Spiritual Shopping: Five Tools That Put A Handle On The Voice of Fear
Like most people, the voice of fear in me is distinct. Historically, I’ve been pretty hard on myself and will often slip into that insidious, familiar pattern of poor thinking-feeling for days. Fortunately, the age of the internet allows us, more than ever, to rise above this pavlovian mental vigilance. Over the years, I’ve discovered some fascinating tools by asking existential questions of Reddit, the pre-app internet and befriending strange humans.
Here they are.
Therapy
A year plus in doing weekly therapy, I have come to realise that it is terrifying, enlightening, alienating and entirely essential work. While a session itself can feel uncomfortable and leave you feeling wiped out, over time — it opens you up. There is sweet, cathartic freedom in finally looking at your mess and organising it. Therapists use a variety of frameworks, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Inner Child Healing, Shadow Work etc. to help us recognise and heal traumas and enable lasting change in our brains.
It’s like sorcery, but approved by the science people. The key to getting the most out of therapy, though, lies in finding the right therapist, for you. Studies have shown that the strength of the alliance between the therapist and the client is the most critical determinant for positive therapeutic outcomes. So pick a therapist you like and can talk with easily. This isn’t the time for pointless credentialism.
Sensory Deprivation Float Tanks
This one enters Stranger Things territory. A sensory deprivation floatation tank is quite literally a tank filled with a few thousand tonnes of Epsom salt and body temperature water in a chamber that is sound and light proof. When you enter a float tank, your body floats without effort because of the zero-gravity environment. Your senses are relieved of all stimuli, so expect the literal opposite of being at Burning Man or Chandni Chowk. And while your mind can resist the experience for the first several minutes, in time — you gently let go and float.
This is when the cool stuff starts — you lose a sense of where your body begins and ends. All you can hear is the sound of your heart beating and the faint sound of static in your ears. With breath, you can go a bit deeper and sink into this delicious, expansive, and peaceful feeling. It is not quite happiness, or sadness. It’s a type of deep softness and a sense of being ‘home’. I’ve often thought that this might be the closest experience to what floating in outer space might feel like, and I’ve read some folks liken the experience to being back in their mother’s womb.
When you come out of the float, it’s amazing how beautiful the world appears. Gurgaon traffic seems very lovely and you smile a lot. Studies have shown that there is a significant co-relation between mindfulness in daily life and the use of float tanks. For the price of two or three mediocre dinners, you can give your central nervous system sixty to ninety minutes of deep rest every other week. It’s honestly pretty priceless.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)
The most straightforward description for EFT is acupuncture, but for your emotions. In an EFT session, you get in touch with the emotional charge behind a particular event or situation and literally ‘tap’ on specific points on your body with your fingers while holding that emotion in your awareness. The first time I did a tapping round, I was struck by how dramatically my feelings around a particular life stressor tamed. As evolutionary beings, we’ve all unwittingly picked up defences from past incidents that may no longer serve a useful purpose. Tapping combines somatic and physiological awareness to help you access these ‘blocks’ and release them, sometimes within minutes.
Gary Craig, the gent that ‘discovered’ EFT, made a full manual and published it for free years ago on the internet. It’s potentially the best way to learn about the protocol in detail, but there are also fine folks like Brad Yates that have a tonne of free content online for all sorts of yucky emotions. In the event you think you’re too cool to tap, here’s a video of an EFT practitioner administering a tapping round to 70,000 willing Vulfpeck fans at the Madison Square Garden.
Heart-Brain Coherence
Some years ago, I impulsively bought a bright fuchsia pink coloured book at the airport, titled ‘The Power Of The Heart’. (Admittedly, this was a time in my life where I believed every event was the universe personally paging me.) Despite its chocolate-box aesthetic, the book turned out to be a treasure trove. It went into some depth about new research investigating the connection between the brain and the heart. During times of stress, breathing into your heart space can bring more coherence to your heart rate variability. The folks at Heart Math Institute suggest, that this has a positive carry on effect on the neural messages sent by the heart to your brain.
I’ve seen breathing into my heart space translating into an increase in spontaneity and creativity. Dropping from your head into your heart also feels delicious and allows you to lead with intuition and the intelligence of your body rather than cold logic. It helps me take inspired action, laugh more and feel more connected in my relationships. Some have reported tuning into their heart space being the source of epiphanies and breakthroughs.
Gratitude
Early in 2019, my childhood best friend Kim and I went on holiday. Instead of prank calling our enemies from Bangalore, we played this (somewhat annoying if ill-timed) ‘game’ where we took turns to name things we were grateful for. The game stuck well beyond our two week Italian adventure, and I’m not sure if this is confirmation bias, (Hi Science people!), but it put me on a trajectory of making more wholesome choices.
It turns out, a regular gratitude practice literally changes your brain. By intentionally seeking opportunities to be grateful every day, our neurons are forced to create new pathways and ‘hardwire’ our brains for happiness. Dr Rick Hanson explains in his book Buddha Brain, that because “neurons that fire together, wire together”, the practice of gratitude shifts your attention away from negative emotions such as fear, resentment and guilt, and that this is in turn prevents a build up of the neural substrates that contribute to mental and physical illness. I’ve experienced gratitude to be a great way to anchor myself to the present moment, or even snap out of a mild funk. Some proponents of radical gratitude have said that it has made them experience more good luck.
In an age of perfomative pessimism, taking action to feel better can feel somewhat scary, even wrong. But progress comes from fixing your house and quietly doing the things that can make you better, so you can in turn live more fully. For these reasons, I’m all in on the woo life.