While our instinct is to turn away from anxious thoughts and feelings, learning to mindfully turn towards them awakens the neural circuitry we need to heal.
Our bodies are both the source of anxiety and the key to its resolution. We learn very early in life, as early as the womb, to avoid or resist pain, whether it’s origin is physical or emotional.
It’s this instinctive resistance to pain that causes and perpetuates anxiety, as well as many stress-induced physical symptoms, including chronic pain.
Intense emotions can be stored away, partitioned, or exiled out of our conscious awareness to protect us from being overwhelmed or incapacitated. This allows us to carry on with navigating life’s challenges.
It’s likely that over time our ability to suppress these emotions weakens or just outright collapses as emotions or stressors accumulate. As these suppressive forces weaken, the buried emotions threaten to emerge and this emerging threat can be felt as anxiety. On occasion, the sudden collapse of our suppressive capacity results in a flood of emotional energy that we might label as a panic attack.
This resisting of pain isn’t only a mental activity, it’s also very physical. Muscles and related connective tissue, or fascia, constrict to mute or block the pain from conscious awareness. This form of emotional protection is an unconscious, protective reflex that is baked into the nervous system.
This information about the physical aspects of anxiety is also helpful in appreciating how difficult personal change can be through mental effort alone. The reason for this is that the brain’s unconscious protective reflexes, that involve the body, are embeded in deep neural structures where conscious thought alone has little effect.
If thinking alone isn’t a powerful enough influence to amend the survival programming that fuels unconscious tension and anxiety, then what is?
Turning Towards the Body, the Here and Now
Our body gives us the option of experiencing life directly in the form of sensations or feelings, as opposed to the way the mind thinks abstractly about life. It’s this direct bodily experience of life and emotions that allows us to resolve anxious feelings and integrate suppressed emotions.
Feelings like terror, fear, dread, or anger are a direct experience of our life force energy, chi, or prana, in response to stressful events in our lives. This invisible life energy may be discounted by mainstream medicine and science, but it’s experienced by everyone. It’s experienced as bodily felt sensations and feelings.
It’s the judgment of and resistance to this emotional energy that lays the foundation for anxiety. The energy has a natural impulse to move and yet the nervous system’s protective reflexes try to clamp down and protect us from being overwhelmed. This inner dynamic creates an ongoing tension that we describe as anxiety.
Unfortunately, this protective storing or suppressing of difficult emotions, while helpful in the short term, can become a long term drain on emotional and physical reciliency.
Learning to Feel is the Answer
Being willing to feel the energy, as sensations and feelings, a process called interoception, wakes up our self-healing circuitry, namely the medial prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex.
This life energy is intelligent and when we put attention on it, curiously and non-judgmentally, it begins to balance itself and the stuck or stored emotions begin to flow and integrate into the system as a whole.
Here’s a special note for anyone who finds that mindfulness practice is difficult or impossible.
The next post will focus on how a history of early adversity can make reconnecting with your body more challenging and on what you can do to overcome that challenge.
Steve is a retired Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Acupuncture Physician, and HeartMath Trauma-Sensitive Certified Practitioner with over 35 years of clinical experience in Energy Medicine, Energy Psychology, and Biofeedback.