The Fear and Anxiety Solution (34 page)

As the first daily step of your forty-day commitment, simply breathe long and deeply with your eyes closed. Make sure to engage your chest and your abdomen. On the inhale, fully expand your lungs by letting your belly rise; on the exhale, pull your abdomen slightly back toward your spine to push all the air out.

One-minute breathing.
This kundalini yoga technique is one of the quickest and most powerful ways to clear and center your mind. The goal is to be able to inhale, hold your breath, and exhale for twenty seconds each, creating a one-minute breathing cycle. Sound daunting? Honestly, it took me several months to get to a full minute. So don’t push yourself too hard.

Begin by making each part of the cycle between three to ten seconds long. Just make sure to inhale, hold, and exhale for the same amount of time. You can either mentally count the seconds—“one, two, three …”—or repeat an affirmation, such as “I am calm, centered, and at peace,” for the amount of time you’ve chosen for each piece of the cycle.

This breathing pattern symbolizes life’s fundamental cycle of receiving, maintaining, and letting go. Routinely, I ask my clients which part of the process they find most challenging: drawing the air in, keeping it in, or letting it out. It continues to fascinate me that their struggles with this technique often appear to reflect their challenges with receiving, maintaining, and letting go in life. See for yourself which part feels the most natural to you and which brings up resistance and takes more effort to accomplish.

After you’ve practiced this one-minute breathing exercise for a couple of weeks, you may want to challenge yourself a little bit. Just for five or ten breaths, extend the time of inhaling, holding in, and exhaling. Each time, allow yourself to approach the point where you feel the urge to quickly progress to the next part. When you notice an almost panicky feeling rising from deep inside, wait another second or two before you move on, instead of giving into this sensation. There is something extremely empowering about being able to witness the emotion without instantaneously responding to it. Instead, if you draw the breathing cycle out a few seconds longer, you show yourself that there was no reason to panic, that you’ve been safe and in control the entire time.

After ten minutes of either of these two breathing meditations, allow your breath to regulate itself. Keep your eyes closed and complete the centering step by visualizing and connecting to the brilliant core light of your essence for another minute or two.

I am sure you will soon agree with one of my meditation teachers, who said, “Our breath controls our mind, and our mind controls our lives. So by learning how to master your breathing, you learn how to master your life.”

Now that you’re centered and grounded within your core, you’ve opened the door to the abundance of resources and potential that resides within. However, no matter how great your innate potential may be, it becomes meaningful only if you can access it, bring it into form, and channel it for a purpose. By defining a new, empowering core belief and identity, you’ve already laid the groundwork for fully embracing and utilizing your potential. The following daily process, the empowerment accelerator, helps you to completely incorporate and align yourself with this new identity.

In the past, you may have tried to change the way you thought and felt about yourself through positive affirmations. And you may have found out that for some reason and despite all your efforts, those “mantras” didn’t seem to stick. As I mentioned before, words alone don’t have an intrinsic meaning for the subconscious mind and, therefore, need to be decoded and translated into images, feelings, and sensations. In other words, you need to transfer the affirmations from your mind to your heart, which you’ve already accomplished by working through the processes in
chapter 10
. However, to fully embody your new identity, it needs to be anchored in your cellular memory. The physical is memorable.

The empowerment accelerator links your new belief with your whole body, dramatically speeding up the process of integrating your new belief, so that it quickly becomes second nature for you. At the end of this six-step process, every fiber of your being will be aligned with your new, empowered identity, like iron filings aligning with the force field of a magnet.

1. Focus.
Stand comfortably with your eyes closed and take several deep breaths to center yourself. To complete this and each of the following five steps, anchor the new empowering belief by stating it out loud or silently to yourself at least three times.

2. Imagine.
See yourself, as you did in
chapter 10
, having fully incorporated this belief. Adjust the picture of the new you by changing its size, color, brightness, and distance until the image is the most attractive and desirable it can be to you.

3. Feel.
Notice the positive emotions you associate with the empowered self. Do you feel confident, energized, excited, relaxed, or self-assured? Tap into these emotions to infuse your new identity with life. Hold this focus for one to two minutes. (Remember to breathe as you do.)

4. Embody.
Bring this image into physical form by mirroring and adopting the posture and facial expression of the empowered self. Are your shoulders back? Is your chest open? Are your arms comfortably hanging down by your sides or your hands relaxed in the pockets of your pants? Do you notice a friendly smile or a twinkle in your eyes? Are your facial muscles calm and at ease? Take on the stance and the air of confidence that radiates through and from the empowered self.

5. Boost.
Move into a new posture—a power posture—and express your new belief with even greater intensity for one or two minutes. For example, raise your arms triumphantly into the air and enjoy the breakthrough you’ve accomplished. Or open your arms wide, embracing yourself and all the opportunities that life has to offer. You could also march in place, vigorously engaging your legs and arms to demonstrate that you’re confidently moving forward on your path. Or you may just want to break into an uninhibited victory dance, celebrating how you’ve gained the freedom to be yourself. Try out different forms of expression and find the one that makes the strongest statement of your empowerment—and is the most fun. By turning up the positive energy you’ve already created, you anchor the new belief even more deeply into your cellular memory.

6. Commit.
Bring your hands to your heart, take a few deep breaths, and center yourself again. Set your intention to fully embody your empowered identity on this day by visualizing how you will move through your day as the new you. To end, once again repeat your new belief three times.

