How are all of you hanging in there? In general I feel well, but will have waves of sadness that come . I talked to a friend yesterday who just feels angry. Another one of my friend’s anxiety has totally been triggered in light of the world’s events.
For most of us there is worry. Worries about getting ill, about our overall safety, the separation we feel being quarantined, our children, and financially what this all means.
I’ve always been a highly skilled worrier. As a child my mother gave me worry dolls to put under my pillow at night. The idea was to give a worry to each of the dolls and they would magically take it away while you slept. The only problem is that my worry actually spiked doing this at night – what if I didn’t give them the right worries to take away?
The word worry derives from the same word as strangle. Worry strangled some of my childhood joy. It still has the power to knock me down and highjack my brain. It has the capacity to literally strangle our life force.
Worry also deactivates our frontal lobe, so we have no executive functioning, or the ability to organize, plan, make good decisions, regulate emotions, and self-monitor!
Life is ultimately unpredictable and uncontrollable (yes…this is what we are worrying about). The worry makes us somehow feel as if we are “doing” something about the fact that life is uncontrollable.
So what is the balm to worry?
There is a teaching in the yoga tradition called Ishvara Pranidana, which means “surrender to your highest self”. It is cultivating a state of openness and receptivity. It’s agreeing to surrender those aspects of your life over which you have no control, and trusting that if you stay open and receptive, that you will receive exactly what you need.
There is a lightness that comes with surrender. And, it may even slow how we age. Non-attachment is a common psychological characteristic of people who live to be 100.
So, commit to the practice of surrender and release. To staying open to your life – nothing is worth closing over. Let me repeat, nothing is worth closing over.
Relax and release. Relax and release. Relax and release. We don’t have to know everything about our future or how our own transformation is going to work. What if you started to repeat to yourself, “life is working out for me”?
