What if anxiety wasn’t so scary?

One of my clients shared this story with me and it touched me so profoundly I wanted to share it with you.

It was Halloween Nights of Horror in Universal studios at Disney in October.

They had put on a horrific tour that my client was invited to: zombies, bloody-axe wielding men, ghouls and monsters everywhere.

But my client doesn’t like horror stuff (don’t blame her, you wouldn’t have got me anywhere near).

As you can guess the makeup and special effects were outstanding and the tour was absolutely spectacular. It was dark, there actually was a street to walk down with lumbering zombies lurching at you from either side and mad men waving axes and shrieking in your face.

And it didn’t feel like a show at all to my client. She hid her face in her hands and her husband had to lead her through the grounds, shaking and on the brink of tears, planning what to do in the event she got grabbed and pulled away from the rest of the crowd.

Eventually she had had enough of the abject terror (as you would) and decided to sit in a cafe at the sidelines to wait it out – sending her husband and friends to go ahead.

It was a huge event and they took a while.

And as she sat at the table for over an hour, she gradually noticed something.

There was a curtained corridor in the corner of the room.

As she sipped her tea and she watched, she noticed that zombies would lumber in there, then lumber out again after 10 minutes and start their ‘route’ again.

They would lumber in the same direction, round in a circle for 20 minutes then back again.

And some zombies would lumber in, go down the corridor then a slightly taller zombie would wander out, but wearing the same clothes as the zombie that had just gone in there.

And in a heartbeat, she saw the truth of it.

They were going on their TEA BREAKS and changing shifts.

And in a second, she saw the glitch in the matrix. She saw that they looked real but they weren’t true.

For forty-odd years, she could have gone to that park and experienced the same feelings of terror and fear.

There was no efforting, there was no ‘taking on the fear’, there was no ‘putting on a brave face’ or ‘shrinking down the fear, turning it black and white, making it smaller and pushing it into a corner’ to help her overcome it.

She just saw the truth and it took one second.

The zombies looked real but she was no longer fooled into thinking they were true.

My guess is if she goes again, she might fall for it again, and it might look really real to her.

But never in the same way again.

She saw the glitch in the matrix, she saw the illusion for what it was, and would never be fooled in the same way again.

This is at the heart of what I’m sharing with you here at the Little Peace of Mind blog in terms of breaking through our fearful thoughts.

Imagine being free to have your anxious thinking but no longer be scared of it because you saw it for what it was?

Not ‘having to get rid of it’ or ‘finding better ways to deal with it.’ But seeing what it’s really made of and then losing the fear of the fear.

The reality you create with your thoughts can be completely convincing.

Yes, the thoughts that you have about being far from home being scary, needing to be around/not be around a certain person to be OK and all the things that you find make your stomach churn and your palms sweat, are, in fact (excuse my french) bollocks.

They look real, but they’re actually not true.

But once you see the truth of the illusion, that our thoughts create our reality and they are as insubstantial as puffs of smoke and just move on by if you let them, nothing is ever the same again.

Imagine if you didn’t care if your anxiety turned up or not.

Too weird to imagine? I created an audio below to explain more….

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