Fear & worry don’t sound like very nice things to talk about, but there is something we can learn from them that just might turn things in a more positive direction. Have you ever heard the saying, “Lean into your fear”? Most likely.

But when has anyone said, “lean into your worry”? Maybe we should. 

A great analogy for leaning into fear is skiing. As you ski, you must lean forward down the steep mountain into that gravity you fear, as soon as you lean back away from the hill you lose your balance and lose control.  

As a mentor once said, “Fear makes you hesitate and hesitation gets you hurt.” As least in the ski world. 

But there’s lots of areas of life where you must lean into fear. In creativity, you must not be fearful of messing up, yet embrace accidents as a unique way of approaching new things. In business, you have to take risks so that your business can grow. Spiritually, you must visit the places in your heart that want to stay in the dark without awareness, facing that fear will show you how you need to change or grow.

I see worry or anxiety as a form of fear. It’s easy to come to this conclusion when you look closer at worries in your own life. Most of them are based in fear, fear of the future, fear of not having control, fear of what someone might think of you, fear of not having enough ...etc. 

Now surely if worry is a form of fear, and leaning into fear creates positive outcomes, then leaning into worry should bring positive reactions as well, right? 

Well, what exactly does it mean to lean into worry?

Think of it this way, to lean into worry is to face the worry head on, face to face, not to fight it but to listen to it. 

The fact that you’re worrying about something in the first place, indicates it is something important that needs to be addressed and not ignored. Ignoring it is the same as resisting it. Just as resisting fear is the opposite of leaning into it, If you resist the worry it only gains more control over you. 

The first step is in recognizing the worry or stress for what it is.

Once you recognize there is something very real bothering you and getting in your way, you can take it on, face it, lean into it. 

If something really is so important, you should not be trying to fix it with something as useless as worry.

There are two opposite directions you may choose from in this situation of anxiety. The negative path of resistance or the positive path of existence. 

At some points you may feel powerless to choose, this feeling may come from the fact that even after you have already chosen to take the positive path, you may slip and change directions so easily, leaving you feeling powerless. This is scary and also empowering. When you notice you have been lead by worry down the wrong path of thought within your mind, you have the power at any moment to change directions and choose the better thought path. While at the same time, when traveling along the better thought path you must keep your guard up till you are out of the anxiety completely, because at any moment you could be dragged back down by worry, even within your greatest and strongest of moments.

I choose, end of story.

But sooner or later we must realize we choose which leader to follow. We always choose where our thoughts take us, whether the choice is easy because of good situations or the choice is hard because of the way anxiety attacks you. 

Worry, stress, and anxiety would like to have us think we are out of control and have no choice when we are attacked by panic. At times in my life I have felt so out of control during a panic attack that it was an out of body experience where I felt detached from myself without a clue who I even was anymore. Indeed, sometimes it seems too strong for us. 

But do you understand the kind of power and permission you bring into your life when you realize you are the one in your head, you are the one in your body, you are the one within your spirit, nothing has control over you but you?

Although you may feel completely helpless, realizing you have complete control is the next step to overcoming the attacks.

Sometimes it is our own resisting that holds us back the most, our own inability to lean into this worry and accept it for what it is; nothing more than ourselves, which we have complete control over. 

Each of us may have many reasons for wanting to hold onto the belief that it is not us. We have proof to show that even when we try our best not to end up in a depressed state of mind, we end up there all the same with almost no visible amount of improvement, despite the fact that we hate to be there & no longer want to be this way. 

Each of us needs to find those reasons that make us want to hold onto the beliefs of powerlessness & rise above those lies. 

One of my personal reasons is that I do not want to feel accountable, I want a good excuse when I mess up that it’s not something I can control. But There is a huge difference between something you can control and something that you just do not know how to control yet. You may feel out of control, when all you need is time to gain the tools & knowledge that are gifted to us through life experiences. Many people latch onto this excuse of powerlessness because it takes so much patience and soul searching to change that it seems impossible.

Step two: Know what’s true!

Integrate into your thinking and believe that you are in complete control of where your thoughts lead you and the reactions you have to situations.  While at the same time, knowing that you may not have all of the life tools needed to carry this out at the moment. But you hold within you the same person in your weakest moments as you do in your strongest.

You hold within your spirit 100% of who you long to be, that person within you who you are growing into, simply needs to be freed. 

