“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” – Unknown
Pain. It’s a part of human life that is unavoidable. It would seem that suffering is unavoidable, too.
When we talk about social anxiety, what we’re talking about really isn’t pain.
It’s suffering.
It’s the constant resistance to our anxiety (pain) that causes the suffering.
Pain is just a signal, that’s it.
What we do with that signal, how we fight it, or friend it determines our experience of whether we suffer or not.
Pain is harder to control. Suffering is far easier to control, and that’s the game we play with social anxiety recovery.
You are not a “painer” of social anxiety; you are a “sufferer” of social anxiety.
Letting Go of Long-Term Suffering
In today’s vlog, I talk about the key points of how we deal with this from a mindful, allowing perspective to allow the long-term suffering of social anxiety to dissolve away.
If we try to fight anxiety, make this pain go away, we’re just creating more suffering for ourselves, and not training ourselves to deal with this type of emotional pain in a new way.
Yes, the beliefs that are wired to anxiety create the suffering too – but the easiest place to start is by learning to not resist the anxiety and experience it in a new way.
You’re going to have to go through some pain to get to the other side, to end the long-term suffering.
But it won’t be as bad as you think when you actually start to do the work to recover. But you’ve got to do the work.
This is weird counter-intuitive stuff, but it works once you get the hang of it.
Breathe
Breathe into your anxiety.
You must practice to change, and practice as much as you can.
We can’t be different if we don’t practice something new.
If you want deep and lasting change, no pill is going to do that for you. You’ve got to do it, and you can.
Breathe deep and mindfully into your belly, not just to overcome your social anxiety, but so that your life becomes vibrant and new.
So that you become new, and can step fully into that confident person you were meant to be.
Do this everyday, and watch your life transform and social anxiety drop away.
