I’ve personally struggled with anxiety since I was 13. Like many people, I decided the world was too chaotic, change was too hard, and fear became my unwanted companion. When I was in my early 20’s, my mom introduced me to spirituality and a love of Spirit, prayer, and a connection deeper than my own fears and worries. It was like coming home.

They say the thing you need the most, you teach. Because of that, and all the work I’ve put into healing my anxiety, I now have what I feel is a deeply layered understanding of how to handle anxiety and fear. I’ve been able to look at anxiety, and find its root cause to move through it into freedom. 

The overwhelm and exhaustion of the last two years have been collectively and personally, experiences we have no navigation system for.  Although we all have personal experiences around the last two years, what has bound us together is the effect it has had on our nervous systems.  The amount of stress, fear, anxiety, loss, grief, and the unknown has taken its toll on all of us. 

But we have two choices. We can continue to numb and be avoid-dancers. Or we can align with our spiritual truth, knowledge, and guidance to release anxiety and stress.

Let’s talk about the first choice. Busyness, numbing or running are options we may choose to avoid dealing with the discomfort in our bodies and lives. Running looks like this: running from one task to another, and falling into bed every night exhausted and wondering how you will do one more day like this. Avoid-dancing, which is avoiding the emotions and stress that you feel inside your body, is a form of running when we push our feelings away by eating more, drinking, watching too much Netflix, shopping, drugs, or social media. Anything outside of ourselves can be used to numb out and avoid dealing with the real issues that are causing you to run in the first place. 

The consequence of being too busy and avoid-dancing is that we never actually release the anxiety and stress that we are trying to run from. We start to notice the extra pounds rush in, which adds to our stress. Our relationships begin to decline. We feel exhausted and disconnected from ourselves and others.  We may also begin to feel hopeless and helpless about ourselves and the state of the world.  Running is a downward spiral that leads to more anxiety and the inability to make decisions based on our highest good.  Here is what you can do instead, which is the second choice:

ROOT:  Shame, guilt, fear, doubt: often, these four inner roots throw us off balance and threaten to destroy our foundation more than the world’s instability or anything going on outside of us. These roots are living inside of us.  Anxiety has a root: we don’t feel anxious for no reason. These root emotions often stem from a childhood memory or trauma where the anxiety was first triggered. From there, if not released, these four roots follow us in our bodies, waiting for other forms of trauma or incidents to arise and come alive.  When we face our roots, and face the younger parts of us that have been scared or shut down, we can then dissolve the fears and stress we are carrying today. As we meet the frightened younger self and greet them with love, forgiveness, and kindness, we have the opportunity to understand ourselves and find compassion for where our anxiety originates. It’s not through rejecting or even fixing anxiety, but through understanding and love that we can begin to break free from the control, anxiety appears to have over us.

ALIGN: The second option to deal with anxiety is to align with your highest truth, and be open to receive spiritual guidance through what I call the GREAT PAUSE. The great pause, slowing down, is a pathway to align with your truest self and highest guidance.  When we stop and slow down, we can live by our highest, best decisions. We create the space to see what is the Divine’s will in every situation, instead of making decisions based on fear and anxiety. The great PAUSE allows us to serve a higher truth rather than follow our anxiety down a trail of poor choices. We can align ourselves by asking this question, “How can I best serve in every situation in my life?” We then can give: to ourselves and others in a way that gets us out of our heads and into our hearts. Our hearts don’t know anxiety. They know love. When we serve and give, we remember that we are not our anxiety. We are our love, and the anxiety can take a back seat.

This is the time to learn how to: Pause, Give, Heal and Serve. We do this by creating a slower pace of life. 

FEEL: When we slow down, our emotions arise and invite us to feel, which heals anxiety. Feeling is like a warm compress to a sore muscle. Feeling is healing the wound that no one can see. Anxiety is the open wound that keeps on getting fed by our inability to slow down and truly feel an emotion fully.  Once we feel why we are so anxious and really give our bodies permission to feel, then anxiety can release and we can live in peace.  We need time to heal. Heal our bodies, heal our wounds, and heal our world.  We need to allow ourselves to cry, be angry, sad or even feel intense joy,, and to build our consciousness to a higher way of living.