It is not a case of accumulating more of the characteristics of who you long to be, so much as it is a case of tearing away the false bits of who you thought you were, in order to free the “strongest you” who you already are. 

Liberate the “you” that is truest to your highest desire for yourself & free her from the bondage of ignorance and inexperience.

Then each time you feel anxious, slowly over the course of your life you will begin to change. But how? 

After the first step of recognizing worry for what it really is, and the second step of believing you are in complete control, now you begin to gather your tools for the future.

Step Three: Gather your tools for the future.

Do not take for granted those “strong moments” whether they come easily or not, within them are tools to be gathered that can be used time and time again. Also within the weakest areas of yourself there are tools to be gathered, tools of experience and learning not to be taken for granted.

As hard as it may be, you can draw upon you past positive experiences with worry. Perhaps you can think of a time when you have overcome even just a little or for just a second hesitated to give in. Draw upon that strength which you held then, though it seemed like it was not a part of you, like a strength that you do not have. Yet you know from you past experiences you had the strength in that moment. Believing that you are that same strong person will bring a powerful tool into your mind. 

At first you will only have the smallest of tools, very small instances that you can draw upon where you’ve overcome in the past. But nothing comes all at once and the longer you lean into the reality of your anxieties and the reality of your own power, the more tools you will have growing one upon another.

Now Refocus

With new tools under your belt, you may be ready to conquer the world, but there’s no enemy as bad as the enemy of distraction.

When you get lost in a spiral of desperation, recognize first where your focus is. Oftentimes the spiral’s power is within the spiral. When we focus on that feeling of worry, you have lost focus on the actual problem or the reality of the worry. As we talked about above, recognizing the fact that you are anxious points to a real issue, the goal is to focus on that issue that is causing you to get upset and not the fact that you are upset or have once again “lost it”. It seems simple and maybe it only works for me, but I guarantee that anyone who struggles to give themselves grace or forgive themselves for mistakes will relate. In the world of the people-pleaser or the perfectionist, recognizing you’re focusing on the problem the problem is creating and not the problem itself, can be a profound wake up call.

The worry is a distraction from the positive path, it’s the easy way out of dealing with a hard situation, it’s the opposite of leaning into the worry. Often I have let the worry drag me away from the issue into other areas of worry, causing me to feel inadequate or hate myself, not realizing the actual underlying cause in the first place. Indifference is very similar to resistance. Anytime you refuse to feel the pain of the issue and let it lead you to the real problem, you are resisting the worry and letting it distract you in it’s own deceptive way. 

I know what you may be thinking, because I have thought it often, how sometimes the anxiety comes on without reason, it seems like there is no underlying cause or trigger, it’s just attacking randomly. But remember what we talked about before, about being in control and how we chose this path for ourselves in the first place. Worry is a distraction, of course it will look random and disconnected from any underlying cause & perhaps you must endure more pain than expected to get to the bottom of it. 

A distraction can be like an illusion. When you look at worry this way, you’ll see that resisting worry causes you to miss the other thought paths you could have taken. Because when resisting it, you do not see it as “a way”, you see it as the “only way”. When we break free from its illusion we can see there is indeed other paths to choose from. We were lost in a thick cloud of ignorance that has now been blown away. 

The goal is to see worry lose control in our lives. It has no control on our lives anymore!

This is no plan for ridding your life of worry, simply a discussion to bring awareness into your life. To remind you not to resist worry, but to simply let worry exist so that it moves on like a mist. 

Things get bigger and scarier when we do not face them. They stick around and keep trying to get our attention. 

First when we face fear it induces even more pain, but once you have made it through, it no longer holds the same power over you. 

You have this tool now of knowing you can defeat it. You have more freedom now after letting that anxiety pass through you, really feeling it for the moment even though it is more painful that ignoring it. Now you have knowledge of yourself and your common reactions. Now you have these tools of knowledge when similar situations arise. 

You will fail again, but not in the same way, you’ll fail so similarly it will seem like you’ve learned nothing, but that is just how slow we grow. If you look back in 5 years, you’ll see then that you were growing the whole time.

Do not resist it, do not get lost in it; let it equip you with one more tool; with a little more strength. 

Do not resist it, do not get lost in it; but let it lead you to where the problem first began & gain insight into steps towards change.