Chapter 11
The Expanding Life
I began this book by declaring that the things you’ve been doing to try to control your anxiety are actually what maintain your anxiety. It follows that when you stop trying to control your anxiety, it will no longer be maintained. What exactly does that imply?
Without maintenance—regular monkey feedings—the anxiety cycle breaks down. When, after setting off anxiety alarms, it repeatedly gets no confirmation of the threat it had perceived, the monkey learns that the situation is something that you can handle. The less reactive you are to the alarms of the monkey, the less active the monkey is. When you stop feeding the monkey, you will eventually experience less anxiety and worry.
For those of us who have suffered all our lives with the ambient background of monkey chatter and an IV drip of fear, the promise of less anxiety is almost too far-fetched to imagine. What would life be like without the ambient background of anxiety? Well, for one thing, you’ll be thinking in a whole new way.
An Expansive Mind-set
The monkey mind-set is a formidable structure, one we’ve all spent years constructing and reinforcing. Is it possible to overwrite it with something new?
Most of us have tried endless variations of positive thinking and affirmations, and we’ve learned through experience that changing one’s mind isn’t comparable to changing clothes or changing oil. Learning a new way of thinking is like learning a new language. We need to use it. We need to experience living with it.
This is especially true when there are real worries in your life, actual primordial threats like Samantha had. Telling herself that she was not responsible for her son’s safety just wasn’t believable until Samantha began to stop checking up on him and began checking in with herself.
The first few times that Samantha chose not to check on her son were agony for her. When her son got angry with her for setting limits on borrowing money, that was even more painful. But Samantha continued her practice, tolerating the discomfort it caused her, and praising herself for taking care of herself.
She joined Al-Anon, where she met others with similar situations. It was easier to see the limits of personal responsibility in others’ lives than in her own. She got lots of support for taking responsibility for herself rather than for her son and his illness. After a few months of trying on these new ideas, she noticed that her health was improving and she was able to do things for herself—and even have a little fun once in a while.
Coping with her son’s illness turned out to be an opportunity for Samantha to change basic assumptions that she had operated from her whole life. She actually believes now that she is responsible for herself and that her son is responsible for himself. She has a stake in something she can control—her own health and well-being—which she is not going to sacrifice for something she can’t control—her son’s. She doesn’t assume responsibility for him even when he fails.
Whatever your anxiety and worries are based on, when you choose to act with a mind-set based on your personal values—and not the monkey’s—you will get new experience that supports that mind-set. Your consciousness will integrate this new experience and expand. With repeated new experiences, your old perfectionist, need-to-be-certain, over-responsible mind-sets will break down. You’ll learn to believe in the new expansive mind-set you have chosen. Expansive thinking will become your new default.
Living with Purpose, Achieving Your Goals
As you become less limited by the monkey’s bias toward safety and more resilient to its alarms of perceived threats, you will begin to take the risks necessary to meet your larger personal goals. Things you only dreamed about doing before will begin to appear doable.
Maria, as you recall, longed to travel. The values she cherished most were curiosity and spontaneity, but she was afraid to go more than ten miles or so from her doctor and her hospital. All that has changed now.
First of all, Maria is delighted to report that she has far fewer uncomfortable physical sensations. This is partially because she isn’t constantly scanning her body for them anymore. It’s also because when she does happen to feel something uncomfortable, she doesn’t look it up on the Internet. When she doesn’t feed her worry, there’s less to worry about. She feels healthier and less stressed.
After all her practicing tolerance for uncertainty regarding physical symptoms, Maria has noticed she is more willing to be uncertain in other areas of her life. She doesn’t second-guess her financial investments anymore, she is bold and decisive when shopping, and the number one thing she Googles now is travel locations. After years of hugging the shoreline Maria is making up for lost time. She just returned from a month in South America, a destination she would have been terrified to travel to before. Maria is living according to her own values now—explore, explore, explore!
Increased Compassion and Self-Esteem
Eric, like all perfectionists, held himself to an impossible standard. He wasn’t allowed to make mistakes. Trying to live this way meant he’d never succeed and predictably, he felt pretty bad about himself. But Eric’s practice has changed all that.
Now that he allows himself the possibility of being wrong, Eric has become much more decisive. He’s stopped over-researching and putting off making decisions, and as a result he gets lots more done at work. He actually enjoys his job now and it shows in his interactions with others. He has become more assertive, more clear, and more honest, which makes him a better boss. Rather than avoiding interventions with his employees, he deals with them directly, nipping most problems in the bud.
As he gained confidence, Eric expanded his practice to other areas of his life too, like the gym. Although he’s still overweight, he doesn’t feel so out of place there anymore. His regular workouts have made him a little stronger and a lot more confident. It’s much easier being Eric these days now that he can forgive himself for being less than perfect.
