On letting go of worry

I hadn't slept well in two days. The uncertainty regarding a particular future outcome had been gnawing at my soul and sowing fear and insecurity in what I like to think of as a typically grounded, garden-variety, peace-filled mind. I found that the following thought exercise, born of one morning's pre-painting journal entry, removed completely any nagging negative affect; it allowed my artist's lens to look clearly across the mindscape and to create, no matter the current weather. 

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The part of me that is logical, mechanistic, predictable, predicting and pragmatic -- the part of me that is well-acquainted with the practical constraints of living a human reality -- wants certainty. 

Impatient, restless, and ill-acquainted with the present moment, it wants to know now what will happen in some future now. 

It wants to determine. It lives in a deterministic universe.

It nimbly calculates through the various outcome scenarios of varying plausibilities or probabilties, seemingly tireless, like a hamster scurrying along a wheel. 

Yet is it famished by its efforts, and hungrily seeks reassurances that "everything will be okay." And never satisfied in just knowing that it will be okay, it seeks to know exactly how it will be okay, as well...

That part of me needs to know how to anticipate the future so that it can exact its executive orders on the mind-body complex in preparation for some impending now. 

It is the future-predicting machine that I see in my mind's eye. 

And that predictable future-tripping is quite predictably tripping me up in the present moment, effecting a cascade of cortisol coursing through my veins, quickening my heart rate, squeezing ever so tightly my chest, the vice-pressed chest choking up my throat as this mind mercilessly seeks to know the outcome of a future that just hasn't happened yet. 

It tries desperately to perfectly predict a future now, again and again, sometimes with better precision and sometimes less adeptly. No matter how adroit, it is always updating its future-predicting algorithm and refining its predictions. It doesn't stop. Its job is to predict, and not to effect joy or serenity within its human vehicle... 

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The part of me that is my essential, highest self, is compassionate and caring toward the hairy little beast as it spins its wheel. It takes the unconscious, mechanistic little logician tenderly in the palm of its hands, looks at it as the feeble little creature it is, and gently says, It's all going to be okay.

Derailed for a moment, the relentless little logician agrees, It does always end up being okay, switching in content but not in mode, and continuing, so I have no reason to believe that this case should be the exception to the rule... 

The patient, loving, divinely creative reality of my mind's eye non-judgmentally holds the highly rationalizing, slightly irrational ego in the frame of its lens. 

It doesn't try to change it. It doesn't reject it, or invalidate it. It doesn't try to make it stop future-predicting. It just accepts it, it is what it is.

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Upon closer inspection, I realize that observing the observer has lowered my heart rate, and cleared my mindscape of any needless clutter. I realize that the tightness in my chest -- the very real artifact of a very persistent, albeit transient internal state -- has left me completely. I am serene. I notice a joy and lightness about me. 

Watching it, observing it -- instead of struggling against the contents and modes of this little mind -- has freed me from the illusion that I am it. 

Amazing. 

The realization feels as satisfying as successfully sticking the landing of some monumental pass of mental gymnastics. 

Mental fitness, not unlike the physical fitness I've cultivated through my years of bikram yoga and rock climbing, is the effect of skilled practice, turned habit. Over time, it has become a feature of who I am. 

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Nothing outside of me has changed at all.

And yet both everything and nothing inside of me have changed.