What has been its strength?
Vulnerability, which I made my enemy until I was 30; I escaped with persistent suicidal ideation.
Psychiatric hospitalization?
Yes, and drug and alcohol addiction, until I learned acceptance by cultivating a different kind of relationship with my vulnerability that today has become my strength.
explain it to me
We believe that most of our problems come from vulnerability, when in reality they come from trying to escape from it.
Should we accept that things can go wrong?
If you live enough birthdays the reality is that sooner or later things will go wrong, you have to accept it as the force of gravity, and most people don't. Trying to avoid suffering or anxiety causes us more suffering.
Because?
The lives of people who try to combat anxiety become much smaller in the long run. Your life shrinks. Anxiety is the fear of losing something you have. The more people and things you love, the more exposed you are to loss, and the way to reduce that vulnerability is to reduce those connections.
Doesn't seem like a good idea.
it is not On a deep scale anxiety is triggered when we cannot maintain connection with our essential environment. We worry about not being good, strong, virtuous and caring enough for others.
We are social beings.
Harry Harlow did many experiments on attachment and said that a lonely monkey is a dead monkey, and for millions of years this is the truth on which we have evolved on an evolutionary scale.
If anxiety is the price of living, is it about accepting it?
It's about openness, about being involved with your own life. Everyone gets their heart broken at some point and the common reaction is to isolate yourself, to prevent it from happening to you again. What would it mean to do the opposite, to open your heart?
Your acceptance and openness therapy?
If you run away from relationships because you have been hurt, it is unlikely that someone will hurt you; but the absence of a relationship will hurt you.
What do you propose to make anxiety our friend?
Ask yourself the following question: in a world where anxiety was not imprisoning me, how and where would my life expand? Would I paint, dance, who would I want to connect with or what projects would I do?
And isn't that frustrating?
Find other people who are doing these things that you would be doing and interact with them regularly even if it's minimal, it's all about direction, start with something very small but persistently.
Give me more ideas to approach anxiety properly.
We tell ourselves stories throughout life: "I'm the boring one at parties" or "I'm not an intelligent person". Faced with certain situations this story will explode and you will suffer anxiety, the idea is to take those stories with kindness.
How do you handle feeling unprepared?
Imagine that your child is afraid to show himself in front of the group, will you hide him in a cave or help him face this situation with affection and without forcing? Imagining this with a child is very easy, while imagining it with ourselves is very difficult.
Self love
The misalignment between the direction of our life and what we really want causes us distress and discomfort. This is where identifying the values that are important to each person comes into play.
Give me more ideas to avoid anxiety.
Notice how he poses his question, as if he has to solve the anxiety first in order to live later, and life doesn't work that way.
Anxiety is part of life.
Yes, and anxiety or depression emerge from our personal history. Some people are more vulnerable than others; I, for example, am extremely vulnerable because I buried three of my brothers when they were 36, 45 and 53 years old.
Wow, that's really hard.
They all died because they refused to suffer. There are no tricks to avoid suffering, in the face of suffering the choice is to experience life.
And what experience does it offer us?
The question is where do you hide to feel safe. I used drugs and alcohol, and I looked for a community that could help me.
I'll take care of it, he came out of hiding.
When you do yoga, as you move you find the place where there is resistance, a lack of flexibility... Your psychology is the same, for some it is intimate relationships, for others, work. Where you find this lack of flexibility is where your practice is.
