The best spiritual practice to help with anxiety is laughter, because when we’re laughing, we’re always laughing at ourselves.
When we take ourselves seriously, we create a division between us and reality, because then you are taking yourself seriously. When you are serious, you’ve turned yourself into two things.
When you’re just lighthearted and funny and able to laugh with your own craziness, then you’re aperson enjoying life. So if you have a lot of torments in your life, you need more and more funniness. If you have a lot of anxiety, you need a lot more funniness.
This is why we have such an addiction problem in our world, because everybody’s so tense and afraid. Chemicals, booze, fentanyl, cocaine, all those things make you feel better. But you’re getting that feeling as a temporary fix that physiologically is not healthy. And you are bypassing the work that you need to do to get actually get better.
So two things. First, understand that being better is possible. In addiction studies, they say it’s not, that once you’re an alcoholic, you’re always an alcoholic.
You would have to not only get rid of the physical addiction and the mental addiction, but you would have to completely step past the mental ill that we all have in the first place that made that addiction necessary for your life.
And don’t ever think that people having addiction, that it’s not necessary for their lives, because it kind of is, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to get beyond it. We have so many addictions that go on. Our addiction to sugar makes you feel better to eat some really pretty sweet treat, doesn’t it?
We have addiction to our own anger. We have addiction to our constant excuses about life. Until we can step beyond the habit of that, and the mental story that gave us that, and then finally step beyond being addicted to story itself, we’re not going to be healed of it.
So the best spiritual practice for anxiety is to start laughing at yourself, because you can’t take yourself seriously when you really have a good laugh at yourself. Get together with other people, rib each other, friendly, nice, and laugh at each other.
We’re silly. We’re silly things. There’s plenty we can find to laugh at. So step number one, add more laughter.
Step number two, know that there is a way to step beyond our addiction to our mind, step into a way of being that is being in the ground of being itself.
When you know who you are, then it kind of doesn’t matter. Anxiety is a thing that just comes and goes.
Happiness is a thing that just comes and goes. Mistakes are something that just happen. Success is something that just happens.
There is a way to step beyond our addiction to the unreal, and that, ultimately, is the biggest cure for anxiety.