As we learn to be compassionate toward ourselves we are learning compassion toward others. Comparisons and criticisms will become less relevant to us as we begin to recognize our common humanity and fallibility. How light we can feel when we shed the burden of perfection!
Resilience to Setbacks
What if things go wrong? What if, despite your new willingness to take risks, you do not get what you’re after? What if, despite your practice, a primordial threat does manifest itself in your life? Your practice cannot prevent the loss of a job, a home, or a loved one. It can’t insulate you from natural disasters, wars, or economic upheaval.
All three of my clients faced significant personal hardships at some point during their practice. Samantha’s son did wind up hospitalized, just as she feared he would. Eric eventually had to fire his employee and lost his friendship with her husband as a result. Maria did develop symptoms that required medical attention. What each of them found was that their personal expansion practice—experiencing and welcoming small-stakes opportunities for expansion—brought them greater resilience than they dreamed possible, enough to withstand large-stakes pain and loss.
The ability to tolerate your own necessary feelings is a superpower, allowing you to do things you once thought impossible. With enough resilience, every threat, perceived or genuine, can be handled. As your own personal path to resilience becomes more well-worn and familiar, you are preparing yourself for the inevitable ups and downs in life. Your resilience is a core of strength to draw upon when bad things happen. When the hurricane hits, you will be in the eye, resilient and grounded in your new expansive mind-set.
Room for Pleasure
As you continue to breathe deep into your feelings and sensations and welcome whatever you feel, you will encounter something you likely didn’t expect—more positive feelings.
Both pain and pleasure reside together in the same vessel of the body and both share the same pathways to and from your brain. When you open your body with your breath and make space for pain, you are also allowing more room for pleasure. When you cultivate an expansive mind-set that allows painful feelings to be physically experienced, the same neurological circuitry will carry pleasant feelings as well.
When you act on your values, not only does the pain of loss become more tolerable, but positive emotions long atrophied are revived. Expressions like joy of discovery, pride in independence, warm compassion, desire for pleasure, passion for self-expression, gratitude for generosity, awe of mastery, and love of adventure cease to be merely ideas. They are full-blown emotions you actually experience!
Just be careful not to get attached to these pleasant feelings or try to get more. Trying to feel good is feeding the monkey. Just let these pleasant feelings flow through you, like you let the unpleasant ones flow through. As long as you keep expanding, there’s more where they are coming from!
Peace and Presence
I happen to be writing this segment of the book on an airplane. A couple of hours ago as I approached the TSA checkpoint at the airport, there were five different lines to choose from. Although I had plenty of time before my flight, soon after I chose a line, I noticed I felt a little tense. The line to my left was moving much more quickly than mine, and the people who were behind me before were now ahead of me. I noticed feeling resentment toward them, as well as some shame for my stupidity choosing the line I did. My monkey was definitely on the job. Others were getting ahead of me, “threatening” my social status.
The only threat here was to the quality of my life. If I treated the monkey’s alarm as important I would continue to feel stressed, annoyed, and ashamed. Instead I thought, Yay! An opportunity for expansion. I opened my hands as a reminder to myself that I was willing to allow others to go ahead of me. I took deep welcoming breaths, relaxing into the feeling of tension in my chest and the sense of competition with others. By doing this I sent a message to my monkey mind that I could handle this “threat.” I got the banana and reclaimed the moment. Freed from the “what should be” assumptions of my monkey mind-set, I was fully present with “what is.” With the resilience to let my necessary feelings run their course, I felt at peace.
I have been reluctant to use expressions like “in the moment,” “peace,” and “presence” in this book. This language has spiritual connotations and I do not pretend to be a spiritual teacher. But I have practiced enough with both psychological and spiritual tools to know that although the tools in this book and the tools that spiritual teachers offer go by different names, they are essentially the same.
The Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young defined suffering in a mathematical formula. Pain × Resistance = Suffering. Most of us would agree; we’ve resisted and suffered enough to prove it. I would like to tweak that formula just a bit to reflect my fundamental message to you in this book.
Anxiety × Welcoming = Resilience
My message to you is to welcome anxiety and grow resilience. With resilience to anxiety, peace and presence are waiting to be claimed every moment of the day.
Let your practice become your lifestyle. Make reviewing your values, treating problems and anxiety as opportunities, and choosing expansion strategies become as second nature to you as picking up your phone when it rings or opening the door when there’s a knock. Each small step of your practice will compound daily, bringing unforeseeable and amazing changes in your life.
Remember also that wherever you go, however far you progress, the monkey is along for the ride and always on alert. Even in the most expanded world there is always a frontier, a line beyond which you will not feel safe. As you approach that edge you will encounter familiar things: perceived threats, negative feelings, and a need for certainty, perfection, and/or over-responsibility toward others. You will feel like retreating to safety.
But you will know what to do. You’ll take a deep Welcoming Breath and say, Thank you, monkey! Then you’ll take another step toward new experience and learning.
