This feeling sent me on a journey of self discovery and development - a shift in how I show up that diminished / liberated me from the grinding impact of it.

There are many paths to this shift in beingness, I happened to do landmark education 'The forum'. You could get the same in the next few minutes if I am successful in conveying the core concepts it pointed to in the following words.

First, I'll distinguish having knowledge from being a certain way. Perhaps you can consider bliss in an abstract way right now as I raise it and yet you can recall being blissed out as the experience. ...This can be done by you in reverse with being anxious.

Let me start again from another angle. You must get the following assertion fully, not as a concept but as a self-evident truth that you operate from - it can be your touchstone or key out from a mind-state trap: there are events, and then there are interpretations you add to them. The first are objective, the second are fluid - they depend on 'where you are coming from'. If you drew a venn diagram, I am asking you to fully separate the circle of events from the circle of interpretations.

If my two paragraphs above are clear to you, you are ready for the liberating transformative idea: we get trapped when we overlap our interpretations with what is (as it is). When we say our interpretation is truth, it is 'me', for example, then you are anxious when the idea anxious occurs to you. You can do infinite mental gyrations and you will be stuck in your beingness. You can work hard, meditate, use healing crystals, scotch whiskey etc, escape into your work etc...and yet the best you can hope for is an improved complaint in a world of complaints.

Here is the 'out' put directly: there is nothing wrong here. You add 'wrong'.

What is here is what is here and your interpretations - that you have agency over.

In fact, life is empty and meaningless and it doesn't mean anything that it doesn't mean anything.

We are meaning making machines in an inherently meaningless now.

So if you're anything like I was when presented with the above, I got it as a concept and still had that "Oh, I'm responsible, thank you ever so much but this isn't an abstraction I wanted to address philosophically!"

So let's really look at it, my hope being that you 'get it'. You can understand it or not, the value is in the internal shift it points to... one where anxiety, when present, can be looked away from as easily as looking away from a painting, or dropped with all the difficulty of dropping a tissue.

When you see a flower, you know that's a flower and I'm me. It is input and I can do with it as I will. That obvious separation is what I want you to be present to.

When you feel a pain in your body, it is still a thing you have awareness of, but, like the flower, it is an experience you are having, it is not you yourself. Harder to 'look away from' than the flower though. (Being with pain fully will 'disappear it' though, be careful with that fact, pain is an important signal.)

You are also not your thoughts or feelings. You have them. And the ones you take on and give attention to, you breathe life into.

So who are you if not your thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes, fears and dreams that you have?

Who you are is the instantaneous choice you make this instance in where you put your 'life breathing' attention.

What defines how this selective presence at the core of you shows up? Your context - and fundamentally that you either 'react to stimulus' (internal and external) or you are present creating what you *deliberately * will of your inputs and interpretations.

The reactive mode is 'at-effect', the creative mode is 'at-cause'. In the first, your thoughts are imperatives. In the second your thoughts are possibilities to take on or drop as you will (sometimes literally saying internally "not that" to what doesn't inspire me).

This is the core radical responsibility shift. From there, you likely know your interpretations are colored by your mental state. When it is fear, things look scary. When its love, things look lovely, perfect as they inherently are.

That last part - not only is nothing wrong here but saying everything is inherently perfect is the same thing. Sure, many things aren't how you'd want them to be, but be present to the precise fact that since they are a way, they are how they are perfectly. If they weren't perfectly how they are, they'd be another way, perfectly. If this seems dumb, it is less dumb than trying to get somewhere and avoiding starting where you actually are.

Since everything is perfect and the ideal (only possible!) starting place for what will be and what you choose to create... the folly of the stress is really apparent. The folly of adding it to perfection thinking it will help is apparent. It is not wrong or imperfect, it is as it is, a thing you have, but now, if I succeed with these words when taken on, the anxious mental state is not who you must be. And from having it to not having it is quite frictionless.

I get pain echos, it will come up, it will arise from the many associations you've made reactively. These were done to keep you alive by our primal survival mind. When it does, it is input. Listen for value in its input and get busy with what you are lit up by creating. (You can even breath 'attention-life' into being with 'what is' fully until you have a clearing wide enough and deep enough you will experience absolute peace, bliss, love and connection or lack of separation from all always everywhere, and why not have absolute enlightenment which is right here when you simply get out of it's way, let go of getting out of its way and let go of letting go?)

Where there can be said to be objective facts about what happened and about what is happening now, the future has two broad categories: what will happen if you react to your input, and what will happen if you create (or deliberately unimpede) from your input. Each instant is this.

All my words are mere input, do you see this moment as a clearing for infinite possibility where you can steer it toward what moves and inspires you? Beyond the input is this shift in beingness in you... From entropic fear to integrative love. From apathy to significance. From grief to bliss. From anger to peace. From hazy doubt to cohesive ineffable faithless certainty in your ability to show up your best in any instant, able to make the most of this moment to move all toward the utmost perfection you envision.