The Fear and Anxiety Solution (28 page)

As you are drawn into the core of this energetic field, you become aware of a brilliant light—the light of your essence. Delve into this light and become aware of its magnificent qualities and unlimited potential. Bask in the glow of your essence and allow peace and serenity to envelop you. All your worries, tension, and perceived limitations can dissolve here. Your old identities and outdated beliefs disintegrate and vanish in this light, while you recalibrate to the perfect blueprint of your true self.

Through the light of your essence, you have permanent access to all your inner gifts, resources, and powers. Focus on one or two specific qualities of your essence that seem to be the most pertinent for your life right now. These could be peace, strength, clarity, compassion, love, or awareness of your own worthiness. Then inhale and feed the light of your essence with love and appreciation, and notice how its brightness and brilliance increase. As you exhale, simply think, “I am …,” adding the quality or qualities of your essence you want to focus on. As you do this, watch how the light at your core begins to expand and radiate outward.

Continue to breathe in and out, fueling your essence with love and appreciation and allowing its light to intensify and spread out. Soon your essence envelops the atoms and molecules of your DNA and expands inside your cell’s
nucleus, restoring peace and harmony to your genetic coding. Those genes that have been overused by fear and anxiety are turned down, while others that are crucial for your healing and growth are activated.

After a few more breaths and silent “I am” declarations, the radiant light of your essence overflows into the cell plasma, revitalizing and rejuvenating all the organelles within it. At last your essence infuses the cell membrane, restoring all its elements and receptors to complete balance and harmony.

Now that your entire master cell is glowing brightly with the light of your essence, notice that this light can ignite the core energy that resides within each cell of your body. Continue to affirm internally your “I am” statement on the exhalation, and see how the cells around the master cell begin to shine brightly in the light of who you are.

With every breath, this brilliant energy expands to the millions of cells in your heart. Once your heart is completely illuminated and appears like an internal sun, its countless rays pulsate gently through your body. Each ray further ignites the light of all the cells in your chest, your abdomen, your arms and legs, your neck and head. Notice the waves of this harmonizing energy expanding throughout your entire body. Pay special attention to the areas that used to feel tense or tight when you experienced fear and anxiety. Each of your body’s trillions of cells, the spaces between the cells, every cavity, and every vessel becomes infused and filled with the light of your brilliant essence.

Let the light of your truth overflow and expand beyond the confines of your body and illuminate your electromagnetic field in all directions. This field of energy around you also functions as your protective shield and deflects any negative influences or projections from the outside, keeping you in a comfortable space of peace and self-reliance.

Allow this energy field to expand to a size that honors who you truly are. For the next several minutes, completely relax in the softly pulsating light, and let your mind and body recalibrate and come into harmonic resonance with the essence of your being. Be one with yourself.

To end, simply take three breaths in and out.

• • •

Know that every time you go through this process, realigning with your essence becomes easier and more natural, until soon your essence is the foundation of your identity. Through this realignment process, you’re building a solid
foundation of self-worth and inner peace, and you’re also restoring your mind and body to its original energetic blueprint of health and well-being.

The process worked beautifully for a client of mine. Claire had been struggling with anxiety and low self-esteem her entire life. When I first met her, she was barely thirty-eight years old, but she felt and moved like a woman twice her age. She’d recently lost a lot of weight. Her joints and back increasingly ached, her skin had started to break out with acne, and her menstrual bleeding hadn’t stopped for five weeks. She told me that at night she couldn’t rest, and if she did fall asleep, she was tormented by violent nightmares. In the mornings she barely crawled out of bed and had to drag herself through the already limited activities of the day.

“I’ve always taken care of myself,” she told me in dismay. “I eat well. I don’t drink or smoke. I meditate every day. And still my body is breaking down from the constant stress and anxiety.”

Since medical treatments and herbal supplements hadn’t provided significant improvement, Claire was certain that she needed to find and heal the deeper root cause of her challenges. During our work, she quickly realized that her foundation of self had been defined by lack and fragility. She grew up in extreme poverty and had spent many nights awake, hungry, and freezing. At school, she was often teased because of her old and ragged clothes, so she preferred staying alone and invisible to her peers. Despite her challenging childhood, Claire had managed to provide for herself pretty well as an adult. However, most of her choices, including those contributing to her healthy lifestyle, were still motivated by fear and anxiety. In her mind, she was simply too small, too sensitive, and too weak to fit into a highly demanding, rather unforgiving, fast-paced world.

The first time Claire practiced the realignment process, she noticed a dramatic shift. “My essence is so much stronger and more solid than I expected,” she said. “There’s such an abundance of energy and potency. Just looking at it makes me feel safe, as if nothing bad can ever happen to me.”

During the following days, she was able to remain calm and centered, even when her coworkers were stressing out. Their frequent bouts of stress usually zapped her into high-anxiety mode. But now, every time Claire meditated on her essence, her positive feelings solidified while the familiar undercurrent of stress and anxiety dwindled. Soon she noticed that her body started to adjust as well. After only three months, her pain was gone, her menstrual cycle was
regular, her skin cleared, and she’d even put on some weight. Claire had so much freed-up energy that she decided to practice ballet again, something she hadn’t been able to do for years. Most of all, Claire appreciated that her sense of being was now founded on her genuine trust in the amazing potential and strength of her essence.

When you align yourself with your core essence on a regular basis, you can approach your life—with all its opportunities and potential challenges—from a self-empowered place of balance and neutrality. It still amazes me how the simple act of turning inward and reconnecting to the light of who we are can transform our entire perspective about life and ourselves.

