Life is like a continual tight rope walk. A balance between wanting to get to what we desire and dream of and walking through the valley of what frightens us.
On the one hand we have passions that inspire us and on the other we have fears that prod us into states of stress and anxiety. Our experience in life is determined by how well we can maintain our balance in this continual journey.
Everyone naturally gravitates towards happiness. The problem is that to reach anything, that we think will bring us happiness, involves walking through the valley of fear. Those that are not happy, are those who have lost their balance walking through the valley of fear.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Happiness is essentially the recognition that you are free. Stress and frustration are the feeling of being trapped and limited. Anxiety is the fear that you may be limited and vulnerable.
I would like to talk a little about the structural basis of stress and anxiety, so that we are able to see more clearly how to ovecome them.
Our entire experience of humanity is the perception of limitation. We are limited in what we can do because of time. Limited by space. We are limited by our physical capability, our mental capability and our emotional capability. Time after time we meet barriers and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Our experience is truly defined by the boundaries of our perceived limitations.
Yet what one believes is impossible, another can do again and again. Not so long ago, it was believed that it was physically impossible for human’s to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. However once Sir Roger Bannister achieved that feat, it became commonplace.
Some people believe it is impossible for them to make new friends easily. Some believe it’s impossible to make money easily. Some believe it’s impossible to get their kids to behave. But there are others who are able to make these things happen time after time.
You see, what you believe is possible is determined by your thought structure. What I like to call your Human Operating System. And this thought structure, coming through the limitations of your perceptions is inherently flawed. So unless you ‘upgrade’ your Operating System, you limit what is possible in your personal universe. The more limited the possibilities in your universe, the more problems you get, as the the true universe conflicts with your personal version of it.
The diagram below shows this visually.
So the more aware you are of what you believe and perceive and the more you challenge your view, the more you’ll update and so expand your Possibility Zone. As a result, there will be less and less problems in your life.
However what many people find is that, while they believed expanding their possibility zone would achieve a blissful state, there is still issue after issue to deal with.
What actually happens is that there are less problems, but you develop a much more refined level of sensitivity. Therefore you become aware of minor problems that never previously registered. There is a perfect physical analogy to this that might make this clearer.
In the last 80 years, medicine has been one of the areas that has made most significant advances. We have identified and found solutions for hundreds of new diseases and ailments. I think we can agree that our general level of health is better. We live longer and are far less likely to suffer from debilitating illnesses and chronic pain. But take a look at the following statistics.
In the 1920’s there were 8 reported incidents of sickness per 10 people.
By the 1980’s that had risen to 21 reported incidents of sickness per 10 people.
That’s a 160% increase in reported sickess. So are we less well?
The difference is one of suffering threshold. How much pain or discomfort we are willing to put up with. Previous generations grew up watching people suffering and dying from terrible diseases such as Tuberculosis and so on. When others around you have such serious and easily observable conditions, it seems churlish to complain about feeling a little lethargic.
When the standard for being ill is having a serious illness people are less likely to notice or complain about niggles. But when you take much of those big illnesses out of the picture, people begin to notice anything less than perfect health. So despite objectively being in much better health, people now actually report more ailments and niggles.
Likewise, some people live in states of great turmoil. Yet others who live in relative peace can suffer a relatively equal or greater amount of stress from incidents that wouldn’t even register to the other. It’s all just a case of where your thresholds are. And this is what is at the root of anxiety.
Anxiety is often confused with the symptoms it brings. The real issue is not the sweating, the palpitations and so on. Nor is it even the incident that triggers the symptoms. The real cause of stress and anxiety is the level of your thresholds. With a higher threshold the incident wouldn’t cause an anxious response.
Life is continual movement. Inhaling and exhaling. Up or down. Contraction and expansion.
So in every area of your life, you are either growing and expanding or shrinking in your status or capability. You are either becoming more confident or less confident. Richer or poorer. Healthier or less healthy. Closer or further apart in your relationship. Happier or less happy. Better able to handle stress or less able.
The thing is that the less that you do, the less you are comfortable doing. Conversely, the more that you do, the more you are comfortable doing.
Perhaps the most common source of anxiety comes from social interaction. What typically hapens is that people feel shy, or anxious, and so they avoid interacting. Maybe they do interact, but they interact through proxy. By which I mean they put up a shield, a defense mechanism, that they hide behind.
But without facing their fear and moving through it, they haven’t raised their threshold and so the same things still frighten them.
Reaching your fear threshold is like walking up to a fire. Your temperature increases, your heart beats faster, your mouth goes dry. The closer you get to the fire, the more amplified the fear becomes. And so it feels that if this is how bad the fear of it feels, well the feeling of it actually happening must be enough to annhiliate me.
Actually though, what happens is that you discover that the fire is a mirage. You don’t get burned because because once the event is here, the anxiety is gone. Anxiety can only be based on anticipation.
Sure sometimes it’s replaced by intense embarrassment or pain. But that is just another threshold. And going through the experience will raise your threshold, regardless of whether it turns out well or not. So next time, the same event won’t cause the same level of anxiety.
However, if you shrink from the fire, you never find out that it is just a mirage. And so you get stuck by the heat of the approach. You become stuck. Debilitated by your inability to get beyond your fear. Because you never venture closer to the fire, your thresholds lower. Therefore more and more frightens you. Until your entire life becomes surrounded by fire. A prison of fear.
Your quality of life, in every area, relationships, finances, social life, career and so on is determined by your thresholds. By how low a quality you will accept and by your willingness to face your fears and raise them.
Everything that you want, but don’t yet have is gained by raising your thresholds.
Everything that you don’t want and currently have, in your life, is eliminated by raising your threshold levels.
