Beyond Anxiety & Depression

Audio Transcript

With great love, I welcome everyone to today’s talks. With this pandemic, this has shown how fragile the human mind is and how unprepared we are as a society to deal with uncertainty. The mental health issues, depression, fear, anxiety, has multiplied over the past six to eight months tremendously all over the globe. And I wonder why as humanity, as a society, why are we so ill-prepared mentally? So obviously, there is a physical constraint in understanding the virus or the scientific advancement, but what about mentally? Why this upheaval can cause us to rapidly descend into all these negative states, anxiety, fear, depression, pain, phobias?

Personal Struggle with Anxiety

And I myself have suffered from this anxiety. So those who have been coming for the talks for a long time now, I’ve shared my struggle with anxiety. I had relentless, horrendous anxiety for years. And the only thing which helped me manage the anxiety was escaping it. And I think escape is the default mode for humanity itself. It’s a very destructive mode because it never gives us the solution. It just postpones the discomfort. So instead of facing the discomfort now, I’ll face it after two hours or four hours or one year or whatever. And I escaped this anxiety continuously for years.

Escape is Not the Answer

And I’ve seen people do that through games, video games or Netflix or relationships, sex, drug, drugs, whatever, whatever helps them. But is escape the answer? And I think all this escape now with the pandemic, there’s no way to escape it. It’s staring on your face. You either resolve it, you face it. But you can’t escape it. That uncertainty, that fear, that pain, that depression, that loneliness. And that’s where we see how fragile the human mind is. How easy it is to, sorry, I have to manage the microphones and the participants, I admit them. So how difficult or how easy it is for the mind to break? And what’s the solution here?

Facing Anxiety Directly

So for me, I escaped this anxiety for years and years and years. And all the while it was getting worse. And then one fine day I said, escape is not an option. There has to be some other way. How long will I postpone it? And this escape is like a slow poison for the system. You’re dying bit by bit every day. You’re suffering and dying bit by bit. You think maybe a bit of TV or a relationship will numb that pain. It does numb the pain temporarily. But that anxiety, that pain, that fear, that phobia, that depression is just there like a monster ready to just come back. So I said to myself, I will not escape this. And even though it was very terrifying for me, for the first time I sat with it. I gave it space. I let it be instead of escaping it or instead of modifying it.

Observing Without Modifying

So the other form of dealing with all these emotions, negative emotion is to modify them. Try to replace them with positive emotions or do something which will bring down the intensity of it. And the main idea behind this is I don’t want this state. The state is too uncomfortable. Hence, I will either escape it or modify it. And I said both the things have not worked for me for years. So I sat down with it. I didn’t modify it. I didn’t want it to go away. I didn’t say, oh, I don’t want it. It’s so uncomfortable. It’s so much of pain. What am I going to do? I’m going to lose control and I’m going to go down and spiral down. I said, let me see what happens. Will I really spiral down? Or is it another trick of the ego trying to tell me not to deal with it?

Welcoming Anxiety

So for the first time, when I sat down with that pain, I sat down with that anxiety and discomfort. Something amazing happened. The anxiety was still there. But the constant conflict and the struggle to run away from it was gone. And that’s a huge amount of energy. I just realized how much energy I was putting in to make these states go away. To just say, I don’t want them. They have to go away. They’re not good. They’re uncomfortable or whatever. That conflict, that constant struggle of not wanting something which is present all the time. That conflict, for the first time, I could observe, subsided. And that was a huge relief. So even though I still could see anxiety, but I was OK with it. I was fine with it. I didn’t want it to go away. I didn’t want to modify it. I didn’t want to change it. For the first time, I was observing it. I was watching it. I was giving it space, which was frankly not a good experience in the sense it was terrifying. You don’t want to feel those anxiety feelings or whatever feelings you’re feeling. And that’s why we’re escaping them all the while.

Loving the Anxiety

And so I did this for some days. And then one day when I was sitting with this, a radical thought came to my mind, which I had not read in any of the books or any of the paths for teachers. And the thought was, so first I was escaping them. Now I’m observing them. And now I told, there was a thought which came to my mind was, can I actually love my anxiety? And when the thought came in, it seemed like a very weird and stupid thought, which was like, are you crazy? But I went along with it. And I realized all my life, I have labeled this thing as something negative, something bad, something which should not be there, something which is not right with me. And that was an internal assessment, a perception of one of these emotions, which were arising in me. But who told me to feel like that? Why was I feeling like that? Why can’t I welcome them? It is just an uncomfortable feeling. It’s not that someone is holding a gun to my head and I’m going to die. It is just an uncomfortable feeling. It’s not that someone is holding a gun to my head and I’m going to be shot at. It is an emotion, a thought arising in my body-mind complex.

Observing vs Identifying

So instead of labeling it, I did, and observing it, I did something very different. I welcomed it. As a friend, I said, you’re here. You have been here for so many years. You’ve never left me. And it seems like I will never be able to escape you. Why can’t we be friends? Or why can’t I even love you? And in that moment, I could see the very roots of that anxiety, which was coming up. All this anxiety and fear and phobia and depression is there for a reason. There’s something unresolved. On one level, you know what it is. You know what you’re escaping. You know why you’re feeling sad and depressed about. You know why you’re feeling sad and depressed about. On some level, we are conscious of it. But when you go deeper, you can uncover the very root and say, okay, this is the reason. This was what I was feeling. And this is why it has not resolved all these years. This pain, this fear, this fear.

Freedom Through Perception

And in that moment, something more incredible happened for me. I could see all these emotions as thought and thoughts as something different from me. So what I mean to say is right now, if I can see my hand, I know this is my hand. These are my fingers, but this is not me or the whole of me. This is a part of me. This finger is a part of me. It’s not me in the sense. It’s not complete me. It’s just a part. Similarly, this fear and anxiety and all these mental states, they were not me. I could perceive them. I gave them reality. But just like my finger is not me, though, it’s a part of me. So you have to understand they are a part of you. I’m not saying they’re not a part of you. They are a part of you, but they are not you unless you totally identify with them.

Observing and Loving Mental Content

So I could see that all these thoughts arise and I am the perceiver of the thoughts. I am not this thought. I’m not my depression. I’m not my anxiety. I’m separate from it. I can observe it. I can watch it. I can choose to identify with them and create a story around them. And then be completely encased in that story. Or I could watch them. I could observe them or even love them. Knowing all the time, like my fingers or my hand, I’m the perceiver. I’m not that emotion. And this single insight changed my relationship with not only depression and anxiety, but with all my mental content. Whatever the mind was throwing at me, it could be emotions or sadness or pain or laughter or joy or happiness, all this content. I knew I can perceive it, but I’m not it.