For me, this meditation changed my life. Micromanaging and overachieving used to be my normal mode. My days consisted of too much to do, too little time, and subpar (in my mind) accomplishments. The alignment with my essence made me understand that rather than trying to constantly prove myself and force life to happen, I could choose to flow with it and let the gifts of life come to me. This realization didn’t turn me into a couch potato (although I now actually allow myself to enjoy sitting on the couch from time to time). But it helped me, in a profound way, to shift my attitude of overachieving and underappreciating myself into an attitude of gratitude for the core of who I am.

By being in alignment with your essence and, thus, in a place of integrity with yourself, you’re no longer as affected by or attached to outer circumstances. You simply know that you have all the powers and inner resources you may need and want at your disposal. This doesn’t mean that your foundation of confidence and self-reliance will make you cold, calculating, or arrogant. Remember that your essence is also the source of love and compassion. Therefore, when you align with your core, you have greater access to these energies and can share them more easily with others. You may also find that you have much more love and compassion for yourself.

Through this realignment process you are building, on a mental, emotional, cellular, and energetic level, the essential foundation upon which you can create anything and anyone you want to be. Which brings us to the topic of our next chapter: who do you want to be?

Y
OU CAN ONLY
keep a change when you own it. In other words, for change to become truly meaningful and permanent, it needs to affect deeply how you perceive and relate to yourself at your very core. The work you’ve done so far through this book has prepared you to own your changes. So take a deep breath, get ready to redefine how you see yourself—your inner identity—and own it.

Keep in mind that no matter how hard we try, we can never fully appreciate and comprehend all of who we truly are, simply because we’re too complex, multilayered, and vast. This is why our subconscious applies filters to condense and simplify the otherwise overwhelming amount of information about ourselves into more comprehensible formats—our inner identities. Some of the strongest subconscious filters that shape how we see ourselves and the world around us are our core beliefs.

There’s a common saying, “What holds us back is not who we really are, but who we think we are.” In other words, we’re always more than who we believe and imagine ourselves to be. The truth of who you are goes far beyond your old fear-and-anxiety-based identity, which may have been defined by limiting core beliefs, such as “I’m not good enough,” “I don’t have what it takes,” or “The world isn’t a safe place.” As we’ve discussed, no matter how much emotional baggage we release from the past, fear and anxiety will start to rebuild quickly if we continue to identify ourselves fundamentally with such limiting beliefs. Even more than the actions we take, our beliefs determine the results we achieve and, therefore, how we feel. Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing
the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Haven’t you also found that despite trying many different approaches, your results often haven’t improved? Why is that? Because you haven’t changed your mind-set and beliefs. Changing behavior without changing beliefs is like buying a new car to become a better driver.

In the previous chapters, you’ve forged a closer connection to the essence of who you are. In doing so, you’ve built a stronger foundation of self. In this chapter, that strength will help you delve more deeply into your limiting core beliefs, eliminate them from your subconscious, and then replace them with a new, self-empowered identity.

In the circus, elephant handlers train their animals to remain calm and obedient when tied to a post. The method they use is rather sad. When the elephants are young, handlers take heavy chains and tether the animals to large tree trunks. No matter how hard the little elephants tug on the huge chains, they can’t break free. At some point, completely exhausted, the animals stop trying. Over time, handlers replace the chains with increasingly smaller ropes until it would be easy for the elephants to tear away the flimsy cords and escape to freedom. Still, the animals don’t even try to pull on the cords, because since their youth, they have associated the idea of being tied with the inability to move.

We humans too develop many of our limiting beliefs during childhood and adolescence, when the subconscious is most susceptible to outside influences. These beliefs aren’t usually our original ideas. Instead, they’re based on the beliefs and behaviors of our parents, peers, teachers, and other influences in our environment. To acquire a limiting core belief, we have to hear its message or experience its ramifications many times, each time feeling a relatively strong emotional response to it.

Shirley had been suffering from anxiety, guilt, and lack of self-worth for most of her life. Because she’d been adopted at birth, she dealt with feelings of sorrow about being abandoned by her biological mother. Her adoptive mother exacerbated the wound Shirley felt. The woman was extremely controlling, judgmental, and at times violent. For as long as Shirley remembered, no matter what she did, it was never good enough for her mother. She told me that when she was four years old, she decided that the only way to survive and someday have a chance to leave home and be free was to fully obey and please her mom.
However, as the years went by, the insults and judgments from her mother gradually erased Shirley’s sense of self. Even as she became an adult, with a successful career and her own family, Shirley’s identity remained defined by guilt, anxiety, and almost nonexistent self-worth. Still, dutifully, she continued to call her mother daily, wincing through the screaming accusations and petty insults.

Even as her mother grew extremely ill and Shirley became her caregiver, the dying woman continued to berate and criticize her. The last words Shirley heard as she sat by her mom’s deathbed were, “What do
you
want?” Then her mother deliberately turned her head away from her daughter and passed away.

Shirley’s husband, friends, and children saw clearly that she was a victim of her mother’s anger and abusive behavior. But no matter how much others supported and adored her, Shirley continued, even after her mother’s death, to hold on to the belief that there was nothing good or loveable about herself. Finally, when she was well into her fifties, the anxiety and the pain of believing that she was so seriously flawed sparked the courage and determination she needed to address the root cause of her limiting identity.

During the Pattern Resolution Process, Shirley tapped into a memory of when she was just one or two years old. She recalled her mother placing her on the kitchen table, gently tickling her, and speaking to her very sweetly. Shirley was delighted and responded with a big smile. At that very moment, her mother’s demeanor completely changed. She pointed her index finger at Shirley’s tiny face and yelled, “No! You’re a bad child.”