Dealing with Anxiety — Spotify from the CEC Library

Behavior always goes hand in hand with spirituality, because everything we are influences both how we manifest ourselves and our energies. As we come to understand a little more about all our characteristics, about who we are, we also become able to take steps and achieve things along our spiritual path with much greater consistency, coherence, and meaning.

We can perceive all this spirituality around us. In the end, we remain distant from it because of the demands placed on us and everything we also learn in everyday life. It is about making that connection with what truly makes our lives happen, but which we do not see. What can you see through clairvoyance? The etheric double, which is the layer of energy close to our body that sustains it and gives us vitality. The aura, which is our energy field around the body and also expresses our emotional states, our thoughts, and our chakras. You can also perceive the manifestation of consciousnesses, such as spiritual helpers and people who accompany you, who may be close relatives.

It is interesting because, in a setting where you are being guided, you feel safer. This is very different from when we are at home alone, doing clairvoyance practices and feeling apprehensive about what we might see. In a group activity, everyone is together, supporting one another, which also brings a sense of security. There are various techniques: the facial technique in the mirror, the technique in pairs, perception of energy from nature, perception of energy from the hands, and visualization of the etheric double.

Our world suffers from this problem of anxiety. If you are listening to me and are around 60 or 70 years old, you may remember that, a long time ago, there was not so much information or such a fast pace. Imagine that you worked somewhere and walked to work at a leisurely pace. You would wake up and could take an hour to have your coffee at leisure. Then you would walk for just five minutes and already be at work. Then you would come home for lunch, return to work, work again, go back home, and do everything you needed to do.

It was a different time, when distances were shorter. The population of our Earth was also much smaller. If you keep track of the population of the Earth, you will find that we have six billion seven hundred million inhabitants. That is a lot of people, a great many people indeed. Our planet has a population density of about 2.7 people per square kilometer. You say: "Are there really that many?" It may seem like very few. I remember that, in the past, in the Amazon, there was not even one person per square kilometer. Now things are changing, the population is increasing, and when the population increases, distances increase, because not everyone can live in the same place.

You end up living farther and farther away, and usually everything you need, the major center where people shop and work, gets farther away. The center of consumption is usually downtown, in industrial areas, in areas with shopping malls, places like that. You will have to travel. Obviously, if the distance increases, you start to affect your inner time and space. A dissonance arises between the real space outside and the inner space in which you need things to happen. If you are writing this down, you will see that my reasoning is logical. You may ask: "But how is that possible? Do we have an inner space?" Yes, this inner space and time of yours are working all the time.

You end up using that inner space and time to make assessments, and you also use them as reference points for the things you are going to do. The result is that these inner reference points and external reality never match, and you will experience what we call anxiety, which can be called an anxiety disorder. You are going to work and leave an hour early. That hour goes by, and you say: "There will not be enough time, there will not be enough time, there will not be enough time." You will have great difficulty dealing with real time and your inner time because one of the two is running out. Sometimes our inner time runs out much faster than real time, and we fall into deep anguish.

A listener writes: "Every day, when I go to work, I feel very anxious. It feels as if something is going to happen. It is as if something were threatening me. This happens all the time. I have already spent two years in therapy, but it did not resolve the problem. I need to resolve this. It is causing me a great deal of suffering. I would like you to explain what path I could take."

Our defensive structures can take several forms. Anxiety is one of them, but consider what you are telling me: "It is as if something were threatening me." It feels as if something is going to happen. This kind of internal threat is an emotional threat, not a real threat. I think it arises from some event in your life, or several events, or one event and its repercussions.

We structure ourselves internally so that we can carry on and have a life in which we can produce things. In the course of our lives, events may occur that interfere with everything we do. To be able to continue, we create defensive arrangements that enable us to move forward. We do this to keep our psychic apparatus and our physical apparatus functioning. So, when you feel that something is threatening you, you need to see whether this happened at some point in your childhood or adolescence. You may have heard things; something may actually have happened that traumatized you, something you repressed and that suddenly becomes present when you experience a certain situation.

Here, for example, you are talking about work. There must be other situations in which you feel threatened, in which you do not feel safe. But for me to explain this to you, I would need to be with you. We would need to work together so that you could discover yourself, organize yourself calmly, and even defuse that delayed-action mine inside you. It was planted at some point in your life, and now, suddenly, it appears and bothers you.

You said you had therapy. I think that, when we undergo therapy, we first need to engage in it. Engaging in therapy means truly having a therapeutic alliance with the person who is going to treat us. Often you have a therapist (and I include myself in this too; I am not speaking about anyone in particular), but you cannot find in that person someone with whom you can truly see yourself, open up, and form a therapeutic alliance. It means being able to say: "I am walking alongside him. He is helping me. I trust him." We need to trust the person; that is important for you to truly make progress. Even if we say, "No, I trust them," something the person says, something about who they are, can take that trust away from us.

