Our mind is focused on things that haven’t happened yet.
“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu
So How Do You Stop Future Thinking?
First, notice when you’re getting preoccupied with future things that haven’t happened yet, then use mindfulness of the breath as a quick and easy way back to the present.
What's Mindfulness?
John's Story
I taught my client John how to become present using the breath. John works as a security officer at an alternative school. Part of his job is watching kids in detention. The kids can get pretty wild. One day, one of the teenagers got up and began throwing a giant tantrum, complaining how they didn’t want to be there in detention. As the stress of the situation kept building, John kept breathing, he stayed focused on his breath.
John confronted the student and the student threw a pencil at John. John was so present that he was able to knock the pencil aside out of the air. The kid was so impressed that he promptly sat back down and didn’t make a peep for the rest of the detention. So John was able to use the breath to stay present and to create a very, very different outcome in the situation
Fighting Against the Worry Keeps You Stuck in it
What you resist persists so what you fight against, you give negative energy to, which allows it to sustain itself or grow, like the picture below with the donkey and the bellhop. We often become the bellhop fighting against the anxiety, saying to it, “I wish you weren’t here.” “I wish I wasn’t feeling this way.”
We resist it. And as a result, it hangs around and gets stronger.
What we want to do is give the emotions, in this case anxiety, the space it needs to move through. When you give the emotions, the space they need to move through to integrate, they usually do.
Here is a practice process from my book called the Aura Process so that we can experience what it’s like to give the emotions the space they need.
What that process does is give the emotion that you were experiencing the space that needed to integrate and to move through. I find that in most cases, most emotions will integrate after one or two repetitions of that process. Really intense emotions may need a few repetitions.
What we want to do is give the emotions, in this case anxiety, the space it needs to move through. When you give the emotions, the space they need to move through to integrate, they usually do.
Now you know how to deal with the worry when it’s already here.
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