How to Let Go of Anxiety

First the bad news: anxiety exists (sorry). As I talk about in my new book, Take Back Your Mind: Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times, it shows up as this veil that separates us from the world around us and sometimes it feels like that veil is impossible to lift. The other day, I got an email from a meditation student of mine who went to the doctor after facing some pretty horrible circumstances. The diagnosis in the half-hour consult? “You will be anxious for the rest of your life.” No wonder she wrote to me, terrified. Telling someone that they will always be anxious is only going to make them more anxious.

While anxiety may be a part of the fabric of your life at this time, you can mitigate your relationship to it through (surprise, surprise this is the advice of the meditation teacher) meditation. This is the good news, of course, that meditation can help us acknowledge our anxious thoughts, see them as the ephemeral gnats that they are, and let them go.

Now here’s the best news: you are not an inherently anxious person. You can, in fact, relax. The careless words from the doctor notwithstanding, no one is in for a lifetime of constant anxiety. Yes, I realize you may have come to wear the identity of an anxious person — you have not known much else for a very long time — but this identity marker is actually just the top layer of who you truly are. You are, instead…