Before you can shift your anxiety to inner peace, you first have to become mindful of it. When you’re in fear or anxiety, you are in your head either worrying about the past or the future. By bringing your attention from your head to your heart, you come into the present moment where anxiety doesn’t exist. That’s why mindfulness practices work well with reducing anxiety because they create a calm and peaceful shift in your energies.
Mindfulness gives you the ability to reframe your anxiety and see the sacred information that is there to guide you. Once you become aware of your anxiety and call it out into the open, you have the choice to see what it’s telling you and release it. Bringing awareness to your anxiety can help diffuse it in the midst of a crisis or panic. Just the mere act of becoming aware of your anxiety can lessen its power over you. Most of all, you can get out from under anxiety, get your life back, and move from panic to peace by using these mindfulness and grounding practices on a daily basis.
1. Mindfulness Meditation teaches you how to notice your thoughts and feelings without reacting from fear. It shows you how to become an observer of your own experience: your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment. One of the most courageous choices you can make when your anxiety shows up is to sit still, lean in, and be present with it. It’s courageous because your knee-jerk reaction is to cut and run from your anxiety. This reaction is so automatic that doing nothing to avoid your anxious thoughts and actually bringing them closer is quite the challenge.
Find a comfortable place where you won’t be distracted. Take a series of slow deep breaths. Now imagine your mind as a vast blue sky and your thoughts as white billowy clouds. Notice your thoughts move across your mind as clouds move across the sky. Don’t try to analyze or hold on to them. Just pay attention to the thought until it leaves. The key here is to notice your thoughts without judgment and getting caught up in them. Start with five minutes and gradually build up to ten-fifteen minutes every day. You can also do this while walking and then extend it to other forms of exercise and movement.
2. Mindful Movement is another way to become mindful of your thoughts and feelings. One way to do this is by taking your mind, body, and spirit for a walk. Start your practice by going outside for a fiftee-minute walk. Do so without your phone or iPod® as a distraction. Before you start to walk, stand on the earth and draw your attention down to your feet. Tap or stamp them lightly in place and notice how your feet feel against the earth.
As you begin to walk, notice that you don’t need to think about moving your legs. They know what to do so you can simply notice the rhythm of your breath in and out. Now shift your focus to your steps and how your body feels as it moves one step in front of the other. Observe yourself taking a step forward toward the future and then releasing your back foot, letting go of the past. The space between your steps is the present. Pay attention to this space with present awareness as you walk.
You can also experience mindful moving by approaching daily activities like cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, eating, shopping, walking, and driving with awareness, participating in them with the intention of being fully present in the moment.
3. Heart-Centered Attention is a mindfulness practice that brings you home to your heart, the seat of your trust, inner wisdom, and spiritual truth. By dropping into your heart space, you move into present awareness. This is where compassion, acceptance, and trust in yourself and your divine source live. In fact, anxiety and fear cannot co-exist in the same space. When you drop into your heart space, you remain grounded like the eye at the center of a tornado even as anxious thoughts spiral through your mind. Just by bringing your attention from your head to your heart, you create balance. Focusing your attention at your heart doesn’t just calm an anxiety-ridden brain and nervous system; it also brings your body, mind, and spirit into energetic coherence.
Close your eyes and place your hand on the center of your chest. Now put your attention at your heart center. You can tap your fingers on your heart space to stimulate the energy here. Take a few deep breaths while inhaling and exhaling through your heart. Now focus on your heart by visualizing a pearl of while light here. Feel the light filling your entire heart space and expanding outward in all directions.
I invite you to get in the daily habit of using the mindfulness practices that resonate with you. What matters most is that you take consistent action to shift your anxiety to spiritual opportunity. This will create healthy new habits that promote trust, calm, and inner peace.
You have chosen an extraordinary time to be on earth to assist in the healing of humanity. This is an intense period of self-healing, self-discovery, personal and global transformation. Therefore, maintaining balance and centeredness is challenging right now as we navigate the rough seas of this shift in human consciousness.
With everything going in the world, you may feel anxious navigating the energies of these intense and turbulent times. You are not alone. Because of this energetic intensity, you may feel more edgy, restless, and unsettled than usual. You can sense what other people and the world needs and want to provide it.
Within every storm, there is a calm and peaceful center. You can find this center of inner peace through your heart. It’s essential that you practice these 3 anxiety-soothing strategies to release the energy overload that can lead to anxiety, depression, and compassion fatigue.
