‘Understanding takes away fear.’
DR BILL PETTIT
Well, for starters, Bob doesn’t have them.
Many people email me to let me know: ‘My anxiety is different, Nicola, because I…
Here’s the truth. It’s all made of the same stuff, it’s just the shape of how it shows up that can be different for any of us. The feeling that yours is different, that you are somehow unique in your suffering, is simply a symptom of identifying as the smoke rather than the smoke machine.
I want to ask you to imagine a pool – an incredibly deep pool. Imagine seven billion of these pools and they’re all fed by one huge pool that lies underneath them – a pool so infinitely huge that you can’t even imagine the edges.
That huge pool is quiet. It’s empty. It’s calm. It’s beautiful. It’s peaceful. It just is.
On the surface of the smaller individual pools, there are sometimes ripples, sometimes waves, even tsunamis from time to time. Each pool has its own idiosyncrasies. One moment there can be tiny ripples and huge waves the next. All day, every day, the surface water changes. And independent of what is going on the surface of one pool, there’s a different set of waves on each of the seven billion pools.
But the deep pool underneath is completely unaffected and untouched by what’s going on at the surface.
Now, in other types of ‘sorting out your anxiety’ programs and books, our job becomes one of trying to understand what triggers in the world are making the waves happen in order to calm them. The aim is then to set up the circumstances and ‘get our ducks in a row’, so the waves are initiated as little as possible. Alternatively, we attempt to develop better wave-management techniques, so that we can create a little pool that’s always completely peaceful and tranquil. Or at least peaceful enough and tranquil enough to be ‘manageable’, given whatever we have decided we can tolerate right now.
Whether we realize it or not, what drives most human action is ultimately a desire for peace, love and contentment – to feel totally comfortable in our own skins – and not understanding where that feeling lies results in a sense of lack or yearning in our lives.
Most of us mistakenly think that always having a calm surface is the way to plug that gap. So, we fill our lives with our best attempts at changing things we think will impact the waves. This might look like working hard to buy more stuff, spending all of our time looking after other people, having children and doing everything we can for them, striving to achieve, using drink or drugs to drown out the feelings of lack, trying to exert our power over others, giving to charity or stealing from a stranger.
In fact, most of what we do as humans, whatever form that might take, is an attempt to smooth those waves in the belief that this will lead to that feeling of peace. All of which makes total sense until you start to see that:
Trying to deal with the waves by managing your external circumstances is a never-ending and futile game.
Despite all appearances, the waves aren’t coming from anything in the world outside, so looking to manage your circumstances in the outside world isn’t going to be helpful. We all know this on some level. How many times have you tried changing jobs, changing partners or moving to a new house to help you feel less anxious or have a nicer life, all to no avail?
Trying to control the waves directly and ‘have better thoughts’ by counting them, scoring them 1–10, trying to make them go away with willpower, analysing and talking about them or pointing them out to others doesn’t feel good. By paying more attention to them, we just seem to get more of them. But most mainstream psychological interventions that have dealt with anxiety up until this point innocently believe that spending time discussing waves is the way to resolve anxiety. Whereas it’s more helpful to see that waves occur in all pools, that’s just the way of it. The idea that they shouldn’t is the only thing that causes us to suffer.
In fact, the small pools are made of the same stuff as the deep, peaceful, bottomless pool and they’re what give us the experience of being human. As a result, there’s nothing inherently wrong with waves and our attempts to manage them does nothing but whip them up into tsunamis. We don’t need to pick them to pieces, work through them or analyse them – they’re just waves. We simply get the ones we’re given. Where to look for answers? Not here.
Instead, we’ll be looking to learn more about the deeper infinite pool, which is calm by its very nature. To see the nature of this more and more deeply brings a sense of relief and peace. The result? The fight to control the waves just starts to drop away of its own accord. You don’t have to keep doing that, sweetheart.
So, when you say to me ‘But mine’s different’, you’re effectively saying, ‘But my waves occur in these patterns, whereas other people have waves that occur in those other patterns, so I need something different.’ What I’m saying is, if we were going to be discussing your waves, then you might have a relevant point. But instead, we’re going to be looking at what’s true for ALL human beings. Where do waves come from really for every single person, no matter what form they show up in? What are the implications of the fact that the waves are made of the same water as their source? And, more importantly, what is the nature of the infinite, peaceful, always tranquil pool where there are already no ripples at all?
