‘If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.’
SYDNEY BANKS
People, circumstances and places can’t make you feel anything.
It really, really, really looks like that isn’t the case so, at this point, I want to remind you that you’re in a Snargleblart class and you have no idea about how I’m going to explain this to you. What if everything you think about how life works is wrong? It’s time to get curious.
We think. Caught up in thought, we all feel a sense of lack and fear. There’s a compelling illusion that most humans labour under, which is that things outside ourselves can help with this and make us feel a certain way. Sunshine makes us happy, babies make us go gooey, making a million feels great, someone shouting at us makes us feel scared, losing someone close to us leaves us bereft and scared.
But is that true?
I know people who absolutely hate the heat of the sun and they check the weather forecast before they decide what to do the next day, such is their dislike. I know people who shudder with distaste at the thought of babies, I know stressed-out, miserable millionaires, people who get aggressive when shouted at, and people who have lost loved ones who are full of love and peace. I also know people who can cycle through any number of emotions about their bank balance in a single day without the number changing at all (myself included).
Our experience of the same thing changes all the time.
It might sound strange, but simply put: nothing outside you can make you think or feel anything. Instead, our experience comes from the inside-out. The fast-moving traffic and the pain in your chest aren’t scaring you. YOU are scaring you.
But because we misunderstand this fact, this is what we innocently do:
Whenever we have a feeling or experience we don’t like, we look outside ourselves to find out what caused it. The logic in our head says that if we can work out what triggered this feeling, then we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.
For example, I’m out shopping and I suddenly start to feel unwell. My heart starts racing and I feel dizzy.
This isn’t normal for me, so I start to get scared of the physical sensations. I look around me thinking, What’s doing this to me? All I know is that I need to get out, so I leave my shopping in the aisle and flee. As soon as I’m outside, I calm down and the horrible feelings go away: Where did THAT come from? My logic tells me it must be the supermarket. Probably, I conclude, it was owing to the large supermarket because I’ve never had that experience in the corner shop. And given that I felt OK when I came outside, it definitely must be because of the supermarket. Supermarkets cause anxiety. Supermarkets trigger me. Now, next time I attempt to go into a supermarket (especially a large one), I’ll be checking out my theory. I’m scanning myself – Do I feel OK? Is my heart speeding up? And guess what happens? We latch onto a sensation that our breathing has gone ‘a bit funny’ and then have the thought, There it is, it’s back again because I’m in a supermarket. The feelings escalate, we leave the supermarket again and swear to never go back.
In essence, we create a thought-cloud of a supermarket and then this is what we see:
But, as we discovered earlier in this chapter, our feelings can never be created by anything outside ourselves. We think we work like a camera, taking in the world passively then interpreting it through our senses and making meaning of it inside our minds. We think the world works outside-in. In fact, it works the other way around – we’re more like a projector – we experience a thought then we project it out and create the world we experience. (In truth, we’re more like a projector, projecting a projector projecting a world, but let’s keep it simple for now.)
It actually works inside-out:
It’s ALL Thought.
Thought creates experience and there are no exceptions.
Here’s one of my favourite examples: I can walk into the kitchen and find my kids throwing food at each other.
I might think, Do you know how long it took me to cook that food? Do you know how much it cost? How did I raise such ungrateful, horrible children? I must be a terrible mother – all with a feeling of anger, injustice and guilt. The resulting behaviour? I shout and send them to their rooms. Meanwhile, their dad might be sitting with them having a blast and joining in, experiencing the same food-throwing as a huge amount of fun. The resulting behaviour? He gets squirty cream out of the fridge to win the battle.
Same events, completely different experience.
It’s not just that different people experience things differently through thought; there are days I can walk into the kitchen and see the kids throwing food (is this just in my house that this is a common occurrence?!) and be overcome with a feeling of love at how cute my gorgeous kids are and how lucky I am to have them. The resulting behaviour? Hug each one of them in turn then put my strawberry-stained shirt in the washing machine.