• • •

Although the empowerment accelerator takes only five to ten minutes, you’ll feel that your entire physiology has shifted by the time you complete it. Like a tuning fork, your whole being will vibrate with the uplifting energy and emotions of your empowered self. Now you’re fully charged, ready to own the day.

The value of any personal change and growth is largely determined by how it will benefit us in our daily lives. As the philosopher and physicist Buckminster Fuller said, “The environment is stronger than willpower.” In other words, the people and circumstances we live with don’t necessarily conspire to bolster our confidence and self-worth. Every day, we come across countless situations that can trigger anxiety or drain us of our power—a disapproving frown from a colleague, an hour spent in a traffic jam, a shortened deadline, an unexpected bill. Our confidence can deflate as quickly as a popped balloon.

Yet our environment has only as much power as we give it. The choice of whether to turn over our power is ours, but it doesn’t always feel that way. We often don’t believe that we can actually stop and decide whether or not we want to head back to the familiar territory of anxiety and insecurity. Why? Because we either approach this place of choice so quickly and so unconsciously that there really doesn’t seem to be much of a choice at all, or we find ourselves at that junction but don’t know what to do to remain calm and keep our power.

By practicing the reinforcement steps of your forty-day commitment program, you’ll develop the awareness and flexibility to master these common challenges in ways that further strengthen your confidence—and your sense of coherence.

Although there are myriad situations that can send us from feeling balanced and empowered to out of balance and powerless, a large number of them fall under one of two major themes: making assumptions or taking something personally.

In general, assumptions are a normal part of life. There are simply too many variables and possible outcomes to consider. If we didn’t act and make decisions based on assumptions, we would become completely overwhelmed and paralyzed.

Yet negative assumptions can make us feel angry, hurt, ashamed, and especially fearful and insecure. There are three ways in which we commonly scare ourselves by conjuring unfavorable assumptions; we assume that:

     • We will lose something we care about.

     • We are the victims of our circumstances.

     • We have to fit in to be accepted.

One of the fundamental problems with negative assumptions is that we often don’t recognize them as such. For example, think about the “what if” game. Any thoughts starting with “what if” should give us a clue that we’re about to venture off into a fictional reality. We can get lost thinking through the consequences of terrible disasters, painful rejections, or enormous failures without realizing that they’re all based on one, frequently ludicrous “what if” assumption. Other more subtle indicators that we’re about to enter fantasy land are phrases such as, “I know what he’s thinking,” or “It just won’t work out,” or “She is so much better off than me.” You get the idea. We make generalizations, ignore certain facts, and misread and overinterpret others, all to concoct stories that are detrimental to our inner peace and well-being.

Naturally, from the perspective of our subconscious (which is their creative source) negative assumptions have a valid purpose: to prepare us for and protect us from danger, rejection, or pain. But despite these positive intentions, negative assumptions never make us feel safe. Instead, they tend to deplete our energy, undermine our confidence, and take control of us rather than giving us control.

Taking something personally is another common reason we lose our power and shift out of alignment with ourselves. The opinion and behavior of others become the determinants of how we view and feel about ourselves. Usually, we take personally somebody else’s:

     • judgment

     • approval

     • energy

Taking anything personally is also a subconscious, protective strategy for avoiding hurt, rejection, and abandonment. But whether we’re making
assumptions or taking things personally, we’re displacing our power and focusing on somebody or something outside of us. Ultimately, we abandon ourselves, and our subconscious responds by generating more fear and anxiety.

The following exercises give you the opportunity every day of the week to focus specifically on these common anxiety pitfalls. By working through these exercises, you’ll develop resourceful patterns for identifying and responding to these pitfalls with ease and proficiency.

For many people, Monday is the least favorite day of the week. After tasting the sweet joys of freedom and relaxation for a couple of days, we dread Mondays as the rude awakening to a reality filled with obligations and challenges—with ample opportunities to potentially fail, get hurt, or lose something of importance to us. So Monday is the perfect day to pay attention to and address the assumptions that something bad has happened or is about to happen.

Notice at least five negative assumptions you make during the course of the day. Become aware of the moment when you traverse from facts into fiction. For example:

     • You get stuck in traffic on your way to work. You tell yourself, “I’ll be late for the team meeting, and the others will think I’m a flake.”

     • You’re calling your spouse or partner, but he or she doesn’t pick up or answer your text messages. You wonder, “What if something bad has happened?”

     • You bring your child to school and see that one of the other parents is driving a brand new car. Immediately you compare yourself: “These people are much more successful and happy than I am. I will never be able to afford what they can.”

Counterbalance.
Address these negative assumptions with the counterbalancing exercise from
chapter 6
. Start each positive statement with “I trust.” Make
sure to communicate from your heart and imagine that you are connecting with the younger, subconscious protector who may still need some more reassurance. For example, to counterbalance the three assumptions above, you might try:

     • “I trust in the value I bring to the team, regardless of whether I’m late or not.”

     • “I trust that my spouse/partner is perfectly fine. He/she is probably just busy and not paying attention to the phone. I’ve done the same thing many times.”

     • “I trust that I am in charge of my own success and happiness. Each person’s life is unique and therefore can’t be compared to another’s.”

Avoid micromanagement.
Notice when assumptions tempt you to spring into frantic action to control the circumstances. For example:

     • You are driving faster and taking more risks on the road.

     • You are calling your spouse every two minutes to check on him/her.

     • You are calling your bank to see if you could qualify for a car loan.

Instead, take a deep breath and ask yourself the following three questions: