Dear Cali Chica:

The running away from danger, the thing a child cannot do, that running is the rushing you still experience. Your thoughts are running, multitasking, texting, obsessing. The fear stimulate you still to run.

This is why it is so important for the anxious person to slow down, the opposite of running, of rushing. And it is very uncomfortable to do on an ongoing basis. Cherish your feeling better today, nothing more convincing that we are doing the right thing for us than a good feeling.

But it won’t last, that neutral, anxiety free feeling. But healing is happening, and there will be more and more of days like this if and as you persist until such time that every day will be like that.

We mentioned therapy, if you had therapy with the most capable therapist in the world, for as long as it took, no real healing will take place unless you slow down every single day, like you did today, withstand the discomfort. And slow down when you wake up anxious. In the process of healing, there is no substitute for the need to practice mindful everyday living. It is this very practice, every day, uncomfortable and exhausting, that makes the rewiring of the brain.

As to your question in the earlier post about re-attaching the fear to the original danger: pay attention to this very moment: what is the danger in this moment? If there is none, relax, just for this moment.

Feeling anxious again, ask the same, relax. Free this moment and the next moment from your fear. I think this is the beginning of the re-attaching, that is removing the fear from the times when there is no danger.

I wrote to you earlier “relative safety” because we are never completely safe of course, just like an animal in the wild. When the predator approaching, that is danger. When the animal successfully escaped, it is in relative safety. There may be another predator lurking, or maybe a poisonous plant it just ate, unknowingly. Relative safety is all we can have and that is enough for an animal in nature. It has to be enough for us too.

anita