I’d like to ask you to take a moment here to reflect. Can you see where this is true in your own life? Over the next few days I want to ask you to keep your eyes open to where you see your own experience of events shift and change over time. Look at your own family next time you’re watching a TV program together – you’re all watching the same images on the screen and listening to the same sounds, yet if you look, one person might be fully absorbed and laughing, another might be irritated by the same jokes, one person is totally bored and unengaged, thinking about something else entirely, and you’re too busy looking at everyone else to have any experience of the TV at all. This doesn’t mean the TV show isn’t playing, it just means it doesn’t currently exist for you in this moment.
When you’re not thinking about something – it ceases to exist for you.
It’s the same TV show, but each person is having a completely different experience of it. As you get bored of this experiment and turn your attention back to the TV, you’ll have a completely different experience of the show than you did five minutes previously.
Now, it’s pretty simple to find everyday mundane examples of this in our lives, so go and take a look there first to see if what I’m saying here is true in your experience. But it also applies to the ‘big stuff’ in life, too: war, drought, domestic violence and poverty; and marriage, ourselves, sex, careers and retirement. Our experience of every one of these is 100 per cent created through thought.
‘So,’ I hear you say, ‘If I’m creating my experience, surely I can just stop? And why would I create such a horrible life of anxiety, if it were up to me?’
It seems to me that all human beings, at some point in their lives, go into resistance against what IS. We have thoughts and judgements that we’re not good enough, that something’s lacking, that we’re broken in some way, that life should be in some way different from the way it is right now and, because we don’t know any better, we believe those thoughts to be valid. We feel a sense of lack, that something’s missing, but we can’t quite put our finger on it.
From that place we start trying to ‘do life better’. We create vision boards of all the things we want, push ourselves, work harder, try to earn more money, try to be more confident, nicer and kinder, try to spend more time with our family and less time on our electronic devices, try to lose weight, have a nicer house, have more sex, have less sex, make sure everyone else is OK, and exercise more and in the right way. In short, we get busy chasing a feeling.
Whether we know it or not, the feeling we’re seeking is the simple one of love and contentment. The feeling that everything is perfect and there’s nowhere we’d rather be than right here, right now.
What we’re seeking is, in fact, the peace of Mind.
We’re physically busy and we’re also speeded up in our minds, trying to work out how to do more, bigger, better, faster – all in an innocent attempt to get closer to that feeling – and, at some point, life wakes us up to the fact we’re looking in the wrong place.
For some, it’s a heart attack or an addiction to alcohol, and the fallout associated with that: a marriage breakdown, bankruptcy, redundancy, depression, cancer, migraines, chronic fatigue or even an enlightenment experience, and for others it’s anxiety and/or panic attacks. It’s a mystery why we get the one we do. We don’t need to know. It seems to me life has already figured out the thing we’re most likely to listen to. It’s intelligent like that.
When we look back there were always little signs that we were heading off course, but we were so caught up in our self-conscious worried thinking about ourselves that we either didn’t hear them or completely ignored them. But life happens in service of us and it keeps attempting to wake us up until we have no choice but to listen.
So, you and I, we got ‘the anxiety experience’.
Anxiety is a gift, not a curse.
It gives us a chance to wake up, see something truer about the way life really works and see where that feeling we were always chasing really resides.
Thought creates experience. I want to be clear: it’s not that we have thinking about things and we experience that. It’s that the thing itself is created through thought.
It’s not that we have a sulky teenager, as evidenced by the slamming of doors and refusal to make their bed – it’s that we create that experience of our teenager through thought like this:
There are a few facts about the nature of thought that are really helpful to know.
Thought is a spiritual (and by that I simply mean formless) power that creates our entire experience, including our experience of ourselves. Without it, we couldn’t have an experience. It’s an energy that turns the formless into form in the shape of personal thinking that can be experienced. The nature of this spiritual power is that it’s always shifting and changing and, as a result, the thought that’s experienced is always shifting and changing – it’s transient by nature. Thought forms, it’s experienced, it goes back into the formless and it’s gone. The smoke arises, shifts, changes colour, dissipates and then arises to do it all over again. And because thought is infinitely creative, there are infinite thought forms that can be experienced. Which means:
We don’t HAVE to think anything about anything.
