ask tHe exPert
JoHN P. forsytH, Phd. And georg H. eifert, Phd. CoNtiNued
anxiety with defense and struggle, we can learn to let go of trying to deal with anxiety— we can learn to be gentler with ourselves and our thoughts and emotional life. Many of the exercises are aimed at building that skill. Then we will find the space to respond to it differently, and the space to do something new in our lives.
P: Which of your 52 ways to find peace of mind do you use most often? F & E: Honestly, we do our best to use most of them, but we do have some personal favorites. One of them is the“ I am” meditation. We have both been meditating twice a day for years. This exercise teaches us, in a disarmingly simple way, that we are not what our mind constantly tells us. Our minds are word-generating, story-telling machines. What we fail to see is that the mind’ s job is to produce thoughts— that’ s it. If you can learn to watch thinking as thinking and all the commentary the mind creates, what we ultimately come back to is a simple“ I am.” Not“ I am anxious.” Those are words— the mind describing the person and their emotional experience. But the words are not the person. Heck, when you were six years old and someone asked you“ who are you,” you might have responded“ I am a first grader.” But do you still call yourself a first grader? Are those words really who you are?
Also, we like the exercises that teach us more flexible perspective-taking. We cannot change what we don’ t know or are unwilling to look at. We have an exercise where we have people describe their anxiety as if it were another person— give it a personality, age, tone of voice, right down to their shoes. Then, we ask, is this someone who you want to hang out with? Is this character someone that gives you good advice? This exercise is helpful in getting perspective.
P: How is Anxiety Happens different than other self-help books on the same subject?
64 PULSE ■ August 2018