The omnipresence of anxiety in our modern day lives is like a veil obscuring clarity of sense and perception. Clouding judgment and cuing our reactive tendencies, we often become disconnected from the reality of our actual experiences. Mindfulness practice helps us to relax and ‘cut’ through anxiety- our worrisome & anticipatory patterns. We learn to observe our ‘chaos’ at a distance- to refrain from indulging- and to trust the transitory nature of all that is arising as impermanent. It is this quality of awareness- and the transforming ‘energies’ of mindfulness that shift the way we relate to our own minds and to our own thinking & feeling process.

If open enough, if calm & relaxed enough, we can come to clearly see our chaos and our disturbances of mind as just that…

We are not our thoughts or our feelings. We are not our anxiety or our depression. We are much larger than any of these transient ‘events’- these ever-changing states of mind and being. Awareness is our instrument and mindfulness our capacity to skilfully observe ourselves without being consumed by ourselves. What we think or feel, deeply or habitually can be managed and regulated with an awareness that simply knows better. What is thought or felt can be experienced without being contained… seeing and letting be… noticing and letting go.

Without the focus of our attention and in the absence of our identification to it, the energy of ‘anxiety’ will simply rise and pass on its own accord. With no “mental” energy to nourish the anxiety, it cannot sustain itself.

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