And that it’s possible for this:
To morph into this without us having to do anything:
It’s possible for this experience of a headache to transform from this:
To this, without us having to do anything:
Let me repeat that: without you having to do a thing.
There’s always less to do than you might think.
The fact that we don’t have to think anything about anything has several profound implications that I’d like you to consider:
To have a better relationship with our children, it isn’t true that our stroppy teenager needs to change their behaviour, or even that our thinking needs to change about our stroppy teenager. Instead, when thought changes form, which it always does, a stroppy teenager who slams doors and doesn’t make their bed is no longer created; instead, a beautiful teenager who makes us laugh when they slam doors appears and we have no idea whether they made their bed this morning because that just doesn’t seem important any more. A different person is created in front of us through thought.
Through thought, we’re no longer creating ourselves as the mother who is useless, can’t cope and shouldn’t have spent so many hours at the office. Instead, we see the arbitrary nature of the projection, the fact that it’s created in thought, and we fall back into love and witness the being slamming doors in front of our eyes.
The fact that we think and that our reality is created through what we call ‘thought’ is a principle, which means it’s true all the time and everywhere. Which means that if this is true about teenagers, it’s also true about everything. Which means it’s true about your boss, your work, your husband or wife, your health, your panic attacks and even… about you – 100 per cent of the time. No exceptions. Whether you believe it or not, it’s also true about whatever the thing is that you think might be scaring you.
Experience is created through thought.
And then we get to live in the feeling of that thinking.
If outraged, ‘how dare they!’ thinking is appearing we’re going to feel outraged and we’ll see evidence of how badly we’re being treated. If loving thought is appearing, we’re going to feel a feeling of love and see examples of loving behaviour all around us. If we’re experiencing anxious thinking, we’re going to experience an anxious feeling, and everything starts to look scary and overwhelming.
We’re never feeling what’s going on in the outside world; instead, we’re feeling our thinking in the moment. And that feeling lasts exactly as long as the thought. It’s blue smoke until it’s orange.
The worst thing we can ever experience is an uncomfortable thought. And thought is harmless – it’s a mere blip of energy. We are not our thinking.
A few years ago, I would live in prolonged periods of anxious thinking and feeling, believing that if I didn’t change my job or my kids or my husband in some way that there was no way the anxiety could be resolved. What was really going on was that I was continually thinking anxious thoughts and feelings, and inadvertently holding on to them by trying to get rid of them because I had a missing piece of understanding.
I didn’t understand the naturally transient nature of thought. That left to its own devices, each thought arises and dissipates without me having to do a thing. In fact, the less I try to get involved and manage my experience, the more free-flowing thought seems to become.
In addition, I was scared of my own thinking. I was terrified of my own experience because I was operating under a false assumption of what it really was. Remember the banging bridge example from Chapter 2? I thought my experiences of anxiety represented a ‘terrorist attack’ instead of ‘cars passing over me making a noise’. Same noise, completely different experience of it with understanding. Same thoughts, completely different experience of them with understanding.
These days, I might experience myself as a bundle of anxiety (with its associated feeling), as every human does, but because I’ve seen the evidence of the transience of thought for myself and its inherent harmlessness, it tends to pass on through and barely register before I’m recreated again as something else. And something else. And something else. The battle is over. Smoke-manipulator is no longer my job.
For me, anxiety has become more like one of many other emotions – anger, jealousy or sadness that just rise up, turn the smoke red or yellow or purple and then are just gone. Until the next time. The fact that we don’t have to think anything about anything means that any and every experience is up for grabs. And your relationship with any and every experience is open to change.
There is NOTHING you have to keep experiencing in the way you consistently believe that you do.
