“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” ~Carl Rogers
For over a year, I woke up at 3 a.m. almost every night.
I would lie there in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind sprinting through the same loop: What if I can’t handle my job? What if I lose my income? What if I spend the rest of my life alone?
Eventually I would fall back asleep around dawn, then drag myself through the workday like a ghost—exhausted, flat, and pretending to be fine.
I wasn’t just going through a bad patch. I was a highly sensitive person who had spent a lifetime being afraid of other people’s opinions, and in 2019, the ground finally gave way.
The Sensitive Kid Who Grew Up Scanning Faces
I’ve been sensitive for as long as I can remember. After meeting someone new, I would replay the entire conversation in my head—every expression, every pause, every word—trying to calculate what they thought of me.
Did they like me? Did I say something stupid? Did they notice my flaws?
In daily life, I didn’t dare to speak freely. I was terrified that if people saw the real me, they would look down on me. Socializing wasn’t connection; it was an exam I kept failing.
It was exhausting. But for years, I coped. I studied psychology. I traveled. I pushed myself to join social activities. Life wasn’t easy, but it was under control—until it wasn’t.
When Everything Fell Apart at Once
In 2019, I ended a fifteen-year relationship. Around the same time, I moved to a new home and started a new job.
In a matter of months, the three pillars of my life—love, home, work—were all gone or rebuilt from scratch. I no longer knew who I was or where my life was going.
That’s when the anxiety I’d carried quietly for years grew teeth. It stopped being background noise and became a full-time companion.
My sleep collapsed first. Then my energy. Then my interest in almost everything. I went to work, answered emails, smiled at people, and felt nothing.
Here’s the part that’s hard to admit: I knew exactly how bad things had gotten, in body and mind. I had studied psychology. I could have diagnosed myself on the spot.
But understanding the theory and actually acting on it were two entirely different things. I didn’t have the strength to cross that gap.
I Stopped Trying to Get Better
The strange thing is, the shift began when I quit trying.
I stopped pushing myself to recover quickly. I stopped treating healing like a project with a deadline. If I couldn’t fix myself, I decided, I could at least look after myself.
So I did small, almost silly things. I took myself out to eat alone and ordered the food I actually wanted, as long as I could afford it.
I bought myself clothes. I bought myself little gifts for no reason at all.
Slowly, I stopped being my own enemy. And one ordinary day, a stubborn strength rose up in me out of nowhere and said, “Okay. Now I want to fight back.”
The Punishment Cushion
I read self-help books. I watched videos. I tried techniques. And I started meditating—which, at the beginning, felt like pure punishment.
I would sit down, and my mind would erupt. Old conversations, future disasters, random itches, grocery lists. Five minutes felt like an hour. Every cell in my body screamed, “Get up. This isn’t working.”
But something in me knew this was the right door, even if I couldn’t open it yet. So I kept going.
Three to five times a week, I sat. Five minutes became ten. Ten became twenty. Twenty became forty. No breakthroughs, no bliss, no glowing white light. Just me, practicing the art of staying.
The Moment I Found the Watcher
About a year in, something shifted.
A wave of anxiety rose up one day, as it always did. But this time, instead of drowning in it, I noticed something strange: there was a part of me watching the wave.
The anxiety was there—hot, tight, familiar. But so was the one noticing it. And the one noticing it was calm.
It was the first time I understood that I was not my anxiety. My anxiety was an object moving through me, like weather moving through the sky. The sky doesn’t fight the storm. It doesn’t have to. It just holds it.
Around that time, I picked up a book about Morita therapy, a form of psychotherapy created over a century ago by Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita. It put words to everything I had been stumbling toward.
The Therapy That Told Me to Stop Trying
Morita’s core idea shocked me with its simplicity: feelings are not something we can control. We can’t argue ourselves out of anxiety, motivate ourselves out of sadness, or willpower ourselves into calm.
Trying to eliminate a feeling only feeds it. The more you stir muddy water to clean it, the muddier it gets.
What we can control is what we do. Morita called this accepting things as they are—arugamama—and then taking the next action anyway. Anxious? Fine. Take the anxiety with you and send the email. Go to work. Wash the dishes. Live your life with anxiety sitting in the passenger seat instead of waiting for it to get out of the car.
I had spent years waiting to feel better before living better. Morita told me I had it backwards: live first, and the feelings follow.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
This isn’t a story where the ending is “and then I never felt anxious again.” I’m still highly sensitive. I still occasionally wake at 3 a.m. The difference now is what happens next.
Here’s what actually helps me, in practice:
1. I sit without trying to get anywhere.
I don’t meditate to become calm. I sit to practice watching. Some sessions are peaceful; some are chaos. Both count. The goal isn’t a quiet mind—it’s a steady witness.
2. I let the feeling stay.
When anxiety shows up, I say to it, “You can be here.” This sounds passive, but it’s the most powerful move I know. What we allow loses its grip; what we fight digs in. Most of the time, the feeling burns through itself in minutes once I stop wrestling it.
3. I act alongside the anxiety, not after it.
Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” I ask, “What needs doing right now?” Then I do that one small thing—anxious, scared, imperfect, but moving. Action doesn’t require courage first. It creates it.
4. I stopped fighting the 3 a.m. wake-ups.
When I wake in the night now, I don’t panic about being awake. I lie there and watch my thoughts the way I’d watch rain on a window—no wrestling, no catastrophizing about tomorrow’s tiredness.
Sometimes I even get up and meditate. I sit until my body grows heavy, and then sleep comes quickly. It turns out that the fastest way back to sleep is letting the night be what it is.
What I Want You to Know
Years later, I became a psychological counselor. Now, when clients sit across from me desperate to delete their anxiety, I recognize that look. It’s the look of someone stirring muddy water with everything they have.
I tell them what I wish someone had told me: You don’t have to win against your own mind.
Your feelings are weather. You are the sky. The anxiety, the 3 a.m. dread, the fear of what people think—none of it is the enemy. It’s just something passing through something vast.
You don’t need to fix yourself before you live your life. You can take the whole messy bundle with you, one small action at a time.
And one day, maybe a year from now, you’ll notice the watcher too—the calm one who was there all along, waiting for you to stop fighting long enough to see it.
About Kris Nature
Kris is a psychological counselor and the founder of KRIS NATURE, a small studio creating handcrafted natural-stone jewelry for mindful, intentional living. As a highly sensitive person herself, Kris writes about anxiety, emotional acceptance, and the quiet practices that helped her heal. You can find her work at krisnature.com.
Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.
from Tiny Buddha https://ift.tt/K4Xkl80
via IFTTT
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire