EXIT WORRY

Let go of worry.  Live in Trust.  

Don’t be oppressed by your problems.  All problems are imaginary, including the problem of your problems being too many or too heavy.  

Work for what you want in a balanced way, without stress, strain or strife, without worrying about what you are going to get.  

This represents a new way of living for many of us, one that takes much practice to master.  But as you practice and master it you are growing in joy, love, peace and enlightenment.  You are experiencing more fulfillment, more clarity about what is really going on in your life, and a greater sense of control. 

You discover that you are losing the need to struggle for control of your life, yourself or other people, as you practice feeling deeply, totally confident that life is always going to be on your side, that your life is always going to work out for you, that it IS right now working out for you, that you really have nothing to worry about.

The first thing every morning, practice observing how you are feeling.  

Notice your attitude. 

Then make gentle intentional effort to PRACTICE living in trust, in confidence, even in gratitude, for it is all working out for you, for you have nothing to worry about.  

Imagine how you would feel if you had all the wealth you desire, and that no one could ever take it away from you.  Live in that kind of trust, confidence, faith and security because you really have no need whatsoever to worry about money.

And nothing but worry can keep you feeling financially needy and insecure.

Trust that what you want will happen and trust that whatever happens to happen is in line with all you really want.

This practice of trust will only I free you from anxiety, to the extent that anxiety has become a habitual emotional pattern for you.

Awakening to what is happening in your mind, to how you are impacting yourself with your thinking, is the secret path to real happiness, fulfillment, love, success, security, inspiration and all of the freedom, power and peace that you can desire.

This awakening happens as you relentlessly observe your thinking, how your thinking influences your feelings, including your present feeling of emotion, mood, attitude – and how your present feeling influences your thinking.

As your thinking becomes more conscious, it becomes more under your control, and that sets you free from the core-problem plaguing all unhappy people: the problem of an uncontrolled imagination.

Nothing holds you back from experiencing all of the success, happiness, security and prosperity that you desire but a thought.  

But you have to awaken to your mind’s activities in the present moment to realize this.

You have no enemies but those you conceive of.  You have no problems but those you conceive of.  You are in no danger but the danger you conceive of.  You experience the reality that you conceive of.

With the realization of this comes real freedom, for you discover your freedom to simply let go of the only condition that bring you down, that make you feel lonely, lost and insecure: the condition we can describe as negative thinking.

This realization lets you cease identifying yourself as the unsuccessful, tragic idea of yourself that your mind may have been habitually creating.

Do you ever see yourself as less successful than you want to be?

To see yourself that way is to THINK of yourself that way.  

But as long as you think UNCONSCIOUSLY, you THINK that your problem is that you are unsuccessful, when your REAL problem is identifying with the THOUGHT or IDEA of yourself being unsuccessful.

The moment you drop the thought, or stop identifying with the thought, of yourself as less successful, accomplished, beautiful, magnificent, gifted or significant than you want to be, you gain your freedom.

In that state of freedom you can deliberately direct your destiny by thinking about the forms of success or accomplishment that you desire, by thinking of yourself in the life-experiences that you want to be having.

Follow up those thoughts with the practice of trusting that your thoughts foretell your future.

Trust that you are headed in those wonderful directions.

Even more powerful is to practice feeling that you are already there!

Stop imagining any space-time distance or separation between where you are and where you want to be.  

Stop projecting your success into the future.  

Instead of looking forward to anything, instead of envying anyone, imagine yourself in the experience of all you want right NOW.

You don’t have to hold onto beliefs about yourself being unsuccessful to feel motivated enough to becine more successful.  Just the opposite!

Conceiving of yourself as unsuccessful saps you of the motivation you need to do, to look, to feel, to think, and to produce at your highest levels.

Living in ideas of themselves as unsuccessful hinder people from experiencing more success.  

But as long as they automatically identify themselves with their tragic ideas of themselves, they can’t escape this trap. 

And they must continue identifying themselves with their sorry ideas of themselves until they awaken, until they actually SEE themselves doing it.

To be more successful, look at how you are succeeding and trust in your ability to succeed at whatever glorious level you desire.

Real success and happiness flow from trust, faith or confidence in yourself and in life.  

Do your best and trust that to be enough.  

Trust that you can be totally successful living in a balanced way, meaning a healthy way, nurturing your heart, nurturing your spirit.

When you face a danger, you really don’t have to worry about what might happen to be responsible.  Just the reverse!  

Trust that all will work out wonderfully.  Trust that your golden opportunity is present right here, right now.  Look for all that you can gain and you will find more gain than you can measure.

