a safe space. What we want to do is find out which energy center in you, everybody’s different, is feeding your anxiety alarm, which energy center is it? Do you feel it in your head, do you feel it in your heart area, your core, do you feel it in your solar plexus, which is a very common one, in your stomach area, where do you feel it? Now, some people even feel it in their ankles, and for everyone, as I said, it is different. So, what we need to do to create a new level of awareness, is understand where these alarms are going off, we need to locate them in the body. As we get out of the mind, once we locate these areas and senses, we can then start to shift the energy, the anxious energy, into the safer parts of our body. It could be your legs, it could be your heart, could be anywhere, and you can shift that energy, that’s one thing that we are very very good at.
Tools for healing Anxiety and Panic Attacks
We can do it through breathing, meditation, through conscious action. We definitely have the power to shift energy around our body. Most of our meditations that we use, our CQ meditations, focus on shifting energy, and you can learn how to do this in a relatively short period of time. Remember that if you can have thoughts and feelings that create negative energy in your body, anxiety, for example, if that is true, and of course, we know that’s true from psychological research, you can create an anxious state just with a thought. But then we need to look at the other side. If that’s true, we can also create positive mental, emotional, and physical states with thought alone, and when we add feelings to that, feelings, which are the shorthand of the brain, elevated positive emotions, we can start to change the way we think, feel, and behave, and in turn, that will change our environment, because the weird thing is, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
“Do I react in my life? Yep, I do. But the question is, how long are you gonna react? Because if you keep that reaction going for an extended period of time, sooner or later it will become your identity.”
~Dr. Joe Dispenza
The Anxious Analysis
So, your alarms are actually friends trying to tell you that something desperately needs to change, that there is a dissonance between who you really are, your creative abilities, what you are going to become, what you’re going to do with your energy in your life, that there’s a dissonance between that and your fear, what is holding you captive, what is keeping you stuck, frozen, what makes you fight. Whatever those things are, are lower energies that no longer serve you. If you’re suffering anxiety, that’s the bomb, and now it’s time, which is the good news. It’s time for those old friends to go. The difference between coping with anxiety and actually healing it is fairly simple. Let’s use the story. So, people tell me they get anxious when they go to a coffee shop or a restaurant or they have to go into a meeting that is a certain length of time at work, and they are plotting and planning excuses and ways to leave if they have to. So, that is coping with anxiety, but if you really want to heal it, you don’t change your outer environment. You heal spiritually; that is from the inside out.
