Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose

Here is the true miracle of life: when it is awake, it heals.

You might have used amygdala-quieting techniques if you’ve ever cared for a human baby, a puppy, a kitten, or any other vulnerable being. You automatically knew that it would help to move gently, breathe deeply, make soft sounds, and avoid scaring the creature by attempting to totally immobilize and control it.

All amygdalae, in every creature, respond to similar conditions; they sound the alarm whenever something dangerous or unfamiliar appears, and they calm down when given quiet, stillness, and space to relax. This means we can employ the same strategies with ourselves and one another that horse whisperers use to calm mustangs. The skills Voss taught B

This is why Gandhi said, “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.”

Start with this: as you imagine making a living, don’t think factory. Think forest.

In other words, what science shows us—even working through the “I know!” mind—is the don’t-know mind. Reality is unfathomably paradoxical. The mind that excludes can’t handle what we actually are. Only the mind that includes can hold the paradoxes of being. When we embrace don’t-know mind, we can find ourselves as drops of consciousness existing be

You can use that suffering as motivation to relax, breathe, and ask yourself, Can I imagine the space, silence, and stillness I share with everything?

Remember that when dealing with any form of anxiety, our task is not to fight our own nervous systems but to help them relax and enjoy cooperating with our conscious intentions, like sensitive animals that have learned to trust kindly humans. When we get hijacked by anxiety patterns, we’re dealing with literal wild things: sections of our nervous s

The process of making a crazy quilt begins when quilters choose a piece of fabric they particularly love, one they want near the center of their finished product. Then they find another piece that seems to go with the first and sew them together. Then they add another piece, and another, working around the center, building outward in a rough circle