ANXIETY & HOW
VEDIC MEDITATION RELIEVES IT
What actually is Anxiety?
Anxiety is generally created internally, meaning it’s caused by your reaction to stress, regardless of whether you are actually under threat of attack.
Usually, it involves a persistent feeling of uneasiness or dread that doesn’t go away and is often accompanied by persistent negative thinking and worrying, and can significantly interfere with how you live your life, even if there is no immediate threat to you.
Anxiety is caused by a combination of a build-up of stress in your body and is triggered by PCC's - Premature Cognitive Commitments - that are created as part of our fight/flight response.
Imagine your ancestor was out for a stroll and came across the fabled sabre-tooth tiger which they successfully fought or fled. Once their body was sure it was safe, like a good cop, it went back and reviewed the security footage:
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What happened just before the attack?
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Were there signs that we can spot in the future so that we don’t put ourselves in that situation again? A slight musty smell, a rustle in the grass or the lack of birds tweeting...
All these things were logged in their cellular memory as PCC's and every day their senses scanned through this list in comparison to the current moment so that the next time they smelled that smell or realised there was no bird sounds they were alerted to a potential threat by feelings of anxiety. They were prepared for the attack before it happened, further increasing their chances of survival.
How is Anxiety created?
This same system is still in operation in our bodies today!
Let’s say you had a ‘difficult’ discussion in meeting room B, with your boss who was wearing a particular brand of scent. If your body decided that location and smell were triggers to the stressful events that transpired, the next time you're in meeting room B or catch a whiff of that scent, your body will warn you and you’ll start feeling anxious.
However, our mind always needs content to go along with these emotions, and it generally picks from the most watched list, so it will match that anxiety feeling with something that is currently happening in your life or that you've been thinking about a lot. So you will think you're anxious about that when actually what you're feeling is a reminder about that previous event.
A typical 20-year-old has hundreds of thousands of PCC’s, so just imagine how many we have by the time we're in our 40's and beyond! All this unnecessary data is seriously slowing your body and brain down and causing you to feel constantly anxious.
Whenever something changes in the environment around you, your body is programmed to scan through these hundreds of thousands of emails to see if any of those situations match what’s currently happening.
This constant checking firstly uses up a lot of energy, which makes you tired and more prone to a stress response, which leads to the creation of more PCC's.
Yet the biggest concern is that it’s slowing down your fight/flight response kicking into gear when you actually need it. It can be why we unexpectedly freeze - unable to think or move while our body rifles through all those emails trying to find a matching situation.
Imagine your body is a computer and every time a new PCC is identified, it sends a new email
How does
Vedic Meditation
help with anxiety?
When you de-excite your body through Vedic Meditation, your body is able to clear out those old stored stresses AND it’s able to go through these old emails and decide which PCC’s it actually needs to keep, such as dark alleyways and strangers offering you sweeties, and which ones are just rubbish and can be cleared out.
Ever spent a couple of hours clearing out your inbox?
How good does it feel when you can clearly see the information you need and how much faster do you work? Your body feels the same.
And this is fast acting. We typically see anxiety levels reducing during the 4 days of the course.
Joanna's Personal Experience
"I used to have this debilitating fear of walking down the stairs"
If I couldn’t hold onto the bannister I’d have to desperately fight the urge to go down the stairs on my bottom!
I never looked at my phone and would avoid conversation if at all possible. All my attention was on where I was placing my feet. I dreaded the prospect of a client or interviewer saying "let's take the stairs".
One day, within my first year of meditating, I noticed that I’d just skipped down the stairs while looking at my phone. And these were no little steps either - the stairs up to my 3rd floor flat were almost vertical! “Wow, what just happened?”
Sometime later, I remembered that in my early 20’s I’d been going downstairs to the bathroom at a restaurant and the heel of my stiletto shoe had caught in the hem of my trousers and I went flying! Luckily for me, I’d been only about 2 steps from the bottom and so I just banged into the wall and twisted my ankle. Yet clearly this was a traumatising event for me as over the next 15 years I developed an almost debilitating fear of walking down the stairs and this was slowly spreading to walking up them also. I also stopped wearing trousers and high heels!
This trauma had been released from my system and I'm now free to walk and talk!