Surrendering into Anxiety & Panic
Jeanette Amlie
Surrender by Jeanette Amlie
It is my experience that the underlying core of all nervous breakdowns is the conscious & unconscious conflict between our beliefs about who we are & the external conditioning we have been told about ourselves. This battle rages on unceasingly within us until some catalyst brings some of it up to the surface where we may or may not feel ready to face it.
In the past I have written about transforming a Nervous Breakdown into a Breakthrough. Yet over time I have had to turn & face into the very profound truth that as long as our "Breakthrough" is an attempt to "pull out" of the nose dive at the last minute, we have in effect deflected the deepest levels of surrender. And if we are fortunate, in time we will be invited once again to fully let go of our mental & emotional attempts to control reality with our egos.
For me this came in the form of manifesting all the things I was most afraid of and I discovered that in facing them, there wasn't even a fraction of the fear I had felt in just thinking about them & trying desperately to avoid them. Whether it be my fears of financial ruin, homelessness or health problems, whenever I was simply willing to look them square in the face & not deny them or try to run away from them, they always had something profound to teach me. Does everyone have to go this far down the rabbit hole in order to wake up from the illusion of their conditioned beliefs about themselves & the world? I certainly hope not. But if that is what is filling your days with dread & your nights with terror, then I suggest you simply dive into them headfirst rather than waiting for life to orchestrate the circumstances for you.
The challenge & the gift then is to really allow ourselves to turn inward & face whatever it is that is arising, even if it looks like a bottomless pit with no way of knowing where it leads. For once we do we also have the opportunity to see that what we have most feared is an illusion & there is some deeper truth calling us....even beyond our supposedly "authentic" beliefs about ourselves. It is an abiding presence that is neither reliant on nor limited by any of these beliefs. Yet it is beyond the reach of our minds to grasp & so it initiates a system wide failure like the computer that says "does not compute...does not compute".
So then the invitation, as Gangaji would say, is to Stop Everything for just a moment: stop remembering, stop analyzing, stop solving, stop understanding, stop planning & even stop dreaming ANYTHING. And in that instant is the freedom we have been seeking all along - freedom from any concept of who we or others think we are or should be. Indeed this is what the anxiety, panic & somatic earthquakes are calling us into....into direct contact with a truth that cannot & never will be "figured out" with our minds, our emotions or our bodies. So this "nervous breakdown" is really an invitation to surrender all that we have held to be true about ourselves & the world.....no wonder the human organism shudders so at the thought, for indeed it is the "death" of the entire construct.
In the past I have written about transforming a Nervous Breakdown into a Breakthrough. Yet over time I have had to turn & face into the very profound truth that as long as our "Breakthrough" is an attempt to "pull out" of the nose dive at the last minute, we have in effect deflected the deepest levels of surrender. And if we are fortunate, in time we will be invited once again to fully let go of our mental & emotional attempts to control reality with our egos.
For me this came in the form of manifesting all the things I was most afraid of and I discovered that in facing them, there wasn't even a fraction of the fear I had felt in just thinking about them & trying desperately to avoid them. Whether it be my fears of financial ruin, homelessness or health problems, whenever I was simply willing to look them square in the face & not deny them or try to run away from them, they always had something profound to teach me. Does everyone have to go this far down the rabbit hole in order to wake up from the illusion of their conditioned beliefs about themselves & the world? I certainly hope not. But if that is what is filling your days with dread & your nights with terror, then I suggest you simply dive into them headfirst rather than waiting for life to orchestrate the circumstances for you.
The challenge & the gift then is to really allow ourselves to turn inward & face whatever it is that is arising, even if it looks like a bottomless pit with no way of knowing where it leads. For once we do we also have the opportunity to see that what we have most feared is an illusion & there is some deeper truth calling us....even beyond our supposedly "authentic" beliefs about ourselves. It is an abiding presence that is neither reliant on nor limited by any of these beliefs. Yet it is beyond the reach of our minds to grasp & so it initiates a system wide failure like the computer that says "does not compute...does not compute".
So then the invitation, as Gangaji would say, is to Stop Everything for just a moment: stop remembering, stop analyzing, stop solving, stop understanding, stop planning & even stop dreaming ANYTHING. And in that instant is the freedom we have been seeking all along - freedom from any concept of who we or others think we are or should be. Indeed this is what the anxiety, panic & somatic earthquakes are calling us into....into direct contact with a truth that cannot & never will be "figured out" with our minds, our emotions or our bodies. So this "nervous breakdown" is really an invitation to surrender all that we have held to be true about ourselves & the world.....no wonder the human organism shudders so at the thought, for indeed it is the "death" of the entire construct.