You always have perfectly wise guidance available.  Open your mind to receive inner guidance and it will dawn in good time. 

But you have to feel calm and secure within to receive wisdom’s guidance.

If you feel nervous, insecure and stressed out no idea that you receive will seem adequate.

Here is how to turn that situation around: to receive inner guidance when you feel frightened, just trust that that is okay to feel however you feel.  

As you practice trusting what is, you will naturally calm down, preparing you to receive further “instructions” from within.

Whatever you can control, great.  Control it.  But control it with out fear, anxiety or haste.

The moment fear runs you, no matter how hard you struggle to control a situation you fear manifests more and more of what you are struggling so hard to prevent, to escape from, to avoid.

So whatever you cannot control, that’s great too.  Trust that as well.

This is easier said than done, but it is something to practice, to master.  

What to practice? Practicing noticing what you are thinking when you are thinking it, until you realize that your thoughts are just thoughts.

They are representations of reality.  They are mental movies, and nothing more.

Then practice DIS-identifying from mental movies of yourself as unsuccessful, inadequate or inferior.

And practice DIS-identifying from your ideas of life as being dangerous, uncertain, or unreliable.

Practice reminding yourself, when you catch yourself thinking, that your thoughts are just thoughts, nothing more.

You live in a thought as long as you forget that.  As long as you relate with a disturbing thought ABOUT reality AS reality, you think you have a real problem, but your problem is just the thought that you have a real problem.

For instance, you might THINK you have a financial problem, but your real problem is identifying yourself with the idea of a person with a financial problem.

To gain mastery of your mind is to gain mastery over your life.

Recognizing that what you think is just a thought begins your freedom, releases your great creative power to control your thinking.  

As you direct your thinking, you direct your destiny and enter the life of true liberty, success and fulfillment that you most deeply long for.

Be on the lookout to catch yourself in the act of thinking.

The moment you catch yourself in the act of thinking, remind yourself that this thought is just a thought.

When you think of your mate and feel angry, remind yourself that your thought of your mate is just your thought of your mate.  It is not your mate.

When you think of your child and feel annoyed or concerned, tell yourself that your thought of your child is just your thought; it is not your child.

When you think of your neighbor, your friend, your colleague, your client or anyone from your past, tell yourself that you are looking at a thought, not at the person you are thinking about.

If you practice this long enough a sort of light will go on in your mind.  You will enter a new light, a higher light, a higher level of consciousness, a higher reality.

You will awaken from the dreams wrought by thought.  You will wake up from the one BIG dream that your thoughts about reality ARE reality.

That awakening marks your great initiation into a whole new life.  

In a real sense, it unites heaven and earth.

You will never feel like a victim again.  You will feel increasingly victorious every moment. 

You won’t feel down.  You’ll feel balanced.

Nothing that happens in life will drive you to react up or down when you have this awakening, because whatever happens you realize that you need to have your wits about you.  You need to direct and control your thinking, and you cannot do that in a state of emotional turbulence.

When you really trust whatever happens, why feel up or down in reaction to any event?

It’s ALL working out ALWAYS, so you are free from reacting, free from conditional joy and upsets. You have found real poise. You live in lasting joy.

Getting very excited about something or very disturbed about something means that you are reacting to your thoughts about reality, and that you have therefore divorced yourself from reality.

While you are “divorced from reality”, who is taking care of you?  Who is navigating your ship? 

Living in your thoughts is like driving your car blindfolded and expecting that to work out!

You are never REALLY outside of reality, but you are outside of awareness of reality when your consciousness has become absorbed by a dream.  

When you are in a dream you relate with the dream as reality.  

You might be a billionaire having a dream of being poor and start worrying about money!

You really are a billionaire!  You are as rich and as powerful as anyone else.  

But to connect with your wealth and power you need to wake up from the dream of your impoverishment and powerlessness.

When you feel powerless to improve things, to change things, to live in the life you want, you are identifying yourself with a powerless, victimizing, pathetic idea of yourself.

When you drop the ideas that bring you down you stop feeling down.

Don’t agree with this.  Don’t believe it.  Test it out.  Pay close attention to your mind all the time and remind yourself that your thoughts are just thoughts.  That is how to test this out.  Then you will reap the fruit of your awakening into from the dream of a nightmare-life into the splendid, triumphant, fulfilling life you heart most deeply craves.

Then you will exit all of your economic problems, relationship problems, parenting problems, career problems, emotional problems, problems with your past and problems with your future.

You will lose the need to continually plague yourself with problems.

When change arrives you won’t worry about how to adapt to it. 

