Have you ever wondered why you wake up in the night full of anxiety or fear? We can stay so busy during the day that aspects of life lie beneath the “mirror” of our moment to moment experience. The night can allow these aspects of our mind’s workings to surface.
Picture the surface reflection in this photo as your daytime lived experience. There’s more going on below the surface but it remains hidden beneath the busyness of your day. At night, in the stillness, your brain is allowed to drop below the surface of your conscious processing. Through mindfulness we can learn to drop below this even during the day, paying attention to our body’s signals and all we learn as we make connections to the hidden things of our lives. Once we learn to attune to our body’s revelation of our concerns, we need to learn to embrace them. Oddly enough running from anxiety makes it worse, facing it and being curious about our tensions brings relief.
Facing tensions doesn’t change the facts of our lives, but it can change how we live with and relate to these facts. Mindfulness can function like a telescope or microscope, allowing us to see that which is normally beyond our sight. If you’d like to begin this journey, start by doing a body scan each day, noticing tensions, heart rate, breathing, etc. Your body is full of information regarding how you are experiencing your world.
BUT WHAT IF… you happen to be someone who is overwhelmed with all you see and experience — all the time?! Some people experience the world seeing and feeling everything, for those, mindfulness can help one learn to stand at a distance from it, instead of feeling run over by it. Either way, mindfulness helps us relate in a new way to our experience of the world. It is an incredibly powerful tool for dealing with anxiety whether we normally shut our fears down below the surface of our daily experience, or live life being overwhelmed and struggling to breath.