In a conversation with a client, what came up were concerns about flying.
Not flying per se, but the wider contextual worries about doing some stuff for the first time: travelling alone, long haul; visiting a completely new part of the world; uncertainty, second-guessing, doubt.
Consequently there’d been a fair bit of checking and double-checking and re-checking and nervousness and pre-occupation and not-so-great sleep.
All perfectly reasonable, and as the story is unfolding in front of me I’m nodding away in recognition of these legitimate concerns, agreeing that this sounds like exactly the sort of thing a mind would do, faced with those circumstances.
And then we come to the question:
Is there anything can be done about this?
Oh. Ummm… ah.
Weirdly, after all this time, part of me still isn’t expecting this question, so I’m a bit wrong-footed!
😂
I can’t help but answer with a question of my own; one you might have seen flash up from time to time in my Video Masterclasses:
Because that’s the way to solve problems like these: figure out what the problem actually is.
🧐
There’s a subtext to a question like this; something that goes beyond “I don’t like this, make it go away.”
And that subtext is:
“There’s something wrong. Something that needs changing.”
We’re back with that naughty, thinks-it’s-helpful monkey 🐒 in your head again, aren’t we? You know, the one that creates an identity out of all the stories it holds, and then pretends that’s actually You.
It says:
“‘I’ have identified that ‘I’ don’t like this, therefore there must be something up. ‘I’ must do something.”
But what if there isn’t ‘something up’ at all?
What if… it’s just filling in the gaps of what it doesn’t know (those are some BIG gaps 😂) with the old, stale data it holds?
What if… the only ‘problem’ here is that we’re innocently buying into this mind activity, as if it were some sort of factual account of the future?
What if… this is all actually evidence of the human operating system working exactly as it should?
What if… these feelings of discomfort (and all the concomitant behaviours that stem from the mind trying to manage those feelings) are simply pointing us back to Now? To life. To the presence that we are.
A helpful little tap on the shoulder: Hey buddy, you slipped out of reality for a moment there, and you’re off in a story. Why don’t you come back?
Because here's the huge irony to all this: without these feelings of discomfort…
Reflect on that, today.
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft
Putting anxiety into context