Letting Go of Anxiety

You experience anxiety when you have disconnected with your innate ability to trust that everything will work out and always does.  When we have not healed certain events in our past, we experience anxiety in the present.  Anxiety is almost always directly related to pain in our past that is still unresolved.  In most cases, we black the creative energy that is wanting to flow through us when we are anxious.  One day, the situations that make you nervous or anxious will instead make you feel excited, peaceful, and confident.

With anxiety, either you forfeit your ability to enjoy your life or you choose to avoid the discomfort of nervousness and live in your comfort zone.  If you do not take risks, you cannot grow, and your life becomes flat and stale.  You deny your inner desires for more and limit your power.  On the other hand, if you take risks because of the anxiety, you suffer.  There is another option.  Take risks, for the feelings of nervousness come up, and then process your negative emotions.

In my own life, I suffered tremendous anxiety about public speaking.  At the beginning of the first talk I gave, my legs began to shake and I fainted.  Everyone thought I had died, right before their eyes.  My talk was entitled “How to teach tennis.”  When I came to, I continued the talk.

For years, I felt anxious and nervous before presentations.  I was beginning to think that maybe this was not the right things for me to do, but then I read an interview with John Lennon of the Beatles.  He said he had stopped touring because he would become so nervous that he would vomit before each performance.  At that point, I realized that if he experienced anxiety, then it wasn’t a bad sign for me.

John Lennon’s experience released me from the faulty belief that if I was nervous I must not have been any good.  Gradually, as a counselor, I learned that there are millions of very competent and skilled professionals who still experience nervousness or anxiety.  Anxiety in no way is a reflection of actual competence or events to come.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia