Worry Makes Anxiety Grow

Seeing the bigger picture is one way of finding a point of steadiness in the ups and downs of life and aligning body, mind, heart and spirit. ) But if always being right resembles Clottery, why would anyone crave that not-so-bright-and-shiny position? My years of clinical practice suggest that being right allows us to believe our indignation is justified. In this way, we rationalize all kinds of poor treatment of others without realizing we're using people as receptacles for what we cannot stand in ourselves. Here's the kicker: being proven right doesn't make things better. It may just make them worse. People who know you're right may be unwilling to listen to you, follow instructions, or do what they're told simply to spite your poor behavior. The world is full of anti-authoritarian types just looking for a jerk to push back against, especially when that jerk is right! Being strictly right or wrong are extreme positions, anyway. They create enmity between the world and ourselves. We live in a diverse world with conflicting ideas about how to govern it, steward it, serve it, and live in it. Our experiences create varied wells of compassion. Our environments shaped our perceptions and politics and passions. We hold different worldviews. One person believes a system needs to be shored up, and another believes it should be dismantled top to bottom, so I've learned to stay focused on who and what I am advocating for and far less on the disapproval. Focusing on the criticism creates sideways energy that takes me off task and does exactly no good. So rather than argue and defend, or plead and cajole, or try to convince and persuade critics, I bless and release them. Go well with God, and may he bless you on your journey. Sisters, this is actually possible.

You are not required to engage every argument or defend your compassion. Wright had found one such molecule called aspergillomarasmine A, or AMA, in the Nova Scotia soil sample. 3 So his research took on a new focus. Now, his target was to convert this into a weapon against bacteria that contain a peculiar enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to large numbers of highly potent drugs. The name of the enzyme is New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1, or NDM-1. Little connects the teeming population and activity of New Delhi, India, and the Svalbard archipelago. The latter is situated high up in the Arctic Ocean, about midway between the North Pole and mainland Norway. Not much grows here. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the archipelago was a whaling base for Norwegian explorers. Today, Svalbard is known for something altogether different. 0 average. She also knew that she was not deserving or worthy of such an award in the first place, which meant that trying to do her best did not warrant the effort it might cost. Like many of us, it became apparent to M later in life that one more measure of competence or worthiness, even a small one, could have given her the courage to take the risks involved. Instead, she was saddled with the regret of not even trying. Such is often the cost of low self- esteem. Charles Darwin was one of the first to note the importance of emotions in regulating animal behavior. Since then scientists, including neuroscientists and psychologists, have continued to study emotions. Most of this considerable body of work concerns negative ones, such as fear, anger, or anxiety, and for very good reasons.

For one thing, some of these emotions, particularly those that are associated with the fight- or- flight (sympathetic nervous system) mechanism, are very important for survival, which means that they have high evolutionary value. You are not being encouraged to settle for passivity or a lack of feeling but rather a detachment from the highs and lows of emotions you associate with events and circumstances. Prioritizing can help you maintain balance in your life, as the following story illustrates. The key point is that in order to live a happy, balanced, healthy and successful life in all areas, you need to get your priorities right. If you fill up your life first with all the small things, like filling the empty jar with sand first, then there won't be any space for the important things. Your life will be filled with unimportant and insignificant things. Start by filling your life with the essential and important things first, and there will always be room for the other things around that. Give due attention first to health, exercise, well-being, family, loved ones and goals. This means that your daily 'to do' list of errands, schedules and diaries won't rule your life and fill up your days. So, what rocks will you fill your day with tomorrow? These two stories teach us about two essential elements of staying balanced and in alignment: equanimity and priorities. That said, we're not looking to suddenly flip our compass. A sense of safety between us and the world in which it feels okay to give up the equivocation is what's needed. This will allow us to accept what others have to say as merely a different point of view that we've protected ourselves from hearing. Sustaining a dangerous world that deserves our tough treatment has to stop. We're not teachable when we're right all the time. The world has nothing to tell us, so all we do is recycle old impressions of how it works. This creates a mechanical, fixed set of routines between us and our environment. The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Clots repeat their bad behavior and continually receive the same disappointing results.

This confirms, to them, that the world is hostile. Surprise! You can just let it go and keep doing your work. No one will die. Not even you! It may feel white hot for a minute, but then the sun rises again and life goes on. Keep your eyes on the people you are serving, the issue you are discussing, the need you are addressing. There is plenty of work to do. Onward. Life is short. Inside healthy advocacy, there is so much life! It is home to a vault intended to preserve human civilization in case of Armageddon. The Global Seed Vault is located on the island of Spitsbergen on the western end of Svalbard. The vault is an ultra-secure facility nearly four hundred feet under a sandstone mountain4 and is managed jointly by the government of Norway, an international trust of nongovernmental agencies for food security, and a Nordic consortium focused on genetic resource preservation. The vault itself contains samples of nearly 4. 5 million seeds, preserved and ready to be used in case of a global apocalypse. Ironically, the vault may not survive an apocalypse unforeseen by its Norwegian designers: climate change. Due to melting glaciers, the vault is at risk of flooding. So though for practical reasons the site was chosen due to its being far from human civilization, it has proved not out of that civilization's reach. And not just by a changing climate.

In the northwest corner of the island of Spitsbergen (where the seed vault is located) is a glacial fjord named Kongsfjorden. For example, fear or anger makes an organism focus attention on immediate threats, concentrate its self- regulatory processes on evaluating what possible courses of action may be most protective at that moment, and then prepare to execute the decision to the best of its ability in the hope of survival. For another thing, negative emotions are often so dramatic and powerful that studying them is relatively easy compared to researching other affective states. Their physiology or how they work in the body can be readily tested and measured using fairly standard techniques, such as heart rate monitors, respiratory gauges, and so forth. Finally and perhaps even more important, negative emotions, such as guilt or anger, are involved in many forms of human suffering, including mental disorders and aggression. This aspect of negative affect means that studying problematic emotions has a certain priority over other affective states. Consequently, today we know many things about negative emotions. For example, it is clear that some negative feelings, such as fear, are arousing and thereby mobilize people in a way that increases alertness and the readiness to respond. Negative emotions also help narrow attention to be better able to spot threats in the environment. The adaptive value of these characteristics of negative emotions is that they help people scan their immediate surroundings and prepare strategies for dealing with threats if necessary. Many of us enjoy the drama of soaring high on excitement, only to be brought down later with disappointment. We're addicted to the rush of the roller-coaster ride each day, no matter how exhausting it can be. We might say we want balance and equanimity, but our thoughts are out of alignment with our actions. On some level, we crave the excitement. Many of the timeless wisdom traditions describe in various ways how a human being is comprised of different aspects. The Katha Upanishad, for example, uses the analogy of the chariot and charioteer. It likens the physical body to a chariot, the senses to the horses, the active, chattering, thinking mind to the reins, and the steady intellect to the firmfooted charioteer. The objects that we desire are the roads. When we lack steadiness and the active mind is discursive and distracted, then our senses are like unmanageable horses.