Long Term Solution For Anxiety

Question:

Hello. By allowing and accepting anxiety, does it work for the long term or will it cure the present movement only?

- Khan

Response:

If done fully, both. You mean even if the anxiety weakens in the present, will it come back again in the future? Yes it may come back, perhaps even stronger. Don’t be concerned about what there will be in the future, if anxiety will be cured or if it will return. The belief and over-importance given to the concept of “the future” is what creates anxiety in the first place. If you did not believe in time, anxiety would not be real for you either.

On a practical level, acceptance and allowance and nonjudgement of anxiety, whilst feeling yourself as the awareness of it, will weaken the energy of anxiety. If it feels as if the anxiety leaves you, it has either fully dissolved, or partially dissolved, with the rest laying dormant, to arise at a later point. Either way, the anxiety is weakened, and if the feeling of anxiety returns, then taking the same approach will weaken it again gradually or suddenly. In this sense it could be called a “long-term” solution to feelings of anxiety, but they may not all go at once.

Anxiety tries to drag your consciousness and attention into thinking, which it calls “the future”, as if “this is going to happen”. None of it is true, it is just a bundle of thoughts based on past conditioning. The anticipation of events projected as personal thoughts is often far worse than the situation actually arising. Thoughts claim to be the reality, but are very misleading. Do not trust your thoughts.

If you feel you suffer from anxiety, and are asking this question, perhaps you have not yet adopted the witnessing, allowance attitude to anxiety. Let the feelings of the body be as they are. Do not expect the anxiety or the experience to be any different than it is. The very expectation or desire for the experience to be different than it is, even if it is painful, is what causes most misery, and actually fuels the anxiety.

Do not identify with the feelings or join in any personal condemnation or justification for feelings arising. Be empty. Don't own the feelings.

It is easier if you have come to a point of feeling helpless, as if the feelings are now impossible to control. Don’t even call it anxiety. Don’t call it anything. Withdraw your interest and participation in it, yet allow it to be fully, and see what happens. Your mind may still be concerned about a long term solution, but this only pulls you back into time, and therefore anxiety. Don’t look to the next moment, be in this one with complete surrender to the internal and external world, and anxiety will take care of itself.

Thanks for your question and contribution to the site.