Accept the Hand Destiny Has Dealt.
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By Sejal Vora
Everything is true, including a lie.
This is the truth about anxiety.
Having spent six years in love and then breaking up, I experienced true anxiety for the first time in my life. I finally understood that anxiety is a very strong emotion.
It took me over and I had no control over it. And for the first time I can honestly say, “To all those of you that feel anxious: I feel you and I understand what you are going through.“
Just in a moment from nowhere, I felt like my heart would soon start beating in my palms. I was restless and I didn’t know if I was coming or going.
I felt no energy in my body — unmotivated, had a loss of appetite, heartache, was deeply sad and had a sinking feeling. I felt hollow and my head was filled with questions like:
Why me? What have I done to deserve this? What do I do? How can I resolve this? How can I make everything normal again? Where is the old me who was happy?
Having spent a few days playing the blame game and the guilt game, I was only sinking deeper and all I wanted was to end it.
Frustrated, I crawled to the beach one morning and lay there watching the ocean for hours with all the same thoughts re-running in my head for the millionth time and no answer at all.
Suddenly, just out of the blue, a thought appeared in my head. It had no relation to anything, but I still played along:
What if a tsunami were to happen right now?
A tear rolled down my cheek, and just in that moment I knew the magnitude of the question that had appeared. If that wave came, there was absolutely nothing I would be able to do. Strangely I felt a sense of relief.
Just the clarity of knowing one thing right after so many days, something as simple as “there is nothing I can do right now if a wave pulls me in.” For the next six hours, I lay there repeating this over and over again in my head.
If a wave were to pull me in, then that’s my reality, I would have no choice but to accept it.
I realized, in that moment, that everything in our reality — in the current moment — is true and unstoppable, making it Destiny.
There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. If it’s there, it’s there. It can change in the next moment if you accept it and make a conscious choice, then that becomes your reality/destiny. Reality or destiny is what is happening to you now and it changes moment to moment.
It is that short-lived.
I soon realized it was actually destiny that I was fighting. It was my reality! Those feelings of sadness were real, the issues in the relationship were real. I couldn’t deny their existence even if it were in my head and not a tangible thing. It was as real to me as a table or a chair.
If I accepted that I’m anxious, I accepted that as my reality. That’s it. That’s where it ended.
I couldn’t be confused anymore even if I wanted to. I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t justify it and I couldn’t argue with it. It was the truth. I was feeling anxious and I couldn’t deny it any more. The minute I accepted it, I strangely felt okay.
Not ecstatic, but okay — and right then, anything was better than anxiety.
Your current reality is your destiny. The only two options you have are to accept it or deny it. When I say deny, I mean justify, blame, guilt and all such emotions which basically come down to not accepting your reality that has already presented itself. It’s there.
It’s real even if you still don’t want to accept it.
It is only acceptance that makes sense. It seems like it’s too scary to accept because then you would be accepting anxiety or pain.
But it didn’t work that way, it worked differently.
Think of it this way: your anxiety/pain is as real as a table.
Now if you want the table to disappear, you can scream, shout and blame it, ask it to go away or even walk away physically from it, but in your head you know you are walking away from the table, and so there is no solace there, because you actually want the table to get rid of itself.
It’s the same with anxiety/pain — it is real, it is there, accept it. You can’t ask the table or the anxiety to go away, because it already exists. It is in your reality and that’s the truth.
That sinking feeling that medical science says is one of the symptoms of anxiety and stress is not a symptom. It’s the anxiety itself. Popping a pill may reduce the sinking feeling by chemically and artificially inducing more happy hormones to be released, but you are still not accepting it.
I carried forward this new-found truth to my personal issue of whatever was causing me the anxiety to start with because up until now I had only accepted the anxiety. I had yet to examine what really was causing it.
I soon realized the nature of the trap, and no matter what your trouble is, the underlying meaning is that you are not accepting it for what it is.
If you want that table to be a chair or you want that anxiety to become happiness, or if you want your spouse to be a particular way — that doesn’t work.
It was because I didn’t accept what is that I was experiencing anxiety.
That was simple! Maybe a little too simple, I thought.
So I quickly sat up and wrote down everything that had caused me anxiety, and to my surprise the entire list which carried all sorts of grouses had one thing in common. I had denied all of them their place in my destiny/reality. I had never accepted them.
I couldn’t digest that what I had to do was accept it. I couldn’t believe that there was no thinking involved, no logic, no reason.
The truth is that all the reasons that caused me anxiety were true — as true as the anxiety itself and so if I had to accept the anxiety ,I had to accept the reasons/catalyst that brought it.
So I gathered my courage and said the words aloud, “I accept”… and when I did, there was absolutely nothing more to say. For the first time I experienced true silence, and what a feeling that is! I couldn’t believe I was experiencing all this at once.
Soon enough a new troubling reality unfolded itself where I had been betrayed by a friend who I considered very near and dear to me for years. I was shattered and angry on the inside.
My immediate reaction was to give her a piece of my mind. My second reaction was to ignore it. And my third reaction was to pretend to be above it and let it not affect me. I soon realized that all of my reactions were just forms of not accepting that I was betrayed.
So I had no choice but to say: “Okay, I accept I am cheated, I accept I am angry and shattered.”
Suddenly I felt nothing more. The chapter was closed. I accepted the hand destiny dealt to me on this one. I could have gone on for days and months and years about it — from fighting to festering to avoiding to suppressing.
Denying anything that is real will only create more denial, and that’s the real trap.
Accepting it just made it so much easier. Because now I knew clearly what my next step was going to be. This next step was based on acceptance of what is, not what it should have been or what it could have been.
You completely have the power to choose — it’s called free will — but choice appears only after destiny, not the other way around.
Acceptance is not a sign of weakness or giving up. On the contrary, it was only after I accepted being anxious, let down and hurt that I was able to make empowering choices.
Only after you accept that it exists do you have the power/choice to let it go.
No more intellectualizing of my reality, it is what it is: I accept.
*****
Sejal Vora has been a Naturotherapy practitioner since 2006. She graduated in Political Science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and soon discovered an innate entrepreneurial spirit. This prevailed and took her away as far as New York. By 2000, she was deeply immersed in a flourishing jewelry business. Unfortunately, the lifestyle that followed success at a young age was an unhealthy one. The result was an additional 30 kgs in body weight, high blood pressure, recurring tonsillitis, PCOD, skin rashes, frequent headaches and constant fatigue, to name just a few of her ailments. To control these alarming developments, she switched to diet colas and other such fad foods; quickly realizing the trap it lays for consumers — literally out of the frying pan and into the fire! But not quickly enough. It was only at the end of 2004, frustrated with the way her health and fitness levels were dropping, that Sejal decided to move back to Mumbai, padlocking corporate life. Here she consulted a variety of alternative healers, ranging from Yoga masters to hypnotherapists. Drawing from the best of all that she saw and learnt, Sejal came to the clear realization that ‘food is medicine.’ Practicing all of what she now brings to her clients, she not only lost over 30 kgs over a three-year period, but also cured herself completely and has been in peak health for over five years. Her experiences inspired her to get certified training in Natural Medicine & ThetaHealing. She now works with people with clinical and non-clinical illnesses. Having worked with hundreds of patients suffering from chronic colds to cancer, Sejal believes firmly that we need first to change our attitude towards disease. We need to address ailments with our mind, learn to take charge of our body, learn about correct nutrition and practice it rigorously. This path is the best route from sickness to vibrant recovery and long-term health. You can contact her via her website.
{What you resist, persists.}
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