Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
My analytical nature has me forever questioning EVERYTHING in my eternal quest to understand everything which hits my radar. I can get so lost in my quest to understand one thing that I totally overlook the path beneath my feet to end up tripping over obstacles in the path and/or running into walls or posts in front of my nose. I have built a hefty awareness of this psycho tick, but here in global chaos of Corona Times, it seems to be ticking with renewed vigor. The last time I failed to keep up with news in far off lands, the global powers pulled the world out from under me. 18 months later, that threat still lingers.
Today's meditation read from "Meditations for People Who Worry" was a timely reminder for me. It seems worth the added reinforcement of typing it out here.
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Understanding
If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are. ~Zen Proverb
How much emphasis we have put on "understanding"! We have felt confused and bewildered and we have believed that if we could just understand what is going on that we would be okay. We have sought and clutched on to interpretations and reasons, feeling if we just knew what was really going on or why someone behaved as they do we would be all right. Yet, when we found an explanation or interpretation or ourselves or another, the interpretation, in the long run, reallyy didn't make much of a difference in the way we felt.
Indeed, if we look carefully at what we are doing, we just might see the "understanding" actually resulted in our leaving ourselves and what we were feeling. This understanding helped us abandon ourselves. Remeber being hurt or angry and then thinking our feelings were "unjustified" when we "understood"? Our feelings just are. They will lead us to where we need to be.
Nobody ever healed by understanding.
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Open discussion. Thoughts welcome.
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I haven't written in my diary on my computer since May because I thought that my computer was dying. I got away from writing but my computer is hanging in there. I think that I will start writing in it again. It's so therapeutic.
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First, I hope everyone is doing well, and continuing to fight that good fight! Keep up the great work on yourselves; I'm rooting for all of you!So, I started doing therapy at the beginning of the year, when I was in my most depressed state, but with my therapist, I made big changes and steps in the right direction. But, over a month ago, she couldn't take my insurance anymore, and I had to stop...
As a software engineer, my job is to understand how things work, so accepting that some things have no explanation, no reason, or, at least, one that I'm not going to be able to understand, is tough. But, I'm making progress.
It took me allot of years to concede that feelings are not logical. Not even mine, with all my disciplined logical approaches. These days I think of my feelings as a babbling brook: forever running and changing. Within that analogy, is it not amazing how many different feelings can run over a single rock in the stream?
Progress over perfection. Itsy bitsy baby steps.
On the other hand, I have no interest in trying to get people to understand me or my experiences, because it just fosters frustration and requires so much energy. . I also don’t spend too much time trying to understand why my anxiety kicks up at certain times, why I have anxiety at all, or why I have an autoimmune disease or whatever else I have going on. I’m very much a “sh&! just happens to people” kind of person.
So yeah I think for me it’s not getting hung up in trying to understand but rather deciding what is actually important to understand vs what is not necessary or possible to understand.
Understanding is like a butterfly. The harder I chase it, the more it eludes me. If I sit quietly in a meadow, it may come and land softly upon my shoulder. If I am meant to understand, understanding will come in its own due time.
And then there is that phenomenon that sometimes happens when consciously accepting I don’t understand something leads me to full understanding. I think that’s just about getting out of my own way.
As part of my quest to "understand" things I like to name things, but I've learned that I'm pretty sh!t at accurately identifying my emotions and I use the anxious label like a club, so one thing that has been a useful application of understanding is trying to understand "what" I'm feeling, rather than "why" I'm feeling.
I often wonder if my anxiety and my feelings are two names the same phenom. Given my druthers, I'd druther not have feelings. Keep ^it^ logical, friend. Does I really have to be one of those illogical human critters? Can I be a Vulcan, instead? Live long and prosper.
Guess i just don't have the ears or eyebrows for it. . .