There’s a wonderful line in the sitcom Friends where Monica’s new psychiatrist boyfriend meets Chandler for the first time. After spending a bit of time together, the psychiatrist comments, ‘You’re a funny guy… I’d hate to be there when the laughter stops.’
When I first met with Nicola Bird after an event I’d been speaking at, I had a similar but perhaps more positively inclined thought. You’re an amazing, smart, insightful woman, I thought to myself. I wonder if you’ll ever slow down enough to realize it.
In the years that followed on from that first meeting, where Nicola progressed from client to student to friend and colleague, I’ve been fortunate to witness the fruits of a brilliant mind slowing down to the speed of life. And now it’s your turn…
Anxiety can’t stop you from succeeding in the world, but it can take all the fun out of the game. And while the sweet feeling of the peace of mind is its own reward, it also tends to unleash a level of guiding wisdom in us that makes it easier for us to navigate our lives with less thinking on our mind and more love and compassion in our hearts.
Which is why this isn’t, as Nicola points out often and well throughout, a book about anxiety. It’s a wonderful book about the nature of human beings and our potential to find ‘a little peace of mind’ in the midst of pretty much everything that’s happening, and everything we think about what has happened in the past or might happen in the future.
In fact, it’s our ability to separate out what she describes as the ‘smoke’ of our thinking from the smoke machine that produces it that is where we will ultimately find our peace and the wellbeing at the core of who and what we really are.
What’s on offer here is so much more than just relief from whatever anxious symptoms you may be suffering with, and even from whatever ‘reality’ you think is causing them. What’s on offer is nothing more or less than an awakening to your true nature.
So, whether you’re reading this through a haze of anxiety or a buzz of excitement, I encourage you to take your time, have fun, learn heaps and, as Nicola says…
Prepare to be snargled!
With all my love,
Michael Neill
Bestselling author of The Inside-Out Revolution and The Space Within