Many of you might be experiencing anxiety right now.
This might be anxiety about your health or the health of those you love. You might have money worries, worries about how you will sustain your livelihood or what’s happening in the economy. All of this is perfectly understandable. Because it is a big change to our understanding of what to expect in life. We are in a new experience that is very different from our normal way of daily living.
This is where it might be useful to mention a little bit about grief, because most of us are experiencing grief in some form or another. Grief, or the grief cycle, is something we experience after a shock or loss. Right now, we may be experiencing losses in different aspects of our lives.
That might be the loss of normal life, the loss of the way things were and what we are used to on a daily basis. For some of us, it’s the loss of the ideal, or the loss of a sense of safety, that a worldwide virus could actually ever happen.
We might experience shock, be in denial, anger, anxiety or depression because the changes that are happening were not by our design. They are, in fact, beyond our control, and there is nothing much we can do about it. Eventually, with self-awareness, the grief cycle completes by us going into a place of acceptance. This is a brave but empowering place to be in.
In the grief cycle, what is key is to keep moving through it, so we don’t get stuck in any one stage or emotion. But meditation, breathing, self-awareness and what we will talk about over these next sessions, help us to keep moving through it, and that will eventually transform anxiety into acceptance.
Recently a friend of mine confided in me that he was feeling really anxious. He was finding it hard to cope with the situation. He was having trouble sleeping. He felt helpless, and had racing thoughts in the mind. He found it hard to switch off. And he said he felt embarrassed, as he normally feels strong. He thought of his anxiety and these symptoms of stress as a sign of weakness. So he was beating himself up about having perfectly normal reactions to an abnormal event! This only makes things worse, as we can then get anxious about being anxious!
What can help is self-compassion.
If you’re feeling this way, it is not a sign of weakness at all. It’s perfectly natural to be feeling these emotions. What matters is to acknowledge and validate our emotions, and be compassionate towards ourselves for having them. It’s ok. It doesn’t make you a lesser person at all.
Normally we do one of two things if we have strong emotions.
We resist emotions, or push them away. Like a spring, if they are suppressed, they will push back, sometimes out of control. The more we resist these emotions, the harder they push back and make things worse. The other thing we often do is indulge our emotions. We can feed them by adding more negative thoughts until we are spiraling downward. We can also indulge them by picking a fight, or initiating drama and taking them out on people around us.
As we increase our self-awareness through things like meditation, we can validate and accept our emotions with loving self-compassion. From our inner compassionate adult, we can then take the next step toward letting our feelings go in a healthy way, and get to a place of acceptance for the current situation.
Ashok
Ashok Gupta is the Director of the Gupta Program. He has dedicated his life to helping people get their life back from Chronic Illness, improving people’s well-being, and helping them achieve their potential. He has been teaching meditation around the world for over 15 years. He runs a global e-clinic specializing in treating ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia & Multiple Chemical Sensitivities – guptaprogram.com
Ashok has spent many years researching the brain neurology of emotion and linking well-being tools with science. He has published medical papers on the basis of stress-related illnesses. He has appeared in many media as an expert on stress on the BBC, CNN, Guardian Newspaper, ITV, The Independent, and many others.
He wrote and presented the Meaning of Life Experiment which is a Free, Award-winning Meditation and Self-Development App www.themeaningoflife.tv
He also works with companies around the world, teaching courses in Leadership, Time Management, and Personal Development. www.ashokgupta.tv