Welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer podcast. I'm Shan Banderleak here with my

wonderful friend and co-host in Nanga Civier. We come together weekly from

Kent and Leilinaw to anxiety slier sessions with you and answer

listener questions from our inbox and Facebook page, as well as our private Facebook group.

Together we share a powerful collection of techniques to reduce anxiety.

Hello Ananga, hi Shen. Today we're going to be talking about how our thoughts and feelings about anxiety affect the quality of our life.

We'll be looking at the benefits of clearing resistance and resentment towards anxiety and

how that frees up our energy to start taking action steps toward feeling less

anxious and more hopeful. It's so natural to go to that place of resenting anxiety and how it makes us feel.

Yeah, it's something I learned from chronic illness, the difference, how I felt about myself in that experience

from day to day if I could be at peace and accepting and do the best I could with it and have the

sweetest day I could with it, or whether I just felt sick and tired or feeling sick and tired.

Not wanting to wake up in pain and when we're pushing against and objecting to what's happening it just doubles our suffering.

It's that second arrow teaching that we've sometimes shared from Buddhist psychology.

So our anxiety, that's the experience, that's the first arrow, but how we respond to it, how we feel about it.

That's the second arrow, the thoughts and feelings we're having about the factual experience, and it's that responding. It's that second

arrow of the reaction that causes us the most pain.

And some of those thoughts that keep us stuck in anxiety that we hear often are I will never be

free from panic attacks or I know I'm stuck with anxiety for life or I've tried everything and nothing works. The latter being what we hear I think the most of.

But these are beliefs. They are not facts and beliefs can be changed. Freedom from anxiety begins when we

challenge those beliefs and start to look beyond them. Yeah, you can see how, you know, feeling that I'll never be free from anxiety.

I'm stuck with this anxiety for life.

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