In fact, your experience of any circumstance, if you look, has always been fluctuating and variable over time. Yes, we can have habitual thoughts that occur over and over again, but when we start to see that they’re just made of thought and will move on through, we become free of the illusion of their reality. Our reality starts to look less real – we’re waking up to the dream. We start to see we’re not our thinking and that we don’t have to believe anything we think.
It’s as if there are two tracks in life.
One track contains a stream of our life events that we seem to be part of: a childhood where our parents were both out at work 16 hours a day, going to university and failing our degree, getting married then getting divorced, starting a new job and making a pile of money then losing it all, retiring, getting ill and so on.
The other track contains our experience of life: sadness, happiness, joy, fear, panic, anger, feeling sorry for ourselves, peace, upset and so on.
The two paths are completely unconnected to each other. They never, ever meet.
Whenever you hear yourself saying ‘I’m anxious because…’, you’ve simply fallen back into the outside-in illusion. I’m upset because… I’m angry because… I’m jealous because…
What is truer is ‘there is anxiousness,’ ‘there is upset’ or ‘there is anger.’ Period. There is no because. (Snargleblart? Don’t worry about it, just keep reading.)
It just doesn’t work that way.
I know this isn’t how it looks like it works. In the same way that, for centuries, it looked to us to be true that the Sun orbited the Earth, we then learned something that was true, and realized that what we previously thought was an illusion. We still fall for the illusion every time we sit in awe at a sunset, but we know that what we previously took to be true in fact just isn’t.
Do you remember James from the Introduction? He was convinced that he was anxious because of the traffic outside his house. He believed that the traffic caused his anxiety. After all, the traffic was really loud outside his house, he could tell you just how many cars had in fact gone past between the hours of 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. on any given morning. If there were no cars then he would have felt fine, so it MUST be the cars causing the anxiety.
James attended an online webinar where I shared what I’m teaching you here, and he was first to respond when I opened up for questions. He said, ‘I’ve just realized that the traffic isn’t causing my anxiety, it’s coming from ME! ME! It’s not the traffic, it’s my thinking about the traffic, it’s just my thinking!!!’
What he’d seen was that the number of cars travelling along the road went up and down all day long and his level of anxiety went up and down. But one wasn’t in any way related to the other, despite what he’d previously believed.
That for him was a fundamental insight and one that has completely changed his experience since that day. His understanding then started to deepen as we continued to work together. James saw that if the traffic had caused his anxiety then he should have felt fine when he travelled away from home for his work, but he didn’t – his head was still full of worried thinking. Instead of his experience being full of thoughts of the noise, he’d be thinking about how to sell his house, what-iffing (we’ll come to this in a later chapter) and worrying about having to return home. He was living with his pain of the noise – even when he wasn’t hearing it.
If it were true that traffic could cause anxiety, then his wife should have been as disturbed by the noise as he was, and she wasn’t. If it were true that traffic could cause anxiety, then he should have felt anxious all the time he was at home. After all, the volume of traffic didn’t change a huge extent over the course of a day, but sometimes he would be absorbed in conversation with his wife and the anxious thinking would just melt away altogether. There was anxiousness. And then there wasn’t.
Remember the diagram of the two arrows? James saw that cars were driving on the road outside his house on one path. And then on the other path was his experience of life. The two were unrelated. He saw this for himself – he realized it to be true.
And with that he stopped counting cars. He started sleeping at night. He was able to function better at work and in his relationship. He stopped constantly being up in his head, and became more present and nicer to be around. He rediscovered his sense of humour. He got his old self back. He shared what had happened for him at his workplace and is now involved in sharing what he has seen with others.
Not that you don’t have to be anxious about traffic. But you don’t have to think anything about anything.
In this audio, James and I share his story. James’ anxiety was caused by the traffic noises outside his house. Or so he thought…
Then he saw that the thing that he thought was causing his anxiety wasn’t. This is the story of what happened after that life-changing insight.