I think this trust is very important. That is why, when I am going to see someone, I always conduct an initial interview, have a conversation with that person to see whether there is empathy between us. This is quite important. I would need to know more about you to say that what is causing you suffering is there somewhere and that we need to work on it.

You cannot work on this with a single answer, because there may be several reasons that led you to sense a threat in the air. What you are describing is more or less the same thing that happens to someone who wants to do something and feels there is a barrier, but does not understand what the barrier is, does not know what is getting in the way. They say: "I try to do it, but it is as if something invisible were getting in my way." This needs to be uncovered; it needs to be defused. You need to see it clearly to resolve the issue. In this case, I think we would need to do therapy, something like that, so that we could see more clearly. I do not want to be superficial and start giving an answer here that I am sure will not be exactly what you need.

Another listener asks: "I would like you to address something that troubles me a great deal, Mr. Moisés. I began to suffer from an anxiety disorder, and my parents have always been this way. As I grew up, it only got worse, and I never knew how to deal with it properly. I have tried practicing meditation, but for me it was unbearable. What path can I take to get better? Besides that, what worries me a great deal is that I have a son who is already four years old, and I do not want him to become like me."

This person really is worried, because anxiety works like this: if you live with someone who has anxiety, you end up becoming anxious. This is quite interesting, and you, my listener, will have to agree with me. Live with someone who is very cheerful, and you end up becoming cheerful. You start to see humor in things where you did not see any before. Live with someone who is in a bad mood, and you end up becoming negative and bad-tempered. This is how these things spread: you spend time together, and this emotional contagion happens.

If you live with creative people, you become creative; you start to see life in a different way. This is important. So yes, you are right, because when you live with an anxious person, you end up becoming anxious too. It is the same as living with someone who eats a lot: you start doing the same; there is no way around it. You are absolutely right.

But to address the anxiety disorder, it is good for you to undergo therapy. You will have to understand how this process works so that you can deal with it; otherwise, you will try to resolve it through something we call control: "I am going to control my anxiety." Controlling anxiety means spending energy unnecessarily, because each time you will be trying to control yourself. Imagine how much energy you will have to expend to maintain a position while this process inside you, in your unconscious, never stops working; it is constant.

Anxiety does not stop. It does not say: "I will work for two hours, then take a break and come back afterward." No, anxiety has no working hours. It is an internal process that has become automatic and keeps working all the time. This anxiety is something distressing trying to get out of you, and it really will keep trying to get out.

Then you decide to control it. You will have to keep controlling, 24 hours a day, a process that is automatic, is that not true? I do not think this is viable. When someone says: "Now I am going to control myself," they will expend energy. You are waging war against a process that is automatic and simply has tremendous force.

Imagine this: take a very large inflatable ball, one of those plastic ones, push it into a swimming pool, and keep holding it down. If you want it to stay submerged, you will have to keep exerting force all the time to keep it from rising, is that not true? Now imagine how much energy you will expend to keep that ball down. Even if you have something to brace yourself against, you will have to exert force. The ball naturally wants to come up. It is not exerting force; you are the one exerting force. Do you agree?

The ball is precisely what you have repressed, the difficulty in your unconscious that has turned into something and, in this case, has turned into anxiety and needs to come out. You will have to deal with it in two ways: one is by making an effort to control this anxiety; the other is by uncovering this anxiety and defusing the whole structure that causes this anguish. Then things will be calm, and you will no longer have the problem. Instead of suffering from anxiety, you will be someone who does not have the problem and who will be able to act with complete calm and a very clear mind.

I suggest that you have therapy, even with your son, if appropriate. He needs to understand this, and so do you. So think about it, because you say you want to know what path you can take to get better. I think the path to getting better is therapy. You will be able to have this therapy and resolve the issue. There is a cure for this. When we try to cover up something that is happening, I think it does not solve much.

It is more or less like consolation and enlightenment. When someone is feeling unwell, you comfort them and say: "No, but everything will be all right. Stay calm." But you do not resolve the issue; you only smooth things over. Enlightenment means telling the person: "Look, it works this way, this way, this way. You are going to suffer; you are going to have to deal with this, is that not true?" The person has to go through it. I think it is the same thing when we do not see what is really happening.

Anxiety needs to be seen for what it really is within each person. It is a different process in each person. Whenever you have anxiety, you develop a control mechanism; you will always develop one. You will do this to survive. Internally, you begin choreographing how to keep yourself going, trying to make things better. When you are alone, you may become anxious, but when you are in someone else's presence, you tend to exert control. There is no way around it. If, for example, you have anxiety and begin to suffer, you are making an attempt to control the anxiety.

Sometimes this control really does become imperceptible, but you suffer. Suffering indicates that there is opposition, and that opposition is control. It could also be something else, but then we would need more time.