When opportunities show up you won’t anxiously struggle to take advantage of them.

When dangers arise, you won’t worry about what is to become of you or of those you love. 

Living in trust and doing what you can in trust will prove to you that life is good, that you REALLY have nothing to worry about.

Practice living in trust, in confidence, in ever deeper and more complete faith that your life is truly and perfectly working out for you.

Practice being aware of your present moment experience to notice what is happening, so you can respond in line with what you want to happen.

Practice being aware of what you are thinking when you are thinking – and that you are thinking when you are thinking.

Practice reminding yourself when you think that your thought is just a thought.

Then you can evaluate the thought.  If it is working for you, great.  Use it.  If it is working against you, let it go.

THIS practice will set you free of the depressing sense of burden so many people suffer with.

Until individuals awaken to their mind they feel trapped, even enslaved, by insoluble problems.

For instance, a person may understand that he needs a sufficient amount of rest to do his best work, to achieve the best results, to get along well with others, to fully enjoy his life.  

And yet, he continues to drive himself with so much nervous intensity during the day that he cannot rest.

He continues to push himself to do more and more, to stay active into the late hours of evening, so that he cannot settle down to sleep.

And he continues to worry when he finally does lie down, because he THINKS he must, which deprives him of rest as well.

And why does he live this way? Because he CONCEIVES that he must.

If you try to explain to him that he really does not have to abuse himself like this, he may still argue with you, telling you that you don’t understand, that he really has no choice because of his responsibilities.

But this is just a thought that keeps him enchained in a slave-like condition.

Such a person really IS a slave.  We are ALL slaves until we wake up from our dream of thought.  We are enslaved by our ideas of NOT being free.  

When you realize that you push yourself too hard, feel down about yourself, worry about what may happen all because of nothing but a thought that tells you that you must, you found freedom.

When you realize that it is just a thought that is driving you crazy, just an assumption, just a groundless THEORY or HYPOTHESIS or INFEEENCE, you awaken to your freedom to actually choose a better way. 

We might describe this awakening as a new birth, for it marks your entry into a new life.

It certainly signals a NEW MIND.  A mind rooted in faith, a mind that has been UP-rooted from fear.

The TRUTH is that you really don’t know that you MUST run yourself down.  

For all you know, you can treat yourself well, get all the rest you need, live a worry-free and a hurry-free life AND GET AWAY WITH IT.

More than just get away with it. You will be getting ALL you want, as your attitude and abilities soar, and you experience more and more success with more and more joy.

Some people believe that other people prevent them from getting the what they need.

They might say that if they just got more help, more cooperation, more consideration, more appreciation they could be, do, or feel more of that they want.

But religiously examining their mind would reveal to them, eventually, that this is just a thought.  And from there they would soon realize that it is actually their THOUGHT of that condition which keeps them IN that condition.  

For all YOU really know you do not need any more help than you receive.

It is only fear-based imagination that tells us that we aren’t getting enough help, and that keeps us feeling helpless and resentful.

Slavery does not have to be legalized for people to feel like slaves and to live like slaves, over-burdened, under-rested and wracked with the emotional and physical pain that produces.

You are as enslaved as you are unconscious of your thinking!

Some of us believe that we MUST worry about the future. To live without worry would be irresponsible.

But paying closer attention to our mind soon reveals that all worry does is make our present moment unbearable as it prevents us from creating the conditions we you want.

You don’t HAVE to worry unless you believe that you have to.

You can gradually gain freedom from worry by simply observing your thinking and reminding yourself that what you think is just a thought.

To release yourself from worry, work at being more aware of what your mind is up to. Do this by simply practicing being aware of your present moment experience.

When you are lost in thought you are not here.  You are in a dream.

When you pay attention to your present moment experience, you realize the dream is just a dream and you wake up from it.

Present moment awareness reveals that every thought you think is actually a choice.

With that revelation you discover your FREEDOM to choose the direction of your life in that instant.

By directing your attention into consciously experiencing the now you see how you are presently treating yourself.

Until that awakening dawns, you confuse the way you treat yourself with the way you imagine others or life treating you.

When you enter that awakening, if you are being too hard on yourself, if you are relating with yourself too insensitively or even abusively, you realize it and you can stop!

As you pay conscious attention to your PRESENT experience you awaken to the life-path that you are choosing in the present moment, which lets you choose to a path of love.

You can choose to avoid pushing yourself too hard.  

You can choose to let go of worry.  

You can choose to rely on trust, real trust, trust on an emotional level, not just an intellectual level.

