This article is meant for a person at a certain level of consciousness, which you have already reached, since you’re reading this article. I’m not saying anything that is new here, that you don’t already know. However, simply reading this page will remind you of your true inner power, your bliss, and will help you today. My intention is to help you find and establish deep peace and bliss.
Introduction
Life will present you with challenges (yeah, harold, tell me something I don’t know!).
Some of these are challenges that you can cope with easily, others produce anxiety, unease, fear (missed deadline, angry boss or customer), yet others are life altering ones (death of a beloved, divorce, lay-off). In this article, I’m addressing the non-life altering ones, the routine ones that produce anxiety and fear and make life painful.
So, what is your reaction when faced with a challenge? How do you deal with fear and anxiety?
Balance comes first
Remember, no matter what happens, your balance, peace, joy, and bliss come first. Everything else follows from this. Being in a state of balance, produces results that propel you further down the road to bliss.
So, if you have the time, and the ability, wait till you feel calm and peaceful.
- Take deep breaths.
- Count (10, 100, …)
- Practice breath awareness meditation, or mantra, or other forms that can calm you.
- Take a walk outside.
- Sit and watch your feelings, sensations, and emotions inside, like a spectator.
Remember that the way you feel inside is way more important than whatever is happening outside. Your mind may fight you like a wild tiger, and before you know it, you’re “gone”. Lost in thought. Drowning in the turbulent river. Dragged along helplessly by the train of thought.
However, the time will come where you suddenly become aware that you were lost. The momentary awareness that you were lost in thought, is a *huge* victory. You’re like a swimmer who comes up every once in a while, for a deep breath, then goes back swimming. Maybe more like a whale, coming up after half an hour!
It may last just for a moment, but each time you come to the awareness that you were “gone”, you’re strengthening your patience. These breaks in thought are what keep you going. They are precursors to continuous awareness, continuous presence, which is what leads to bliss and joy. Moments like these will accumulate and add up, or more likely, multiply. It’s all mathematical, you see . . . ?
Once you’ve achieved a semblance of balance, move to the next steps
Decide whether to face it or walk away
Decide whether you need to face the challenge or walk away from it. Deciding to face your challenge is hard, since anxiety and fear will interfere with your decision making (to put it mildly!) and make you want to avoid it. We’re wired for fight-or-flight, and your biological wiring may conspire to defeat you – either by gearing you up for a fight when you need to walk away, or forcing you to leave when you need to stand your ground and face it.
There is no one right way. Each circumstance requires different handling. You may need to listen to your intuition, your inner wisdom. You may need to consider whether you’re walking away from a challenge because of fear and discomfort, or because it truly makes sense to walk away. There are many situations where it makes sense to wait, to walk away, or even to run away. To paraphrase a famous politician and leader, “Let us never walk away out of fear, but let us never fear to walk away”
Take action if needed.
Deciding to face your challenge and act is half the battle won. The other half of the battle is actually going through with taking action. From a state of balance, you may be able to act and accomplish what you need. More often, however, you may feel fear and all the associated feelings and emotions like hesitation and anxiety.
Facing Fear
- Take action immediately, before your mind gets a chance to play its usual games. Don’t analyse (if possible). Make that phone call. Setup the appointment. Get up and meet that person. Sit and finish that task now.
- Ask yourself this question: “What is bothering me RIGHT NOW?” As you read this article.Chances are, nothing. All that fear and anxiety wasted, because this very moment, this very instant is not causing any trouble. Right now, the only cause of your trouble is the incessant thinking about your situation. Your mind dwelling in the past of future.
- Examine what fear or discomfort feels like in your body: is your breathing hard? Are you sweating? Is your heart racing? How does your stomach feel? What other sensations are you experiencing all over your body?Simply standing your ground and observing what fear feels like in your body, often reduces its intensity, or even makes it go away. This may take from half an hour to a few days of regular observation, depending on the size of the challenge.
- Visualise someone who you admire as being courageous (real of fictional) and imagine how they would deal with the situation. Imagine them advising you on how to take action. You could also ask a friend or a professional for help or advice on the specifics of handling your situation.
- Realise that in the greater scheme of things, today’s trouble is tomorrows laughter – you’re going to look back and laugh at it – was this what I was dreading? At each stage of our development, challenges will seem daunting. Look back at how you faced and overcame challenges in your childhood or early life, and see how far you’ve come since then. Today’s challenge is going to feel like those childhood ones, tomorrow.
- There are many more ways to figure out how to deal with your challenge, like plan, roleplay, get help, etc. which I won’t go into, since you already know them, or know how to find them.
Life is beyond your control
Sometimes, you may just need to remember that life is often beyond your control. Things happen that you cannot do anything about. You may need to exercise total acceptance of the situation. If you’ve done everything you possibly could, to no avail, be gentle, and kind to yourself.
This is not a defeatist attitude, but an acknowledgement that there is nothing more that can be done at the moment. Simply exercising acceptance will help you relax, which in turn can give you new insights or opportunities for action.
You’ve succeeded by simply having faced your challenge
The simple act of facing your challenge is the biggest victory possible. Any positive outcomes that come about as a result of facing your challenge, are secondary. And every time you face your challenge, you grow stronger, and future challenges grow weaker.
Go overboard, over-react, if necessary
Sometimes, you may need to “over-react” especially if the uncomfortable sensation is overpowering. Act, even if you’re feeling terrible. We’re often trained into self-limiting behaviours that are detrimental, and overcoming those behaviours may seem like going overboard. If this is true for you, then by all means go overboard.
For example, someone trained as a “nice guy” may need to over-react in order to overcome his nice-guy training and stand up for himself. In such a case, the only way to reach a place of balance is through being “not nice”, which will seem like over-reaction.
What is not faced today, will come back tomorrow
Every challenge that is not faced, will come back in a variety of avatars. There are no shortcuts to real growth. So it just makes sense to be conscious and deal with challenges as they arise.
You’re born with everything you need to experience deep peace in this very lifetime. And the skills needed to overcoming challenges are the same ones needed to get to bliss.
You will succeed!
