The perception of anxiety .......
You would need to know exactly what life is like while having anxiety, the first thing to know is that its not something that goes away and returns sometimes because of a trigger like stress or emotional fluctuations like we might think. When it starts it's like you are locked in a room with dim light where there are many objects inside the room but you can still navigate around them to get to the door and get out, while getting to that door you'd feel the fear of failing to reach that door and being locked for longer periods, this fear is the bout of anxiety that's manifested outwards sometimes you stay out of this room for longer periods but the room is always there and you keep coming back.
When your anxiety progresses further you'd find more objects in the room then the room gets bigger and then darker while the objects gets sharper where most of the time you'd get hurt trying to find the door. Each of these objects is the pressure and stress from people and situations in your life while the room gets bigger to accommodate all these objects and gets darker because it gets harder to see clearly the more objects there are in this room, when the stress is related to someone that you love the sharper the objects that hurts you while trying to navigate in the darkness the longer you stay down after getting hurt before you go about trying again.
At some point it might feel like you are not getting out of this room so when you are afraid of trying to go find the door again after recovering from an earlier injury, you try to occupy your time. Even if you are alone you would want to do something, maybe lose yourself in a book and through it see part of the world outside that you are unable to join it will be like magical glasses when you wear them you can't see the dark room you are in but instead some other path in life where other people live and immerse yourself in their stories, it might motivate you to get up and try again.
The real question here is why do you keep going back and how to stay out for good.
Now you understand that while you are in this room you truly have nothing in there, no money, no love, no support, no one to help and at the same time you need a lot of that to be able to get out, but even the people who love you the most are incapable of helping you. Sometimes the people who try to help make it worse instead and add to your pressure and then guilt over pushing them away the next time they try to "help". That's when you try to look for support elsewhere, and because your close allies/friends/loved ones cannot help, you get to know for a fact that another person can't help you. So you are on your own unless there's something else out there that can help.
The journey to spirituality..........
That's when you turn to spirituality, the simple bottom line of most religions is unconditional love and a lot of forgiveness from the creator. When it was my turn to look at the bottom line of my religion I found two beliefs:
One, we are god's favorite creatures which means he loves us the most.
How much is that love exactly? I asked
So since the beginning of creation god sent only one part of his love to go about for all earth's creatures and kept 99 parts for himself. On this earth what everyone perceives as the greatest love of all is a form of willingness to sacrifice all even your own life for the one you love, the example was of a mother's willingness to die in her child's place. This kind of love is not rare in human history or even you might witness it in your life, and all that is only one part. So now you are the favorite receiver of the remaining 99 parts, which in my perception means that i'm very much loved even more than any other love i've ever received in my life.
Two, god will forgive anything you do except forsaking him and worshipping another.
How will god forgive me, what if I did something terrible? I asked
You only need to ask for forgiveness to get it immediately, with no conditions. But God only forgives what's his, like when you do something bad, lie, cheat, hurt yourself, etc... You need to seek forgiveness from the people you've wronged and in turn try to offer forgiveness when you are wronged, this part led me to "karma". So in my understanding, god will forgive me if I cheated someone out of his money for example because I disobeyed his rule of no cheating but I need to go seek forgiveness from the person or compensate him for the damage I caused by taking his money.
With these two facts in my head I started to open up to spirituality, I needed love and forgiveness the most to be my pillars of support to be able to lean on when i'm in a perceived crisis because at this point only I could tell if there's a serious crisis coming my way or not, I needed the type of love that doesn't ask why I did this or what i'll do next, I needed the forgiveness I can get without going about explaining why I failed and giving promises I can't keep which would only add to my troubles. I wasn't thinking of hurting anyone anyway or doing bad things.
How do I ask God for love and forgiveness? I asked
You don't ask God for love because God loves you anyway just go on and talk to him, let him know you and hear your voice. It's like when there are so many children to take care of, the silent one who doesn't ask for anything or complain about anything is still loved but would get no extra care without asking for it. The best part is that you don't have to voice out your suffering and grievances if you don't want to recount it because God already knows.
