A growing number of otherwise successful people are being slowly crippled by anxiety.  Even many sleep issues end up being tracked back to nighttime anxiety. It can affect our love lives, our careers and our personal health and I’m having more and more people come to me for it.

Everyone feels like there is too much to know and do, and far too much to understand. And that’s just to exist, let alone to have a healthy relationship. In fact, modern life and quality relationships of all kinds are often at odds, so people very rightfully feel overwhelmed.

And yet not everyone does.

Too often we see the calm, graceful or productive people as being a part of a different breed. We forget that those people also have moments of doubt; they also experience shortages of confidence and frozen reactions. Like looking at a bucket of water and suggesting it is representative of an entire river, we cannot judge people by where they are at various moments in time. Not others or ourselves.

None of us are permanently successful or permanently failing, we are simply either being clear-minded or we are lost in ego. But we all do both things. It’s only a matter of how much.

The lessons I teach people do not make the problems of the world go away, obviously. But problems exist for confident capable people too, so the difference between a good life and a bad one isn’t whether or not it has challenges –it’s about which mindset we choose to approach those challenges from.

The feeling of anxiety is generated by us worriedly flitting between many of life’s variables without ever slowing down enough to actually consider them. It’s not that we’re lying about the challenges –they are often entirely real. Yet there are ways to either gracefully accept, or gracefully approach the resolution of a challenge. But to do so we need to know how to cultivate a calm mind.

None of us are permanently successful or permanently failing, we are simply either being clear-minded or we are lost in ego.

Someone experiencing grief or betrayal or guilt is looking to avoid a certain type of intense thought. But people working on anxiety are more focused on developing a greater sense of focus, which steals their ability to flit between thoughts. Otherwise they are like bees who never spend enough time on any flower to either eat or spread the flower’s pollen. In that way their flitting undermines both themselves and their environment.

Calm thoughts and a deeper and slower sense of being does not belong to some special class of people. Those who achieve those productive states of mind do so intentionally, even if they also sometimes to it unconsciously. Mental health is achieved when we gain greater and greater conscious control over that intention.

We must become more aware of how we use our minds to create our current and undesirable reality. Once we can see our innocent participation in our suffering we naturally stop. And stopping our anxiety is much like finding ourselves, because lurking behind all of our thinking is the greater being doing that thinking. And that self is bigger than our thoughts can define.

peace. s