Practicing being aware of your present moment experience unveils the fact that all that prevents you from enjoying yourself this moment is choosing a way of life that makes you miserable in this moment.

As you see that, you don’t need any instructions on how to change.  You change automatically.

When you see HOW you are hurting yourself, and see that there really is no need to hurt yourself, you stop hurting yourself.

The only NEED to choose a miserable path in life is imaginary.

It is only believing in a thought that makes people choose a way of living that deprives them of joy, inner peace, security, freedom, inspiration.  

Awakening to the tyranny of thought sets one free of all sorts of painful conditions that so many regard as necessary, like the notion of aging.  

Many presume that they must live in the thought of aging.

You don’t have to think of yourself as aged, as aging, as old, as increasingly decrepit.  

Time is a concept.  It is an idea.  When you compare your present condition to an idea of yourself in a previous condition, you call that aging.

But what if you did not live in the idea of yourself as any age at all?

Mentally comparing things can be useful, but it can also be unnecessary, useless and even harmful.

You don’t have to live in any thought that brings you down.

You can experience a passing pain or feeling of discomfort in your body and simply let it go, without mentally identifying it as a sign that means you are getting old.

You don’t have to think of yourself as old or as young.  

You can live in a state of ageless awareness, awareness of yourself in the now, without comparing yourself to ideas of other people or to ideas of yourself at other times.

This is not being unrealistic.

It is being realistic.

The TRUTH is that aging is a concept.

But so many people are so attached to their concepts that they do not realize this.

They think aging is a physical condition.

Whatever your physical condition, when you experience it directly, sensually, without thinking about it, without imposing a concept upon it, it becomes an condition of agelessness.

When you live with awareness focused on your present experience, you will find your way to freedom from the intellectual and emotional baggage that used to make life so painful, so difficult, so heavy and burdensome.

Now you can logically argue for darkness.

You can defend your identification with painful ideas of yourself being too old or too young, too fat or too thin.

You can argue yourself into feeling trapped in poverty, powerlessness, failure and pointlessness.

That is your inherent freedom.

But what any of us DO with our freedom is up to us.

Those who really get this message realize that living is really an INSIDE game.

It is all going on within.

Your mind creates your experience.

You can direct your mind to enter freedom.

As you live with awareness of the present moment and awaken from the dream of thought you will find it impossible to deny that living in negativity is anything more than just a destructive habit.  

And with that comes the wonderful discovery of your freedom to to starve it by practicing a new way.

Here is another helpful practice.  Make a list of the events that occur in your daily life in which you tend to lose your confidence, your trust, and slip into worry, anxiousness or insecurity.  

Then, going down that list,  spend a few moments pausing at each item on the list, to visualize yourself remaining calm, feeling secure, and totally trusting that everything is working out wonderfully, and that your greatest dreams are coming true – not in spite of what has occurred, but because of it.

For instance, if you become anxious when your mate disagrees with you about something important, or when he or she does something else that you feel threatened by, take a few moments to visualize yourself feeling confident, secure, and trusting.

Imagine further that this activity your mate engages in is exactly RIGHT for you and perfectly aligned with all of your dreams coming true.

As you lose your fear of your mate, you will find yourself able to direct your fate, and better align your own choices with what you want in life.

Let’s say that you felt insecure in response to a thought about your finances, your health or a business arrangement.

Then visualize yourself feeling totally confident and secure about your finances, your health or that business arrangement.

Perhaps you felt anxious when your child resisted doing her homework, when your dentist told you about an expensive procedure you might be needing in the future, or after you sent someone an email that you quickly fretted over as possibly inappropriate.

Simply visualize yourself feeling confident about your child, secure about your teeth and your finances, trusting that the email you sent was just right.

As you practice feeling trust in place of worry, you will see how things actually can turn out for the best, and how you can assist in that happening.

At the same time, you will feel the fulfillment of inner peace in place of the pain of insecurity. 

And you will be transforming your patterns of reaction, moving from a lack of confidence into increasing confidence, which will relieve you of a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering.

If you actually practice this on a daily basis you will very quickly begin to find yourself being more self-aware and self-possessed when those or similar situations occur.

In fact, you will find yourself feeling more and more intrinsically secure about yourself, your life, and everyone in your life.

You will experience growing trust, confidence, faith in life, in God, in Love.

You will exit worry and all needless the harm wrought by worry.

Now, don’t for one moment imagine that feeling faith in life will diminish your power to work on your own or on others’ behalf.  

That is just imagination producing the very condition you want to avoid.

Trust instead that trusting works.  Trust that trusting will release you to do your best work, and all the work you really need to do for all that you desire to happen.

