Anxiety is my super power.

​​“Turn to the other side of your nature. You are both human and divine. There is that in you that can never be hurt, that is always poised and peaceful, that knows your spiritual unity with God and knows no-one can take your good from you” – ERIC BUTTERWORTH, from Discover the power within you.
 
Some days when I am anxious, I can’t face making dinner or cleaning the bathroom. So I go to the kitchen, and I lay out the chopping board and the onion and then I just walk away. I take a cloth to the bathroom, and I just polish one tap. Because I know I need to keep moving. Even when it’s hard. Doing that one tiny thing is me rising up and reclaiming my power. Yes, I have anxiety, but I also have other parts of me too. Those who deserve time and nourishment. It is for those parts of me that I write this.
 
Plurality of causes. Anxiety is both response and symptom but not cause. The development of an anxiety disorder can be caused by multiple factors. Personality type, behavioural conditioning, biology, life experiences, lifestyle, diet and overall mental health. For a “sensitive” person, who feels empathy and emotions deeply it is easy to be influenced negatively by outside energy, but, it is also true that this sensitive person will also experience joy and beauty in the world more easily and deeply too.
 
What first appears to be a weakness can be looked at as a superpower.
 
Worrying in its evolutionary and biological capacity has arguably been advantageous for humans. Awareness for survival in a wild world was necessary. A fantastic application to outsmart a mountain lion but with new threats like nuclear wars, mortgage rises and global warming, anxiety can become a burden. So, with the awareness of what can happen if anxiety becomes the only running programme within the body. How do we awaken the other parts of ourselves?
 
Where attention goes, Energy flows.
 
I purposely plan into my days and weeks, healing activities which nourish the parts of myself that I want to see more of. The artist, the chef, the lover, the wild fierce woman who would fight a bear for her children. She’s in there. I just need to shift my focus and call her forward.
 
‘…for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline’ – 2 Timothy Ch 1 vs 7
 
Stefanie Bridges
Unity finance officer

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