Working with Anxiety

Poses that open the chest and shoulders help with anxious or depressive emotions. Practice poses outside to enhance the breathing aspect, here I am in High Park finding a quiet spot during the Cherry Blossom Festival!

A Quickie Primer to introduce how I teach the ability to experience anxiety or depression without being defined by it:

A crucial method to assist yourself when feeling anxious or depressed (as both anxiety and depression manifest similarly in the brain) is to engage with the thoughts you have during these emotional experiences.

Why do we want to feel emotions that are hard?

Naming and becoming familiar with our emotions, helps us to be aware of our mental processes without being swept away by them.  It enables us to get ourselves off the autopilot of ingrained behaviours and habitual responses, and moves us beyond the reactive emotional loops we all tend to get trapped in. It lets us name and tame the emotions we are experiencing rather than being overwhelmed by them.

(Adapted from Daniel Siegal’s Mindsight; Introduction: 1^st page.)

"Consider the difference between saying, “I am sad”, and “I feel sad”. Similar as those statements may seem, there is actually a profound difference between them. “I am sad.” is a kind of self-definition, and a very limiting one. “I feel sad,” suggest the ability to recognize and acknowledge a feeling, without being consumed by it. The focusing skills that are part of developing self-awareness, make it possible to see what is inside, to accept it, and in the accepting to let it go, and, finally, to transform it. 

(From page X in introduction to Mindsight. Daniel Siegal)You can also think of Self-awareness as a very special lens that gives us the capacity to perceive the mind with greater clarity than ever before. This lens is something that virtually everyone can develop, and once we have it, we can dive deeply into the mental sea inside, exploring our own inner lives, and those of others. A uniquely human ability, Self-awareness allows us to examine closely, in detail, and in depth, the processes by which we think, feel, and behave. And it allows us to reshape and redirect our experiences so that we have more freedom of choice in our everyday actions, more power to create the future to become the author of our own story. Another way to put it is that Self-awareness is the basic skill that underlies everything we mean, when we speak of having social and emotional intelligence."

End of quote from Mindsight. ) 

Neuroscience shows us that the mental and emotional changes we can create by developing self-awareness actually change the brain. When we are interested in our emotions and what they are showing us, we develop the ability to focus our attention on our internal world. We can re-circuit our neural pathways, and reignite and stimulate the growth of areas of the brain that help us feel free and alive.

Developing self-awareness might lead to the healthy growth of middle prefrontal fibers in the brain. This is the part of the brain that regulates mood to grow and strengthen, stabilizing the mind, and allowing emotional equilibrium and resilience. These neural circuits, which include the middle prefrontal areas, enable us to resonate with others and to regulate ourselves. (Instead of separating or avoiding how we feel and isolating ourselves.)  

Change in the brain doesn’t just happen.   We do not automatically change our brain by thinking positive thoughts. That is mental gymnastics. Plus, it takes a lot of mental crowbarring to change a negative thought to a more positive one. In my experience of working with people experiencing anxiety, it is simply too hard to change to a positive thought. It requires Positive Thinking or Affirmative Inquiry, which is yet, another style of switching thoughts. More mental gymnastics.

Instead, we choose to view the thoughts we are having. That's it. We witness; we feel them.

Every day we have thoughts constantly streaming through our mind. These thoughts are our feelings, sensations, memories, beliefs, attitudes, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. These activities of the mind fill our day-to-day lives.

We need to develop a skill in order to experience our thoughts. We need to develop the skill to view our thoughts.

So how do we actually develop the ability to perceive a thought – not just have one – and to know it as an activity of our minds, so that we are not taken over by it? What I’m asking is, how can we manage and direct how we are thinking and feeling rather than being overtaken by them? Through awareness. Awareness allows us to manage and direct the inner workings of our minds. 

Part of the work we do in courses at The Yoga House, is to develop the stabilizing ability to become an interested observer of all thoughts and emotions, their value, their meaning, and how we can manage them rather than control them.