Those who feel that they are too advanced for this sort of work are probably not advanced enough to recognize its merits and to take it seriously.

Those who doubt that it can work probably need to do this work most of all.  Their doubt, their pessimism, keeps them in chains, the chains of inaction.

As you live in more deep trust in life, as you practice feeling confident that everything is going to work out despite logic, appearances or emotional reactions to the contrary, you will grow more content, fulfilled, inspired and even in love with your life.

You will find that this new level of trust does not diminish your drive to work.  On the contrary, it releases you from the chains of fear that have prevented you from working with your full power for all that you would love to bring about.

Anyone who is feeling deprived, undervalued, out of luck, over burdened, disadvantaged, used, overlooked or left behind is expressing their unconsciousness which fosters their attachment to what they think about.

They are so attached to their way of thinking that they do not realize that all they are doing is reacting to what they are thinking.

They might refuse to believe that their lives and their depressing thoughts about their lives are two distinct things.

They do not examine their thoughts enough to realize how presumptive, unfounded and purely conjectural their thinking is.

There are two important causes for this condition.  One has to do with fatigue.  The other has to do with emotion.

Just as we slip into dream land when we feel very sleepy, the more fatigued you feel the less alert you are to the distinction between what you are thinking and what you are thinking about.

In other words, a tired state makes it difficult, and even impossible, to realize that what you are reacting to is just a thought.

So you need to insure that you give yourself enough rest to be fully awakened to what your mind is up to.

And remember that the only “thing” that can prevent you from getting the rest you need is identification with an idea of yourself as someone without the freedom and power to accomplish this.

The second important cause of attachment to thinking has to do with the relationship between thought and emotion.

In the grips of a strong emotional reaction, it may be impossible to realize that you are just reacting to a thought.

Strong emotional reactions sort of galvanize awareness to thought, welding the two together, so that what you think appears to be what is really happening.

If you feel angry at your mate, you think your mate is too this or too that.

You don’t realize, in that moment, that you are conceiving of your mate in a way that makes you feel angry.

You don’t realize that you are reacting to an idea in your head.

Your mate might be a hundred miles away, but you are reacting to the thought of your mate without realizing that you are doing that.

You THINK you are reacting to your mate.

But your idea of your mate is not your mate.

If your idea is not working for you, let it go.

So the thing to practice to protect yourself from falling into the trap of confusing emotional thinking with reality is to practice NOT thinking when you feel emotional.

When you feel emotionally or emotionally down, don’t think.

Focus your attention on your present experience.

Focus your attention on how you are feeling, not on what you are feeling ABOUT.

When you think from an emotional state, your thought sends you deeper into that emotional state.

At the same time, you strengthen the unconscious habit of identifying your thoughts with actual direct knowledge of what is really happening.

The time to think constructively about people, choices, the past or the future is when you feel emotionally balanced, calm and secure.

Then you can think clearly and avoid slipping into thoughts and relating with them as reality.

Then you can direct your thoughts to direct your life.

Begin exiting worry by just paying a bit more attention to your thinking. 

When a worrisome thought occurs, remind yourself that your thought is just a thought.

You might also find help by questioning what you THINK when you feel worried.

Ask yourself, “Do I REALLY KNOW that I CANNOT be successful, or is that just a belief?  Do I REALLY KNOW that things won’t work out the way I want, or is that just a belief?”

If you are self-honest, you are bound to admit that you really do NOT know if everything you would love to happen is actually inevitable.

And even if something else occurs, for all you know, that can turn out to be even better.

Questioning your thoughts can lead you to the realization that you really do NOT have any reason to worry.

So here is what to practice: 

1. Trust in what was, what is and what will be.

2. Live with awareness of the present.

3. Pay particular attention to your mind, to realize what you are thinking, when you are thinking and THAT you are thinking

4. Remind yourself  when you catch yourself thinking you’re your thought is just a thought.

5. When your thinking induces an emotional reaction, question the underlying belief that produces that reaction.

As we practice these things we realize that ALL of our emotional suffering is imaginary based.

We realize that only identification with our thinking can keep us feeling enslaved, stuck or blocked from the life we deeply desire.

We REALIZE that our life is ruled by love, that no matter what happens it really is happening FOR us, never against us.

We begin finding our way to all that our hearts desire.

Even when something seems to be going wrong, we begin to really KNOW it is actually going right.

We realize that we are not just a product of PERFECT POWER, but a participant WITH THAT POWER.

We realize that our trust in ourselves and in our lives really IS absolutely justified.