Once the woman breathes through her anxiety and disappointment and feels them drop away, Joe names what just happened. The anxiety wasn’t a malfunction to be fixed — it was a precise piece of information. It pointed exactly to where she was excited and exactly to where she was abandoning herself by refusing to feel that excitement.
“It pointed to you where you were excited. It showed you how you were abandoning yourself. That anxiety tells you exactly that you’re avoiding things, that you’re abandoning yourself. It tells you exactly where to go. It’s like it’s the best road sign. It’s a teacher.”
This reframes anxiety from a problem to a navigation tool. The discomfort marks the spot where you’ve turned away from your own aliveness, your own wanting, your own next step. Instead of trying to lower the anxiety, you can follow it back to the place you’ve left yourself.
Joe also includes disappointment in the same category. The fear of future disappointment was another way she avoided her excitement, and when she breathed into it, it released “like dropping it off like a weight.” The feelings we treat as obstacles are usually signposts pointing toward exactly where we want to go.
Related Concepts
- Fear is a road map, not an enemy to conquer
- Breathing into anxiety to enjoy it turns it into excitement
- Anxiety is constricted life force, not a problem to eliminate
- Anxiety signals unmet needs at multiple depths
- Anxiety is often repressed excitement
- Saying ‘I’m excited’ while feeling it can unkink anxiety
- Anxiety is sometimes excitement that isn’t being felt all the way
- Anxiety is a signal that your life is out of alignment