Here’s another way of saying this:
You’re probably focused on the behaviours that result from your anxiety – for example, your ability to go out or not, to work or not, to be able to go into a supermarket, to travel abroad, to get a good night’s sleep, to control the amount you drink, to decide what things you can and can’t do. You look at what the waves are up to and then decide what will be possible for you to do today, or next week, or next year. Bob has a great deal to say what that all means about you at this level.
When our attention is focused here, the only available solution lies at the level of ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’ and pushing ourselves to do the things that scare us. For example, behind exposure therapy is the idea that if you can get yourself to do the thing you’re scared of over and over again until you see that nothing bad actually happens, then you’ll be less scared of it. Occasionally this works (at least until another scary ‘thing’ pops up), but it can feel dreadful, it’s exhausting and it seems never-ending.
If we move a little to the left, we see that our behaviours usually result from our thinking about a particular object, person or circumstance. For example, if it looks like supermarkets or hospitals are scary, we avoid them if we can. If it looks like our boss is causing our anxiety, then we avoid going to work. If it looks like there’s something wrong with us physically, we go to get it checked by the doctor. If it looks like we’re lacking money or friendship, we might try all sorts of activities to get more of them. This is simple common sense, given our current understanding of how the world works. CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and other thought-management tools attempt to do their work at this level and try to help us change our thinking.
If you focus here, you try to change the content and meaning of your thinking (aka wave management). If you focus on what you’re thinking as you enter a supermarket, the theory is that you can then challenge the reality of those thoughts and ‘swap them’ for more helpful thoughts. Or you can make the image of the supermarket go darker in your mind or push it away into the distance.
Again, this is a great idea, but there are three fundamental misunderstandings still going on here:
I intend to debunk all three of these theories by the end of this book.
Now, if we move even further to the left, we start to see the simple fact THAT we think.
If we go back to that rippling surface of water on our individual pool, we can see that it’s like every one of us has our own special pair of goggles. Each moment, it’s as if we take off our goggles, dip them into the water and see whatever is on our lenses in that moment.
The common misunderstanding among humans is that we believe we’re seeing clearly what’s really going on in the world, when in truth we’re only ever seeing the world through the water on the goggles in that precise moment.
For example, if you have fearful water or thought on your goggles and you think for a moment about a headache you can feel starting, it will feel serious, extremely painful and as though there’s something wrong with you. We could wire you up to a lie detector and, as you described this experience of your headache, it would all appear completely true.
If you have excitement on your goggles, you’ll probably only experience intermittent pain and the headache will just be an inconvenient niggle in your day. We could wire you up to a lie detector and we would see that this experience of the same headache also registered as completely true.
If you have angry/sad water on your goggles and you think about your past, you’ll remember people who did you wrong, how events in your life have harmed you, or caused you to feel a certain way and potentially like a victim of circumstances. We could wire you up to a lie detector and describe what really happened in your past and it would register what you’re saying as true.
If you have love and joy on your goggles in this moment and you take a look at your past, you’ll be able to describe precious moments with loved ones and a sense of compassion for those you saw struggling in their own lives. Again, the lie detector would not be able to fault you.
There’s no ‘headache out there’ or ‘past’ that we’re experiencing – only ever our thought-created version of one, right now in this moment.
Everything we think looks real, but none of it is true.
We’ll come back to that one later.
What interests us lies all the way along to the left in the diagram: who we are, what there is and what’s going on BEFORE any of this even occurs. What is all of this created from?
Everything you think about you and your personal experience of anxiety and how that’s different from everyone else – that’s way over on the right-hand side of the diagram – is downstream. You might avoid motorways, decline social invitations or repetitively conduct checking behaviours. It’s all fine with me, carry on with all that for now – that’s all downstream of where it’s useful for us to look.
Really, it’s all fine with me. Has anyone ever told you that?
We’ll get to it, don’t worry, it’s just not particularly helpful to start there.
What’s upstream is what’s true for all human beings:
These are called the ‘Three Principles’ and were first revealed to a ninth-grade educated Scottish welder called Sydney Banks, who had a profound enlightenment experience and saw the truth of who we really are. The principles describe how thought is brought to life and appears as if it’s real. They also point to our capacity to be aware of life itself and the ability of every one of us to wake up to the innate peacefulness that’s simply there waiting for us to be sunk back into.
The creator of everything (including us) is represented by the infinite pool. We’ll call it ‘Mind’.
If this is all Snargleblart to you, no matter, just keep reading. There’s something quieter and more beautiful than Bob that’s worthy of your attention, and it lies upstream.