Listen to his full story here: https://alittlepeaceofmind.co.uk/bookresources/
When we start to see the true nature of thought we become less compelled by our thinking. Whether you have a formal diagnosis of OCD or not, every one of us has experienced intrusive and compelling personal thinking.
James had a different experience with his thoughts about traffic when he saw for himself how our experience is created from the inside-out. He became able to have the thought ‘there’s another car’ and not be compelled to dwell on it. He became able to have the question ‘Shall we sell the house?’ arise and not feel compelled to go down that rabbit hole – without even having to tell himself not to.
It’s funny, we have thoughts all day long – some seem to compel us, but the majority we just allow to pass through. For example, as I write this I’m in the Alps on a ski trip with my family. This morning, as I was lying in bed, resort workers were up in the mountains, setting off explosives for an hour to shift the snow and prevent avalanches. In my head was an image of some poor man in the pitch-black climbing up mountains with sticks of dynamite hanging out of the pockets of his boiler suit, lighting the fuses and then running like crazy to get away before they exploded, while trying to avoid the avalanches he was setting off. I must find out how avalanche bombs really work, I thought, dropped the thought, then snuggled back under the warm covers and went back to sleep.
The thought passed through, I didn’t feel compelled to act on it in that moment. At an appropriate moment later that morning, I asked my husband about them and he explained. (Thankfully, the image I had of these poor men was untrue.) At other times, I’ve had compelling thoughts which I’ve indulged: What shall I do for a living? or What school should I send my kids to? Shall I have a glass of wine this evening? I would ruminate over these thoughts, in essence having the same question occur to me again and again, while trying to figure out the answer or having an argument with myself about the options.
That’s really interesting to me – the difference between those two experiences. The first, with the avalanche bombs, felt neutral – it was just a passing thought and it was dropped in a heartbeat. The latter questions felt confusing, heavy, familiar and very Nicola-flavoured. What I see, as I look at these examples, is that we don’t have to be compelled by our thinking. When we find that we’re caught up in thinking, it’s good to know that it’s not compulsory. With insight into this understanding we start to see that we don’t have to drink that 7 p.m. glass of wine, smoke that cigarette, check the oven or switch the light switches off and on over and over. We start to see it’s just another example of anxious thinking we had been buying into. And we don’t have to indulge it any more.
It’s not that it’s not a good idea to indulge in painful thinking, it’s more than it ceases to make sense and just stops showing up as a feasible option.
We don’t have to feel anything about anything. And at the same time we are free to feel anything about anything.
I’m not saying if your mother passes away, you shouldn’t be upset. What I’m pointing out is that you’re not obliged to stay there for a predetermined amount of time. If losing your mother caused upset then you would stay there forever, because we know she won’t ever come back. But you won’t. At some point, you’ll experience peace, love, sadness, gratefulness, guilt or anger, and your mother will still be gone.
We get whatever colour smoke we get in the moment. That’s all. No reason why. No need to change it. No need to do anything with it at all. Wave management also falls off my job description.
For me, this gives a huge sense of relief. I’m free to experience any and all of my feelings fully. I’m not afraid of them any more.
Somehow along the way, we picked up the idea that some feelings and experiences are ‘better’ than others and some are ‘worse’. The aim of the game of life then becomes to get more of the better ones and fewer of the worse ones. But when we start to realize that we’re not our thinking, we start to get curious about what we might be instead. And we start to discover that there’s something that seems to sit quietly, observing all of the thinking with neutrality. Appreciating the impersonal nature of it.
As a result, one of the gifts of this understanding is that we start to become more OK with any experience – even given the fact that we’re not OK with some of them. We see our experience is just whatever the waves are doing on the surface right now – it’s just life doing its ‘life-ing’ thing.
This was a huge revelation to me. Trying to have a ‘pink fluffy life’ was a full-time, incredibly expensive and time-consuming job.
Being anxious, grumpy, cross and upset was OK? I could do all those without even trying! With that insight I became free. Free of the need to ‘have anxiety be gone’. Free of the need to arrange my life so it wouldn’t show up. Free of the need to try to control my thoughts. Just free.
