Anxiety prevails.

Here is a quickie excerpt from my Yoga for Anxiety and Depression 8 Week Series. I have, as of today, stopped running the course and am offering it as a series of 3 private sessions. I discovered this was more helpful for people.

Returning To Ease when you feel anxious:

We learn that we can sit on a sideline position (awareness) and see that the mind is being corrupted by elevating emotions and be in a compassionate stance that is interested about what to do.

I found the following four steps helps me every time I feel anxious, if possible get outside and connect to the sky while practicing them.

To do this, we follow four steps:

1.        Pause: Be Mindful:

Is often defined as a way of intentionally paying attention to the present moment without being swept up by judgments. (Daniel Segal, Mindsight) Developing mindful awareness occurs by training the mind to focus on moment-to-moment experience. Focusing our attention in this way is a biological process that promotes health—a form of brain hygiene—mental flossing.  By cleaning our thoughts and seeing where the deposits are, deposits being the junk thoughts—we identify the thoughts that we are thinking and believing.

For example, if I feel like I am not doing enough or “am not enough”, when I put pressure on myself to get more done, then I won’t be able to access the clear mind that is in the moment.

The first step is to identify the thought: “I’m not doing enough.”

2.        Breathe: Deep breaths will interrupt the thought.  Take as many as you wish, one may be enough. Three deep breaths can take about 16 sec and this can be a good amount of time to interrupt an uncomfortable feeling.

Deliberately copying a relaxed breathing pattern seems to calm the nervous system that controls the body's involuntary functions. Controlled breathing can cause physiological changes that include: lowered blood pressure and heart rate and reduced levels of stress hormones in the blood.

3.        Practice Self-compassion. 

We would not think to chastise a small child for crying. Instead we hold them, we comfort them and listen to them.  Let us learn how to “hold” our self in those stressful thoughts and know that we are not less than, and don’t need to “snap out of it!”  That’s just forceful, performance pressure type thoughts that have no value.

4.        Come into Stillness.

It will take practice to feel what a sense of stillness or calm feels like.  You will need to review it like a fire drill.  We don’t want to try to find the exits when we smell smoke.

Stillness defined: the natural feeling of a fresh moment, where you don’t feel like you need to focus, instead you are engaged in what you are doing. Stillness may feel like an unending relaxed state where the sense of peace is all pervading.

Kindness is integration made physical.  Integration is the ability to befriend your emotions and work with them.

Mindfulness Studies

Results:

Structural changes in regulatory area of the brain after mindfulness practice (8 weeks).

·      Regulate attention

·      Balance emotions

-More effective than medication.

How?

The prefrontal region sends inhibitory fibres down to the emotional centres to calm them down.

Final Statement: 

Your Mind is like a parole officer.  They want you to report back to them any ways that you are disempowering yourself with nasty thoughts.

This quickie excerpt must be practiced again and again to feel the ability to be mindful of the anxiety rather than becoming overwhelmed. I developed these four steps from my own experience of meeting the feeling of anxiety and not being define by it.