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I want to talk about something fundamental to being human:
Anxiety.
It has a way of creeping into the room uninvited.
You know the feeling… the tightness in your chest, the tension in your stomach, rapid heart rate, a restless energy that seems to want to take you over.
Most of us try to avoid it, resist it, or numb it away.
But what if anxiety isn’t the enemy at all?
It’s true. We don’t love the feeling.
But maybe that’s the whole point.
This particular cocktail of chemicals flooding your body isn’t meant to inspire a warm, cuddly feeling that makes you want to go lay out in the sun.
No — it has a very different purpose.
A vital one.
Its purpose is to get you the hell out of the way of whatever imminent danger your system thinks is coming.
Its entire role is agitation.
It’s not trying to comfort you; it’s trying to move you.
So it’s not a bad thing. It’s just misplaced in our modern environment.
We humans love to label things.
It makes the world feel more manageable.
We also love to qualify them: good, bad, me like, me no like.
Naturally, we slap the “bad” label on anxiety.
But in its essence, its not bad at all.
The problem isn’t anxiety itself… It's when it becomes chronic.
You see, we’ve done a decent job of eliminating most physical dangers.
We’re a well-protected animal now.
But your brain doesn’t live in the physical world.
It lives inside a dark, protective casing — your skull — interpreting the world through signals.
And most of the “data” it uses to gauge danger doesn’t come from outside; it comes from an internal world view built in your subconscious.
All those old memories, experiences, and fears you stored while your brain was still developing—they become ghosts your nervous system keeps reacting to.
Your poor brain can’t tell the difference between those phantoms in your head and actual physical danger.
So even when you’re perfectly safe, it’s convinced you’re under constant threat.
What we typically do is brace against this feeling.
If you look closely, most of us carry a constant, low-level tension throughout the day — a subtle tightening, a readiness to protect ourselves from feeling what we don’t want to feel.
This was my state for most of my life.
It was so familiar I didn’t even know I was doing it.
That tension is our shield.
It keeps life from penetrating us.
But here’s the paradox: resistance breeds persistence.
The more you resist, the more it sticks.
So what do we do?
What if we first removed the label?
What if we saw “anxiety” simply as energy moving through us?
And this energy:
Sometimes it rattles us.
Sometimes it makes us laugh.
Different flavors, same essence.
It’s all life force.
And life force moves. It changes. It transforms.
Which means anxiety isn’t here to trap you — it’s here to move you, to motivate action, and then to be transmuted.
And the only thing keeping it stuck… is your resistance to it.
We resist because we don’t like how it feels.
We’re afraid of our feelings — afraid they’ll swallow us up if we let them in.
But what if we didn’t resist?
What if we took a full breath… and welcomed every feeling, unafraid?
In that moment, something shifts.
We begin to have a direct relationship with life itself.
The barrier of tension we’ve been holding — the one that keeps experience at arm’s length — starts to dissolve.
There’s an ancient practice—used for thousands of years in Buddhist and Taoist traditions—of turning the energy of anxiety into something else.
Imagine a great fire in your chest.
When a log is placed in the flames, the fire doesn’t resist—it transforms it into heat, light, and ash.
This inner fire in your chest works the same way.
When anxiety, longing, or fear arises, don’t push it away.
Draw that energy into your heart and let it burn.
Feel the flames transmute it.
The tightness becomes warmth. The restlessness becomes vitality. Anxiety becomes something more loving.
What humbles me most about this practice is that this isn’t new.
Taoists and Buddhists mapped these practices thousands of years ago—proof that humans have always wrestled with anxiety, fear, and longing.
Civilization may have given us AI, smartphones, and modern medicine, but it hasn’t ended suffering.
If anything, progress simply relocated it—from the outer world to our internal one.
Once you’ve learned to transmute your own anxiety, the practice can expand.
This is where it blooms—moving you from the self-centeredness of the ego to the selflessness of the collective.
Breathe in not only your own pain, but the pain of others.
Recognize that countless people across the planet are suffering just as you are.
Draw that collective energy into your heart—a bright fire in the center of your chest—and let it transform.
Then breathe peace, ease, even love back out into the world.
This is the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen, meaning “giving and taking.”
It dissolves self-centered suffering and turns it into compassion.
Here’s a simple version to try when anxiety arises:
Acknowledge the feeling. Notice where it lives in your body.
Bring it to the heart. Visualize the energy being drawn into the chest.
Transmute. Feel the heart’s fire turning it into warmth and love.
Expand. Breathe in the pain of others, transform it, and send love back out.
Acknowledging and accepting what we feel is essential.
This practice is about using every ounce of life force—especially the uncomfortable parts—to become more present with life itself.
What changes is whether we stay tethered to our old identities, looping between longing and avoidance…
Or learn to convert that energy into states that empower our lives.
Try it the next time an emotion grips you.
Don’t resist it.
Don’t collapse into it.
Feel it. Acknowledge it. Accept it.
Then bring it inward, place it on the fire, and let it transform.
And maybe we’ll discover that life isn’t something to survive—but something to be lived.
– Paul
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