Anxiety and Peace

Anxiety means that you are in an unconscious struggle between your ego story and your Infinite Selfhood. Anxiety contains a valuable form of experience and knowledge. If you do not recognize, consider and contain your anxiety, you will react against it.

Our typical reactions to anxiety are what I call Rescue Plans. Anxiety automatically triggers any of several Reactive Rescue Plans that we may have in our repertoire. Get acquainted with your Rescue Plans. Rescue Plans are automatic, habitual, reactionary, compulsive, impulsive, and self-deceptive strategies.

Rescue Plans can be of many sorts and types. Eventually these automated rescue plans or self-medicating reactions crystalize into strategies, addictions, neuroses, and other personality patterns of avoidance and control. These crystalized rescue plans do not work, but we tell ourselves that they should allay our anxiety, no matter how ineffectively. There is a cost for these Rescue Plans.

Since these Rescue Plans are false solutions to a false problem, they only work to a limited and expensive degree. Anxiety, in other words, points to a false problem. Anxiety is a self-protective part of our story, which could point us to the existence of a false identity belief system, but which when misunderstood becomes a signal for self-protective cost-ineffective rescue reactions. Anxiety arises from our perception that we are in pain, that our ego is under threat, and that we are our ego. In other words, anxiety is a signal that I am a potential or actual victim of some threat.

Become a detective and find out what your rescue plans are.

Some typical self-rescue plans or strategies:

1. Addiction strategies. The most common self-rescue plans are the various addictions and compulsions. We try to comfort ourselves with various food, drink, drugs, and sexual compulsions, pornographic behaviors, workaholic, shopaholic, and other addictive behaviors
2. Avoidance, escape, procrastination, flight strategies
3. Manipulation, control, intimidation, threatening, violence, fight, passive-aggressive strategies
4. Good guy and bad ass strategies
5. Scapegoat, blame, projection strategies
6. Psychosomatic, sick, poor me, confused, crazy-making, attention-getting strategies

Analyze the cost-ineffectiveness of your various rescue plans. What is the pay-off for or advantage of your symptom, complaint, illness, problem, difficulty? If you don’t know, make a thorough list of all of the disadvantages of your way of coping, your problem, your symptom. Then, make a equally long list of all of the advantages and pay-offs for your problem. Both lists must be of equal length for this assignment to work.

As noted, the urge to self-rescue can take many fight-or-flight forms. Your mind flips through with split second speed all of your self-rescuing, self-medicating, self-protecting plans and strategies.when anxiety arises. None of these strategies work effectively; all of them have their price, their cost. I say without equivocation that they do not work to a satisfactory degree because the source of the anxiety is not consciously addressed. Anxiety cannot be avoided, manipulated, controlled, or self-medicated in an effective manner. Anxiety is a God-given gift, just like the symptoms and suffering that it produces, and it cannot be erased effectively until you address its purpose.

Therefore, bear your anxiety. Anxiety is not a problem to be solved. Anxiety attacks are just the increased victimization effects of ineffective rescue attempts.

Consciously bear your anxiety, but not with a "poor me" attitude. Consciously sustain it and hold your anxiety with an inquiring attitude and an open mind. Ask yourself what you are really wanting. Ask yourself where this anxiety is coming from. Do not rush into reactive self-rescue plans. Find out the source and purpose of your anxiety. The answer your mind gives you on the first attempts to do this is usually false. Your ego mind will tell you that your anxiety is due to this, that or the other. Your ego will mis-diagnose the cause of your anxiety. The cause of your anxiety will generally be attributed to what someone else has done, said, or failed to do.

Or the cause of your anxiety may be attributed to some memory, trauma, or problem in your past or future which you consider to be real and unbearable. In any case, the cause of anxiety is attributed to the non-spiritual belief that I am or could be a victim of some external thing or person.

Actually anxiety is a signal of spiritual unawareness. And once you launch into your Self-Rescue reactions, you have added another whole layer of consequences and costs. You sacrificed your body, your relationships, your finances, and your self-awareness upon the altar of ego-protection.

Your efforts to self-medicate your painful carefully mis-diagnosed anxiety have not worked very well.

Your self-rescue plans bring a partial degree of relief or you would not use them, but this relief is mediocre, cost-ineffective, and creates more anxiety.

Anxiety, then, is the valuable signal that you are into a victim-perpetrator-and-rescue cycle, your ego story, your spiritual unawareness. Bear that anxiety with an inquiring, curious, open mind. Use that anxiety for the transformation of your story into awareness. Use that anxiety to move from your ego to your Self, from your sense of limitation to your Infinite Potential. Use the understanding of the meaning of that anxiety to get off the victim-perpetrator-rescue merry-go-round. Awake!

I am learning that when I feel the urge to avoid my anxiety and to self-rescue, I relax. I accept anxiety as valuable information. I relax into it. I do not resist it, fight it or try to escape from it. It is just a signal. I relax into the urge for "fight or flight" Rescue Plans. When I relax into my anxiety, and breathe easy, I begin the transition into peace. Peace is the lost reservoir of power which I have labeled with many other names such as the emptiness, the void, boredom, nothingness, the vacuum, loneliness, isolation. Beneath these labels is peace. This peace is the presence of Infinity. This peace is the goal of all of my externalized self-rescue plans. Peace is what I had previously hoped to achieve when all of my so-called needs and wants were fulfilled in the outside world. But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Peace does not come through the war-like methods of the ego’s self-rescue plans. The ego is a system of inner division and conflict and does not bring harmony and peace. Peace is your natural spiritual state which has been lost from awareness. Peace is God within. Anxiety is the unawareness of the Peace of God within. All of our failure-bound rescue plans and symptoms arise from this spiritual unawareness, this inner belief that we are disconnected from the Source.

Anxiety, therefore, when properly understood is the entryway to peace. You do not need to run from anxiety, it will only increase in its effort to get your attention.

Find your peace and then address whatever is left of your problems with calmness and creativity. Peace does not depend on any outward thing. Relax into the infinite peace which is concealed by your victim mentality and its superficial solutions.

Escape from anxiety is impossible. What you are attempting to escape from is the doorway to your Infinity, and that cannot be actually be denied or escaped from. Go through your anxiety. The more you run from it, the bigger it gets. Relax into it. It is just God calling you. You cannot find satisfaction and peace by running from your self. Your Self is Infinite Peace. Come home to within. Use your anxiety signals to awaken to your peace.