Help Your Anxiety With a Tiny Black Octopus

Most of us are aware of the fact that we more or less are trained to escape negative feelings at all costs. Although we know that our attempts to escape these feelings by distraction and such make things worse, we still tend to do it. Thankfully, one of the things Buddhism can teach us is that these negative feelings are not the enemy, even if they feel pretty much like that.

Before we get started, here are a couple of things you need

1. anxiety, at least level 6
2. a tiny black octopus
3. a little mindfulness, time, curiosity and imagination

Let's start at point 2, because I assume that when you read this text you are already skilled enough with having anxiety. But because anxiety always feels at least like level 6, you can also start as a beginner.

First, let's pick up your tiny black octopus. It's cute, always a bit wet, usually it smiles but sometimes it can also look at you a little sad and afraid. In any case, you have to take care of it and treat it like it's you own beloved fragile child. Next time you are going for a walk, like for groceries or whatever, take one of its tentacles by the hand. This small little friend represents, or no, if fact it actually IS your anxiety.

How to feed it: If you like, you can feed your little octopus by trying to not pay attention to it or even ignore it. It instantly grows bigger by feeding it with some of your distractions, by feeding it with superseding and superimposing thoughts or feelings and by feeding it with tasks and problems that you should address but set aside. Everytime you put yourself in such a harmful behavior, it grows to protect you from that. Finally it becomes a nasty, huge kraken monster.

How to shrink it: If it gets too big you may feel uncomfortable with it, especially because now it's holding YOUR hand. The good news is, even if it looks like a monster, it's always your friend and really just wants to protect you. So listen to it. You can easily shrink it down just by gently caring about it, paying attention and being aware of it. This way you can always change its size at any time. Like with all pets, you have to train it a little in the beginning, but it learns pretty fast.

Now that we have our little octopus friend in mind and know how to treat it, we will automatically be more aware about our distractions and things we don't address. Finally we learn, how to better communicate with ourselves and others.

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