See Your Anxiety As A Gift With A Message

 

 

If you struggle with anxiety, you're also a highly sensitive and creative person. Instead of labeling the anxiety as "bad" or slapping an additional diagnosis across your forehead, a more compassionate approach encourages you to see your anxiety as a gift with a message embedded in the symptoms. 

This means that instead of judging your sensitivity as a negative trait, you begin to see the whole package of who you are as a gift and recognize one simple truth: If you're going to get through this life with grace, you have to find the willingness and the courage to feel your painful or uncomfortable feelings. The only way out is through, as we say in psychology.

 

Can you imagine how different your life would be if, every time you felt that pang of loss or sadness, instead of judging it as "overly-sensitive" you moved toward it with kindness? If you simply put your hand on your heart and said to yourself, "It's okay to feel sad. Sadness is a part of life," something inside of you would relax and a small space would open up. A collection of those small spaces leads to a state of acceptance where you're in alignment with life. 

 

We carry so many fears about feeling pain, fears that arise from not learning how to move toward pain with compassion as kids. We fear that if we feel it, it will never end. We fear that it will overwhelm us and we'll die or go crazy. We fear that feeling our pain is for "sissies", that pain is a sign of weakness. We try to "buck up and get over it" but it doesn't go away. It squashes down into the hidden places of the heart and morphs into anxiety or depression. We long for serenity, freedom from the torture chamber of anxiety, worry, and intrusive thoughts, but find that it's continually just out of reach. 

 

This is one of the pathways to serenity: allowing yourself to move toward the uncomfortable places—"the places that scare you," . It's a courageous path, especially as it flies in the face of everything you learned as a child and everything the culture upholds as desirable qualities (i.e. being "tough"), but true healing always involves the courage to shed the habitual beliefs and actions that are keeping you stuck so that you can embrace the person you are meant to be.