First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

by Sarah Wilson

There’s a bit in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now that I’ve always loved. It’s a little trick that can bring you back in from the anxious surge outward in a palm-to-face instant. It helped me get all that “be in the present” stuff that my anxiety had previously stopped me from even being able to conceptualize, let alone feel. I went hunting for the exact passage just now so I could share it with you. You might like to try it, right now. Not in the future! “Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?” He asks you to try it right now with a problem. Try it with a bit of your particular brand of anxious buzz as you read this. Feel into the problem now; not in sixty seconds, not in two seconds. Now! Your head might jump fifteen minutes ahead. No. Now. Is the problem still there? Nope. It’s gone, right? As Tolle tells it, worries don’t exist in the now. Worries about the future or the past don’t exist either—they’re just narratives we create in the present. Practice asking yourself “what’s the problem” often. See if you don’t start to feel the anxious cycle back away. See if those startled birds at sunset don’t begin to settle, softly, gently, at dusk. See if this gentleness is where you want to be.