In some religions it's called prayers and in others it's called meditation, so I started by having a physical place of prayer/meditation that I can bring with me to the dark room. It was hard at first because my perception of the dark room itself is hazy I can only feel the emotions it leaves behind strongly but at that time I did not yet see myself in the dark room clearly. First I brought a mat that I can place wherever, so I can bring my prayer/meditation spot with me anywhere and anytime I need it. Then started simple prayers maybe 5 to 15 min each time while I close my eyes because if I keep them open I still see my place unchanged but when I close my eyes I would picture myself on the prayer mat in the dark room but the spot where I pray/meditate is illuminated in soft light and around it is empty space, while reciting the prayers I take intermittent reposes in the balasana yoga position which was immediately calming. Whenever I get into this pose and close my eyes I see clearly the dark room with me there on the prayer mat and I can talk to god as much as I like or just stay silent, it felt so peaceful.
At first the prayer/meditation was not making a lot of difference except in the balasana yoga pose but for this I wanted to do it often. Then I started to get more confidant in my belief that I had the love and forgiveness because each time I get on the mat I felt better to the point where when I face a crisis I can feel the panic inside but be able to hold it until I can get on the prayer mat and it all goes away, it still felt bad but where before I had no place or time to let go and get rid of it so I kept the small episodes pilling up for long periods at times, at this point I had fixed times for prayers/meditation throughout the day and sometimes extra time at night where I can let go and feel calm even when I didn't need it, I still maintained the prayer/meditation times.
With that as my sure place of recovery, I was getting bolder and more daring but I didn't dare yet to go confront my demons like doing the stuff that i'm avoiding the most. Instead I did all the normal things without the fear in the background of my head, it was not there anymore but the dark room was still there and now it became my place of comfort instead of fear because it was where my prayer mat was from the beginning. By this time my perception of things started to change, as I was coming from where I had nothing and now was starting to get things. All the things I got since then I started to sort out according to priority, I realized there are not many things I absolutely needed so I set my bottom line of what I can give up and still be ok or happy even, the more things I put on the give up list the happier I was because the list was a worst case scenario where I will still be ok even if I give it all up, and every little thing I got to still keep on that list made me feel grateful and happy.
I might still have the exact same things I had before when I was thinking i'm entitled to them because they are mine and losing any of them is unfair, when I was going through a crisis I discovered I was not entitled to anything may it be support or love or forgiveness from the people around me or a job promotion or more money. So when I got any of them I was so happy and grateful, it was like going about fighting in battle like everyone else but expecting no rewards, if you end up with rewards it's a happy thing but if you end up with loses you keep fighting like everyone else or stop and go fight somewhere else, it's your choice and you have nothing to lose because you went in with nothing in the first place.
When you reach this point you will be outwardly completely fine with almost no chance of going back to being locked up in the dark room of clutter because it's not the same anymore, I will explain in the next post about the existence of the dark room, but inwardly you know that you still don't dare to do some things which is no difference from most people. The first thing you did was making a list for the things you can give up and be ok, next is to make a list for the people you can give up and still be ok which is much harder to do. People can't be treated like objects for one simple reason, you can't influence their response and sometimes can't predict it as well so it's easier to sort them out according to how close you want them to be.
Imagine your social circle of people in rings around you, where in the closest ring you keep the people whom you love dearly and trust the most. The people in the first ring are whom you would want to protect because any of them getting hurt will hurt you as well. The second circle are people with more restrictions in getting to you and less attachment from your side, then the next circle and the next...... You can make as many circles as you wish and nothing is set in stone there, you can always shuffle people from one circle to the next. Now inwardly only you know who are the people you are most vulnerable to, and the rest can't even touch you because they have to move through your inner ring to be able to get to you, outwardly you will definitely change in mostly fun ways, the people around you will think you are getting more shameless and thick skinned as well as tolerant. Criticism has almost no effect on you, social shaming is like watching TV drama you might even try to be sarcastic and make fun of the whole thing while you are in the fray so you wouldn't miss out on the fun.
When you reach this point, you are on the right track to attaining inner peace.
I wrote so much today, probably will explain about self, ego and inner peace in the next post.
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