I know that the worst that can happen to me is a thought. Painful though some of them can be, they can’t hurt me, and the nature of smoke is that it constantly shifts and changes.
But can’t we control our thoughts at all?
The simple answer is no. It doesn’t look to me that we get to control the thoughts that arise in any moment. They don’t come from things outside us, they don’t even come from us.
Thought occurs.
Screech to a halt – What??? We don’t control our thinking? Let’s side-step into this for a moment, because I know that, as someone who has experienced anxious thinking, you’re probably a total control freak. Chances are you spend the majority of your time trying to control the outside world and people around you so that you can manage them and be OK. (Did you even realize that was related to your anxiety?) My guess is that you’ve also used ‘controlling your thinking’ as the best way you know how to manage your anxiety and the very idea that that isn’t an option is terrifying.
‘You mean we’re just victims of thought and there’s nothing we can do about it? That’s not OK because then anything could happen inside my head and I can’t cope with that.’
The good news is that ‘I can’t cope with that’ isn’t true, it’s just another anxious thought. It’s Bob.
What is true is that we’re more like the baby in Chapter 2: thought occurs, experience arises and then it changes. There’s nothing to cope with – it’s just a temporary blip of energy. And the more we see the truth of this, the less it makes sense to try to ‘do something’ with our thoughts. For a start, it’s futile. The system just doesn’t work that way.
For example, when we have no idea about how human beings really work, we might believe that there’s something physically wrong with us. We get anxious that this might be serious, we can see the evidence that we’re tired a lot of the time and constantly need to go to the toilet, plus there’s an ache in our right knee that keeps flaring up. A thought occurs to Google our symptoms (also known as asking Bob in for tea!). We feel completely justified in our concerns and a thought occurs to go to the doctor to get it checked out.
The doctor examines us and can’t find any physical problem – it’s anxiety, he concludes. This thought has never occurred before. Then a thought occurs that this can’t be the case because the symptoms feel so real, then another thought occurs to get a second opinion. A thought occurs to book the appointment and another thought occurs to attend the appointment. Same diagnosis.
So, then a thought occurs that both doctors might have a point, so a thought occurs to go online and Google anxiety. A thought occurs to buy a book about anxiety that you’ve seen recommended and then, when it arrives, a thought occurs to read it. New ideas begin to occur as you read and, given the book says that there are such things as anxiety triggers, a thought occurs to examine your past to see what could be triggering your anxiety. As you do this, a thought occurs that you’re actually starting to feel worse as you start to look for things that might have broken you and you thereby start to find them. A thought occurs to stop doing that. Then a thought occurs to open Facebook to see what your friends are up to and a thought occurs to click on a post about a woman sharing her experience of anxiety. A thought occurs to learn more about what she calls the ‘Three Principles’ to which she seems to be pointing.
As you start to learn, insights and new thoughts occur–things that had never occurred in your experience before. And then the next morning – when you do your usual early-morning scan of your body and your knee starts to ache – a thought occurs to reach for the telephone to call the doctor, but, as you do so, a thought occurs that your experience of the pain in your knee is a thought. The idea occurs that you have a choice here – to call the surgery or to make a cup of tea. A thought occurs to make the tea and then a thought occurs to take your dog out for a walk. The thought of your painful knee doesn’t occur until the next day, when you start to do your early-morning scan of your body, and then a thought occurs that the need to do that scan is just thought, and then a thought occurs that you have a choice not to go there, and then a thought occurs to get up and get on with your day.
The idea that we have a choice and free will is just one of many thoughts that occur. You could rewrite this story with different thoughts and actions occurring at any point. The point is that thought occurs – ‘we’ are not ‘doing’ any of it.
For me, the realization that we’re not in control was at first terrifying. In fact, I had panic attacks for the entire night when I saw this for myself. And then it slowly dawned on me (a thought occurred!) that I‘d never actually been in control of my own thinking – I’d just been under the illusion that I was. It wasn’t that I’d had control of my thinking and I now needed to relinquish it – the principle of thought had never worked that way in the first place.
