637: Finding hope and help for calming anxiety with Ayurveda
This week on the Anxiety Slayer podcast we’re discussing how practicing Ayurveda can help calm your anxiety and infuse more hope into your life when things become too much.
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Notes from this week’s episode:
Ayurveda teaches that elevated Vata in the mind manifests as fear, alienation, and anxiety we might experience insomnia, tremors, palpitations, feeling unsettled and changeable moods.
And it gives a wealth of information on how we can calm Vata. One key challenge that we are all facing is that the way we live tends to increase Vata, so we need to make some adjustments.
Ayurvedic counseling
Ayurvedic counseling deals in four primary areas:
1) Physical factors - diet, herbs and exercise
2) Psychological factors - impressions, emotions, thought
3) Social factors - work, recreation, relationship
4) Spiritual factors - yoga and meditation
Ayurveda is respectful of our individual nature and encourages proactivity in healing.
Self-examination is the first step and basis for understanding and resolving any challenges with physical or mental health.
Self-understanding naturally leads to self-care
We can practice looking for habits and choices that don’t serve us well.
Looking for unwanted looping thoughts, and negative thought patterns.
Notice what disturbs our mind and emotions.
And notice what helps our emotional health and make adjustments.
Two tricks of the mind that hold us in anxiety
Thinking nothing works
Isolation
Our mind behaves like a ship heading for the rocks that can’t, or won’t, change course. Our intelligence, sees danger and avoids it. Ayurveda teaches that we can practice living more from our intelligence. It’s a constant adjustment but once we accept that and are willing to do the work it gets a lot easier.
Small deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life.
- Susan David author of Emotional Agility
The importance of developing compassion and acceptance
When you see anxiety as an enemy or personalize it by saying you hate it, you are giving anxiety power over you.
It becomes something you have to fight, or you resent. Feeling this way about anxiety puts you in a victim mindset. You are feeding your anxiety and exhausting yourself.
We’ve all done it. It's the default setting of a suffering mind. You don't like how you feel, so you declare it. I hate this. I don't want to feel this way. But anxiety isn't a personal enemy. It's not listening and it's not going to back off and leave you alone - relief comes from changing our thinking and our actions.
Learn more about Ayurveda on our Patreon along with over 100 guided relaxations, Tapping sessions and teachings for calming anxiety Patreon.com/anxietyslayer