Trust in the process. There's nothing out of place. Everything is how it should be, even the parts that "shouldn't be".
You can't force the process either. Trusting doesn't mean forcing. It's the opposite. The more you force things, the more caught up in all the stuff you're working with.
You can't win the battle. If you're causing more entropy, you're not actually dealing with the tension that you're being affected by. Entropy doesn't reduce tension, it creates more.
You're basically trying to one-up yourself. When you do that, you're also one-down because you are the one you are one-upping! The "other" person who loses is you!
The only to win the battle is to not see it as a battle. There are so many different ways to look at this but let's look at it from an organismic level.
The organism contains many different things. Those things are both working with and against one another. Depending on what way you look at it, you can either pick sides or you can see this process as basically being unified. When you think long enough, you see it really is unified, it really is your body that is keeping everything going.
Without the dance that is going on within our bodies, we wouldn't be here. From a psychological organismic level, it's no different. If you start removing those things, the body and the mind stops functioning.
There is simply a disconnect there between the mind and body. Signals that are being sent and received and interpreted as something different.
That's where the trust comes in. Here you are having an experience and your mind, body and brain is doing a WHOLE load of stuff, most of which you can't even comprehend consciously, and occasionally you become aware of this experience and it brings causes existential processes to begin. Without trust, something must be wrong; with your mind, your body, your brain. Adding more salt to the recipe doesn't make the final product more sweet. You don't solve the "something wrong" part by adding more "something wrong-ness" to the mix. You can only see what happens when you stop adding to it and trust that by doing so, you see the unity in what is unfolding.
Hypochrondia is not the fear of something being wrong, it's the fear of everything working as it should be. You could take this down a psychodynamic route and look at timeline of events in one's life and how over that period of time certain injuctions in this person's life suggested to them doubts about their workings of their body. Maybe some of those doubts are based in some form of reality, like family members actually getting sick or being brought up in poverty or some form of adversity where the risk of illness was very real. At the same time, there is a dynamic here. You can't have the fear of something going wrong without also having the contrasting opposite. The fear of something going wrong implies the desire for them to go right! Everything is weighed against it's opposite. You may fear death but at the same time, there's birth that comes from death and nobody fears birth. Birth is something we celebrate but it's very easy to only see the death part. So is death the fear of death itself, or the fear of the cycle of life continuing? It depends how you look at it! The cycle of life sounds a whole lot better! I'm getting Lion King vibes from that last part, Hakuna Matata!
Anxiety often isn't a specific object but the thoughts around what that might mean and so it's the same thing. It's a descendent, not a direct link.
We get anxious about getting anxious, not about something specific. It's the second or third or maybe forth chain of our awareness of our getting anxious that reinforces the episode of anxiety. Beyond all that, we might actually be anxious that everything is how it should be! Maybe everything IS how it should be. What that be okay? And so, our anxiety, in a weird way, has a logical pattern and it's all geared around us being okay. From a basic survival perspective, this makes sense. After all, anxiety exists to ensure we survive, right? To THINK about what MIGHT happen in the future. That's a good thing! If the messaging is different though, we can take that and get something else.
The forcing part is really important here because you can't push yourself through. There is no "winning" in this game. There is only "getting with". You have to arrive at that place and be like it was familiar to you, like you have been there all along. To see anxiety as a natural part of the dance, it's just the "side" you've become accustomed to not prefer over the "others". For me personally that took 20 years of my life and it's still something I'm working on. I had my first (and only) life changing psychedelic trip in 2015 on 360ug of LSD. Since then I've had one significant trip, in 2022, 5g of golden teachers. I tried DMT for the first time a few years ago and I still have the leftovers from that because I haven't returned to it. I'm perfectly happy never taking anything again. I came to the realization that unless I'm using this sacred medicine to "get with" then I'm going without. The more work I have to do on ground level before I get in the elevator. On a physiological level, that's where all the work is done anyway because no matter where you are, in hyperspace or at work, you're still right there. You haven't really gone anywhere. Psychedelics don't change that.
About the breathwork, by the way.
It depends what you do but many of the techniques change the central nervous system. You have two; parasympathetic and sympathetic. One is responsible for fight or flight (kinda obvious what this one does), the other is responsible for rest and digest (recovery, relaxation, safety, healing etc). When done regularly they can really help regulate the CNS effectively reprogramming it over time to regulate better. In regards to anxiety this is really important but a key characteristic of anxiety, especially if acute, is the triggering of the CNS. People with severe anxiety are often in the red which means they are often in a dysregulated nervous system state which should be common to them in being flightly, nervous, overthinking things, hyperviligiant, shaking, not being able to think straight, racing thoughts etc. Breathing exercises actually help to push the nervous system state back into the green and the more this is done, the more recognizable green states are so the more likely you will seek them over the red ones. You are teaching yourself what it means to be okay because when we are okay, from a central nervous system perspective, that's what we are referring to. All our best experiences in life, if we peeled everything back and looked at the CNS we could identify the state was green (parasympathetic). If we've spent a long time in the red (sympathetic) we become normalized to this state and coincidentally, this is often the state that we are reminded of when we take psychedelics because when the ego dissolution begins, there is nothing protecting us from acknowledging the reality of our inner state, both physiologically and psychologically (after all, the two are connected). That explains a lot of the negative thought loops that occur in trips - people may have remnants of that state lingering, or they may already be in that state when taking them. Again, not forcing comes into play here for obvious reasons.
You can't force yourself out of these states. That's why you can't win the battle. To get out of those states takes a decent amount of time. It's only won by diplomacy. When you make peace with the "opposing" sides and recognize there never was any opposition in the first place. There's noise, to be sure, and lots of it, but we interpret that noise and then create a narrative out of it. Working with what is key to dealing with our stuff. Letting the noise exist, just like it always has, and always will, but no longer making a story out of it.
You could say that you might be making a story out of it by taking psychedelics. It's a way of changing something. I have to say, that's how I began. But what story exactly?
And does anything need to be changed? You have a body. You are human so you have a complex inner world. These are givens. There isn't much that can be done about those things. If anything needs to change, it's what CAN be changed and that's so much of the process. What does that mean? It really makes you look at the map you are using and whether it's helping you get to where you need to go!
Be easy on yourself
