Anxiety by Lisa Sonora Beam
Anxiety.
I love you anyway.
What is this anxiety? Probably a very good day to write about the Anxiety painting. Just writing this down dissipates the energy.
I am entering the anxiety. Not trying to avoid it.
There is always the urge to move away from uncomfortable feelings. Like in meditation, we are distracted by the uncomfortable physical sensations. If we can sit through those, we start to feel our mental discomfort. And that’s when things get interesting.
We can feel what we feel and not react. If we can feel what we feel and not turn away, not move to something for comfort, for distraction, we meet what is.
Meeting what is, something else more spacious opens up. It’s like when you have a bad dream of being chased by a monster, and then just stop running and turn to face the monster. It looses it’s power to terrorize in that moment of turning toward it.
I forget this over and over and over. I forget that meeting what is dissipates anxiety.
This is one way that I remember. Writing. Meditating. Painting. Publishing.
Well, I guess that’s four ways of remembering.
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This painting is one of the 1008 paintings I am creating for an installation titled 1008 Meditations on the Human Condition.
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Howdy! I’m Lisa Sonora Beam, author of The Creative Entrepreneur. I teach people how to get unstuck and use their creativity to make a living doing what they love. 
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gorgeous!
I love what you’re saying here about facing your fears. This is something that I am constantly working on. The blue meditating figure in the midst of the scratchy dark background is a great way to represent what you’re talking about.
i love the courage of this project. the blue color in contrast with the scratchy dark background calls me to appreciate the intensity of the emotion. the writing reminds me of our practice to return to the place of openness which grows deep within the heart. your art is a wonderful reminder and a great act of witnessing. it seems simple but yet it is rather courageous to face the common place of our human conditions. gm
I love this Lisa. I look forward to more of the series.
Lisa,
Anxiety. And a bit of depression – I’m in that place these days too – comes and goes. I read somewhere that depression is spending too much time in the past, and anxiety is spending too much in the future. BANG – hit that nail on the head. Thanks to you i have my visual journals… i always become totally absorbed -in the PRESENT – when i’m working in them … and poof – my anxiety and depression slip away. And, the cool thing is that I can work on the stuff I’m anxious about so now i don’t have to be anxious anymore!!