Latest / Sri Aurobindo Studies / Dealing with Anxiety and Worry

Transcript

Dealing with Anxiety and Worry · Sri Aurobindo Studies

• 0:00
  Many people express the idea that simply living life without
• 0:05
  any form of planning or care about organizing one's
• 0:08
  activities is the ideal worry free way of living.
• 0:13
  This conflates reasonable planning in the outer life with
• 0:17
  the internal process of worrying.
• 0:21
  Worrying is basically an inability to let go of some
• 0:24
  issue or circumstance that might affect one's life.
• 0:28
  A certain amount of worry tends to occur when people find that
• 0:32
  their income has been affected, or when they get potentially
• 0:35
  devastating health news for themselves or any of their
• 0:39
  family, or when someone is involved in some kind of
• 0:42
  accident, etcetera. Anxiety tends to arise when
• 0:47
  there are unknown factors or when the ego personality is put
• 0:51
  under pressure, such as having to do a speech before a large
• 0:55
  public audience, or facing an examination upon which one's
• 0:59
  future career may be affected, or when going in for a job
• 1:03
  interview. In many cases, the creation of
• 1:07
  what if scenarios takes up a lot of time and energy for things
• 1:12
  which in fact never occur. Confidence and faith can help
• 1:17
  mitigate this type of anxiety. For a spiritual seeker who may
• 1:22
  have found ways to mitigate most of the external causes of worry,
• 1:26
  there arise issues of worrying about his fitness for the
• 1:30
  spiritual path, his ability to maintain himself on that path,
• 1:35
  and the support he gets from the Divine to whom he has dedicated
• 1:38
  himself. All of these causes of worry and
• 1:42
  anxiety can and should be addressed, while at the same
• 1:46
  time the reasonable need for planning using the mental powers
• 1:51
  available to us can and should be maintained.
• 1:55
  Planning ties into the scheduled and fixed ways the world
• 1:59
  operates, whether it is regarding plane or train
• 2:02
  schedules, banking hours, shop openings, work schedules,
• 2:06
  etcetera. Planning also comes in when one
• 2:10
  is trying to operate a complex organization that has many
• 2:14
  moving parts that need to work together, coordinate and which
• 2:18
  are dependent on one another for the success of the activity.
• 2:23
  Planning should not revolve around worry but around the
• 2:26
  organization of tasks and actions around a chosen goal or
• 2:31
  objective. Worry is actually destructive
• 2:35
  rather than constructive as it eats away at the vital force and
• 2:40
  actually opens up the individual to the factor that is causing
• 2:44
  the worry in the 1st place. It is like punching a hole in
• 2:48
  one's aura, the protective vital envelope that helps mitigate the
• 2:53
  impact of forces with which an individual comes into contact.
• 2:58
  His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has this to say about worry.
• 3:03
  Quote if a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you
• 3:08
  can do something about it, then there is no need to worry.
• 3:13
  If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.
• 3:18
  There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.
• 3:21
  End Quote. The mother writes.
• 3:25
  Quote. Let us live each day without
• 3:27
  anxiety. Why worry beforehand about
• 3:31
  something that will probably never happen?
• 3:34
  Don't foresee difficulties. It does not help to surmount
• 3:37
  them and helps them to come. Live in the consciousness of the
• 3:41
  eternal and you will have no more worry.
• 3:45
  End Quote Reference Srioro Bindu and the Mother Looking from
• 3:50
  Within, Chapter 4, Ordinals and Difficulties, pages 98 to 99.