On Anxiety

Most people don’t know that I have an anxiety disorder. I feel like standing on an edge of a ravine every time I have to drive alone or take a commute in a public transport. I just don’t want to be left alone with my mind. My mind drives me nuts. Most of the time I drive with someone, I commute with someone etc. Yeah, I had a major depression about it like “O, woe is me, I can’t drive alone; I can’t ride the train, I can’t ride the bus, so on. How will I travel the world? How will I attend conventions? How will I become just a normal guy in the movies who drives on a vast highway in the desert into the unknown?.”  And that may be part of the problem, this wanting to be like some idea of a person my mind creates for me. 

The best thing about my situation though is that, despite this “handicap” I don’t really feel I am deprived of life. (Ok, I can’t do certain things, but so with most “normal” people;  I can’t drive alone—well some people don’t know how to drive at all, and they don’t really need to.) The best thing about this is that after feeling so low and inferior, I was able to learn to appreciate the graces raining down on me each day in the form of family, friends and the sweet love of Our Lord. (If I were in a different situation, with my arrogance, I may even think I am God!) The best thing is that I have learned—despite forcefully bent down--humility and gratitude in this life. I have learned to accept the things I have, and let go of those things I can’t have. 

But I will not be able to realize these things on my own without the compassion of a friend who showed me who I really am. Having learned from his teacher the process of transcending anxieties in this world, he was able to guide me through my suffering.  I don’t know where I will be without my dear teacher who unselfishly shared to me the path through this existence. I hold on to what he said and here I pass on to you:

“A person can only be truly happy, truly satisfied, when he is tasting love for God. The easiest way to come to that platform of love for the Lord is by regularly hearing and chanting His Holy Names.”

God is one but with infinite number of names. Allah. Jehova. Yaweh. Krishna. Father. All of these names are invested with His transcendental power. God has made it so easy to approach Him that we can actually experience being with Him, being with the source of happiness, peace and satisfaction, simply by singing or chanting His names.

Jesus Christ said that His greatest commandment is that one should love the Supreme Lord with all his heart, mind, body and entire being. And like unto it, love others.

We are not our bodies. Nor we are our mind which is the reservoir of our fear and anxieties. We are the soul within this body. Satisfying the body or the mind will only bring us temporary happiness. Making the body and mind happy is like making your clothes happy, for the mind and body are exactly that: the material clothing of our spiritual soul. You, the spirit cannot be happy with material things, like a fish out of water cannot be happy when you put him in a bar or a carnival. The spirit can only be happy with spiritual food, and the food for the soul is love for the Supreme soul, like fish returning to sea.

Our help is in the Names of the Lord said the bible. This is a form of help when no one seems to be able to help. No other hand except God’s can reach the deepest recesses of your heart when it is in fear. And the transcendental sound vibration of God’s Names is His hand reaching out to us.

One day, I will be faced with a situation where I will be driven to the end my strength—beyond driving alone, beyond walking alone along the aisle of a bus. Should that day come, in the form of death or some other predicament, there will be fear, but I pray that I’ll be at my weakest, that I will lose all grip to my false idea that I have the power to control my life to make it better, and in this way be able to fully surrender in love the reins of my body, mind and entire being to Him Whose Love holds the universes together! Haribol, chant the Names of God and be happy!