What Is Anxiety?
Observe and find out, once and for all: what is anxiety? Is anxiety a metaphysical signal of disaster sent from the future? Or is it merely a neurological sensation in your body, in the present moment? Which of these possibilities is reality and which is superstition? For most of Western history, we've been living under the delusion, the superstition, that our anxiety is a metaphysical reality consisting of thoughts, very important thoughts, about the future. We trust that these thoughts are both real and true. Thus we prophecy our own doom, projecting our anxiety into the future as thought. Our thought becomes an intention, because thoughts driven by fear are the most powerful intentions. But the truth is, our anxieties are simply neural impulses arising from this body: its hypothalamus, solar plexus, and adrenal gland. We do not have to convert these uncomfortable impulses into mental movies, fraught with images of the future. We can simply rest in the sensations as they arise ...