It was at that point I experienced a huge sense of relief and peace. For years I’d been attempting to manage not only my thinking, but also my entire life, and in the space of one new thought I realized I didn’t have to. It was like a great weight was lifted from my shoulders.
Thought occurs. It seems to me that the more deeply we start to see this understanding for ourselves, the less we care what colour smoke is currently showing up.
It seems to me that the ease in our lives in any moment is determined by:
As a reminder of the Three Principles:
The more deeply I see the truth of what’s being pointed to here, the clearer and calmer my thinking appears to be in any state of mind. But when I’m caught up in my thinking and completely lost in a low mood, my access to that truth appears restricted in that moment – given the destructive thoughts and actions I seem to get up to at those times.
There’s nothing we need to do about this, it’s just simply a description of how it works.
But surely we have the ability to think positively and change our thoughts? Consider it for a moment. You can’t unthink a thought that’s been thunk. As soon as you’re aware of a thought, it’s in the past. You can only experience the next one and the next one and the next one. You don’t get to choose the next one that shows up.
The idea here isn’t that ‘scary thoughts create scary experiences and therefore need to be changed’ – rather, the truth is that when you see all that’s being experienced is thought, the need to change it vanishes.
If you’re asking the question: ‘How do I change my thinking about…?’ Then you haven’t seen the truth that I’m attempting to point to. That’s OK. Sometimes it’s just helpful to know that we don’t know. Keep reading.
And when we’re no longer scared of our own thoughts, we’re at peace with any thought that shows up (and they will because that’s what they do). It ‘unsticks’ our thinking and it starts to flow naturally, more like the experience of the baby I shared with you earlier. We’re free to be thought up any which way.
And therein lies freedom from anxiety.
Freedom, not from having anxiety never show up, but from being at peace with it appearing whenever it shows up – for as long as it does.
Not as a good idea, not as a practice but because you see it always works that way.
We don’t have to think anything about anything.
‘How do you DO that, though – have different thinking about the same experience?’, you might ask. Here’s my answer: you just have to be willing to consider that it might be possible and go and look for yourself.
Here’s an example: one of the reasons we moved to France for a while was because my husband loves snowboarding, and we thought it would be a wonderful experience for our children to grow up right next to the ski slopes in the Alps. I had one ski lesson and it’s impossible for me to describe in words how much I hated it. The children took to it straight away, but that was my one and only experience of skiing.
Following our return to the UK, my husband took the children skiing on his own while I stayed at home. But a couple of years ago I agreed it would be so much easier if I came, too (plus, I had a romantic idea of doing lots of yoga every day while they were all out on the slopes), and so we booked a week away. Apart from constantly slipping over in the snow, trying to manage the behaviour of three tired kids while picking up ski gear, and the hours of waiting in the snow to check in, the first day all went well.
Then, one by one, every member of my family (except me, thankfully) was struck down with a sickness bug (and other unmentionable side-effects). The rest of the week was spent mainly escorting members of my family to the bathroom and cleaning up. The apartment was tiny, the weather was terrible, the Internet was non-existent (you’ll understand how bad this is if you have kids) and I spent the whole week worrying about the drive home. At this point I still wasn’t driving on motorways, and taking the wheel on the way home would mean a 12-hour drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. Not to mention driving my husband’s car, which I’d never driven before and was an automatic. Possibly with vomiting children in the back. And in the snow. It didn’t end up happening, but needless to say this, categorically, was the worst holiday of my life.
(Please note: none of what I worried about actually happened, but I lived as if it were taking place in this moment for a full six days.)
