Level Up

 

I was traveling this week, which while I love to travel, I was traveling alone and navigating my general anxiety around air travel and driving long car rides alone. It's been tricky, trying to fall back in love with car trips while having, at times, crippling anxiety around driving in general. I've come a long way with managing the anxiety while driving; however, it's still managing around the feeling of anxiety. The anxiety doesn't go away, it's just sort of there and I'm managing it like a rowdy toddler who won't stop screaming and you've managed to turn down the noise just a bit with some ear buds here and there. 

So, on the drive back (2 hours), I decided to leverage some of the visualization techniques I've been trying lately to work through the anxiety and intrusive thoughts. I asked myself what peace would feel like in my body. What would it feel like if I just let the anxiety go? Would it feel like relief? Would it feel like a loosening of the pressure I often feel in my chest lately. What would it feel like if I just didn't feel anxious? And while I can't say the anxiety went away completely, or didn't at least crop up during times I was driving over bridges or past semis that weren't staying in their lanes; overall, I felt good. And even when I got on the plane, I just didn't feel scared. I felt at peace and just happy to be where I was at.

Now granted, I also still utilized grounding, deep breathing, and even some prayer on my part. But overall, I was really pleased with this new way of approaching my anxiety. Not fighting against it, but letting myself feel it and then letting it go - or perhaps transmuting it into peace. 

I'm still working on allowing myself to ponder what certain emotions feel like in my body. I've been so disconnected to my body for so long because I was in chronic pain for so long I had to disassociate from my body in order to survive it. But now that I've identified the majority of my food triggers and my physical symptoms are generally manageable, I still tend to fall into that habit of being disconnected. so that's definitely a work in progress. 

What really started all of this was when I was meditating midday and asking myself what hope felt like in my body. Just a simple thing, or seemingly simple thing, recommended by a dear friend in one of my online communities. But it's changed everything. 

It feels like a leve up. Like this has become a huge shift. My goal right now is to stick with that feeling and continue to explore it.