The worry monster that kills your wellbeing
Are you worried? Do you feel anxious and stressed and worried all the time? There is so much uncertainty to life already but in the current climate we have the noise of multiple communications direct to our person, numerous news sources feeding us negative information and high demand on our finances and time. It can seem as though there is a never ending stream of external things to worry about that we are subject to on top of the personal worries we are dealing with. But when the external bombardment stops just for a minute we are there with ourselves. And so what happens in your mind during that time?
I was in a discussion with a dear friend and was reminded of the powerful and thought provoking teacher, Alan Watts. I feel Alan was the precursor to Eckhart Tolle, I don’t know if Tolle studied Alan Watts, as they both share similar concepts, including my favourite, the ego. Another area that is common to both of them: the thoughts we endlessly engage with our ability to worry and the capacity for people to create either our own heaven or hell with our ways of being.
I like both Watts and Tolle as they discuss many of the areas that are central to their teachings that we at Yugen Wisdom employ with our individual and corporate clients. I find that Alan’s tone always sounds as though he is about the burst out laughing at the ridiculous state of what is it to be human. He is down to earth and practical. Tolle deliberately builds in long pauses during his dialogue. I am sure this is to bring the listeners’ attention to the moment as I can sometimes hear my own mind becoming irritated, wanting him to ‘get to the point’. This is a habit of my mind wanting the answer now; my life lessons in the past were about learning patience. Once patience is mastered, the next lesson is ready to be dealt, learning to ‘respond and not react’ and now , the lesson is about ‘total acceptance of what is’.
I enjoyed the video (below) about worrying, Alan discusses that we worry about worrying and worry if we don’t have anything to worry about then we are worried.
How to never be worried - Alan Watts enlightens us as to why we are worrying and how we can stop ourselves Video Credit: Absolute Motivation
Certainly, many clients I have seen over the last 25 years are addicted to thoughts.
I recall a particular client. She went home after a stressful day, would turn the TV on in one room, the radio in another, an iPod in her bedroom. She couldn’t stand the silence as she then started to engage in her worrying, and she didn’t like her thoughts and ‘incessant chattering of her monkey’. A term that we are all too familiar with.
Another client, when everything was going well and she had nothing to worry about, would then sabotage herself so that she created a problem and drama in her life in order to give herself something to worry about. I am sure some readers are thinking “OMG what an idiot why would she do that? I have never done that!” well I bet you have done at some level!
Like anything, we get addicted to certain items that we believe bring us a benefit, and thinking is no different. We can’t help ourselves. So dominant are these compulsive thoughts that they form a pattern which is difficult for us to change, even when these thoughts become detrimental to our wellbeing.
It deafens our intuition, which of course is an access point to our inner wisdom. It doesn’t allow for change, as the patterns become so ingrained within us, we fear change. We become scared of something that challenges our thinking, making us closed to new concepts or ways of thinking.
We spend years of our life at school/university learning facts and figures, some of which, if we are lucky, we get to apply in our chosen career path, or in later life. The one thing we fail to learn at these establishments, is to control and direct our thoughts, possibly in my opinion of one the most important skills we absolutely need in life.
So what comes next?
It is of course never too late to learn and if you wish to learn how to become a master of your own thoughts and give up worrying, then contact me to get started.
And in the meantime, make a start on yourself. With your very next thought ask yourself:
Is this bringing me peace to continue with this thought?
Is it real?
Is it relevant?
If you can control the worry monster you can improve your decision making, intuition and productivity. At Yugen we can help you with self improvement whether that is professional or emotional wellbeing or the reduction of stress and anxiety
“Alan Wilson Watts (1915–1973) was a British-American[1] philosopher who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.
Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York.
Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism.
In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, “from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written.”[2] He also explored human consciousness in the essay “The New Alchemy” (1958) and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. According to the critic Erik Davis, his “writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity.””