So, when my husband tentatively suggested that we go away to the mountains again, my automatic answer was ‘no’. He was suggesting driving for 16 hours with all of us in the car, renting another tiny apartment, this time in one of the highest resorts in France with a 45-minute hairpin-turn road to negotiate (I still hate heights) at the coldest time of the year (–23 degrees and my kids me do not mix well) with friends I didn’t know very well. Avalanches were guaranteed as far as I was concerned. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If the mountain is closed because of the snow when we get there, we’ll take the cable car up.’ As if that was going to make me feel better about the whole thing. Quite frankly, I couldn’t imagine a worse way to spend our Christmas holiday and I told him so.
But then after a while it occurred to me – What if all this is just anxiety, rather than factually just the perfect ingredients of a terrible holiday? Again. (We see the same things over and over and over, by the way.) And then it occurred to me, If it’s just anxiety, then I wonder if it’s possible to have a completely different experience of this holiday than I’m totally sure will happen? I got curious. I told my husband to book the trip.
When I realized I was just conjuring up scary-looking scenarios in my head and what-iffing, it occurred to me I didn’t have to do that and I just stopped.
A few days later, a completely unexpected insight arose – I could write a book while I’m there. With just that one thought, the whole ski trip moved from this:
To this:
I even began to look forward to going.
Here follows what happened:
The drive was fine – the children only punched each other a couple of times and were amazingly well behaved. We came to the mountain road and there was no scared thinking at all – I just felt completely normal. I couldn’t even tell you if there were sheer drops at the side of the road because I wasn’t anxiously looking for them. That in itself was a wonderful realization – it IS possible to have a completely different experience of something I was totally sure would make me anxious. And if it’s even true for mountain roads, then there’s no place it can’t be. Again, I saw the fact that what I’m pointing you to is a principle – it’s true always.
We checked in right away, picking up the ski equipment was straightforward and the weather was gorgeous. I pulled out my laptop on the first day and began to write. It looked like the whole trip was actually going to play out so much better than I could have imagined.
After an hour, my phone rang. ‘Your daughter is sick. Can you come and get her?’ Thus began three days of upset stomach and my while-they’re-skiing-I’ll-get-three- hours-to-focus-every-day writing time disappeared.
Then my husband fell and broke his elbow. As I write he’s in a plaster cast from wrist to shoulder, mournfully staring out of the window at all the fresh new snow that would be heaven to a snowboarder, while he’s forced to sit inside listening to me typing away writing this very sentence. Who is driving down the mountain when we leave tomorrow? A huge snowfall is predicted, I still haven’t ever driven my husband’s car or driven on the wrong side of the road, and there’s a 45-minute drive down a mountain in bad weather and a 16-hour drive that could well be coming my way.
But this is what’s so different. Instead of resenting my daughter for ‘stealing my writing time’, we curled up together on the sofa and watched Christmas movies while the beautiful snow fell outside. Instead of panicking about who’s driving tomorrow, I find myself not really thinking about it at all – I guess we’ll figure it out then. If I have to drive, oh well. And somehow I’ve still managed to write 13,000 words of this book, despite having no time to myself at all!
Here’s a wonderful thing to know about insight. We think we have an idea of the shape and form in which we’ll receive new thoughts and insights. I had begun to realize that ski trips aren’t actually as bad as I had thought they were. But then I realized that even when things go comically wrong (even the use of that word shows what a different experience I was having), I can still have a wonderful holiday.
That frees me up to say yes to any trip, any invitation, any opportunity, and know that:
For someone who’s life was once constricted to the inside walls of my house, this is truly transformational. And it also means:
It means a completely different experience of the same thing is always possible. And that, the more I see the truth in it, is incredibly hopeful. You see, thought feels real but it isn’t true. So, what if the thought that there’s a you who’s anxious is simply untrue?
What if the things you thought made you anxious were on one track and your experience of them was on the other and therefore completely unrelated?
What if one day you simply dipped your goggles into the water and they came out with a lens of uncertainty and fear, and then you took a look at yourself and mistakenly decided you were actually seeing yourself rather than just the goggles?
What if there really was nothing to do because you had never really been anxious in the first place?
What if you were really, truly willing to consider that fact?