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When I experience anxiety, I am grateful. That’s right, grateful. Why? Because it’s an opportunity for some inner work. It’s an indication of not living in the present moment, which means not living life fully.

If I am not in the present moment, but instead focused on some phantom future reality, then I am not able to feel Presence. I’m not able to connect to my inner source of being.

It’s similar to the body’s ability to send a signal of pain when you cut your finger. If you didn’t feel the pain, you wouldn’t know that you cut it, and that there is a wound that needs some attention.

For most of us, if even a window gets cracked on “our” house or car, we get bent out of shape. This comes from apreoccupation with “me,” derived from ignorance of our true identity. It is a form of selfishness. In essence, the preoccupation with “me” is unconsciousness in the sense that we are unconscious of our true nature. That unknowing, of being lost, contributes to anxiety, even if it is on an unconscious level.

Imagine the ocean being concerned with its dropness instead of realizing its identity as an infinite ocean. That would be a preoccupation with manyness instead of oneness, of the finite instead of the infinite.

The mind lives in the past and the future. The present moment is the domain of consciousness. This is where we connect to our essence, our state of being. In the present moment, in the full light of consciousness, there are no worries. It is in the present moment that we can express ourselves. I know this from my background in music and public speaking. It’s why I love jazz and the art of improvisation.

When I play my sax, I do not think about what note I’m going to play a couple minutes later. There is no anxiety about what note I’ll play. The music unfolds from a deeper order, what physicist David Bohm called the implicate order. The note to be played two minutes later will be discovered, unfolded, naturally, when the time comes. That note will depend on what is happening in the music at that time and what response the music evokes in me.

If I were to focus on the note two minutes or so before it was time for me to play it I would be distracted from the notes I was playing in the present moment. Inspiration comes only to the musician focused on what is happening now. That is where spontaneity and creativity comes from. If instead of worrying about what is going to happen, make a game out of it and see how well you can keep your poise. That will decrease your anxiety a great bit.

Most of you probably have heard of Krishnamurti. But do you want to know what Krishnamurti’s secret was? I’m not an expert on his life, having read just one biography of him, but this secret made an impression on my wife and me. It is very relevant here.

He revealed it to a large crowd in Ojai in the 1980s. Here is how one member of the crowd remembered it:

Partway through the dialogue, he suddenly paused, leaned forward and said, almost conspiratorially. “So you want to know what my secret is?” We all sat up, even more alert than we had been, if that was possible. Almost as though we were one body. We leaned forward, our mouths and ears opened in hushed anticipation. Did we want to know his secret? Heck, yes! That’s why we were all there, wasn’t it? That’s why we came to Ojai every spring: to listen to K. in the hope that we would “get it,” that we could figure out what his secret was. He paused. And then he said in a soft, almost shy voice, “You see, I don’t mind what happens.” I don’t mind what happens. The great man’s words reverberated silently in my mind. They shook me to the core.

I admit, I still get upset when someone cuts me off in traffic. But I find comfort in reading about his secret. As Dr. David Hawkins would say in his book Power vs. Force, it strengthens because the principle behind the words–the truth behind the words–calibrates at a high energy level.

And what is the principle behind the words? The principle is that we are spiritual beings, infinite and eternal, having physical experiences so that we can free ourselves of the limitations our minds place on us, by finding our true source of being in the unmanifested. Minding what happens is the opposite of acceptance.

Minding what happens keeps us out of the present; it keeps our energy and vibratory level low. It’s a form of negativity that breeds anxiety, which is unconsciousness. It makes us reactive to life rather than responsive.

Acceptance mitigates the pain of the situation and enables us to experience peace of mind. Acceptance does not mean that you don’t try to remedy the situation. But the key is acceptance first, then the response. If you have a flat tire, and if you are able to, you change the tire. If you are not able to change it, you wait until help arrives. Kicking the car does no good. Negativity is toxic.

But even great souls such as Krishnamurti are not immune from anxiety. It’s one thing to experience anxiety and let it go; it’s another to make it a chronic condition.

The biography of him I read was called: Krishnamurti 100 Years, by Evelyne Blau. In the book she interviewed Dr. Benjamin Weinniger who recalled introducing Krishnamurti to all of the psychoanalysts in Washington, DC in 1946.

He tells Evelyne Blau in the book, “When he (Krishnamurti) was talking to the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts for the first time in Washington, DC, he came to me and he was shaking with fear. He said, ‘I’m scared.’ And I tried to reassure him that it would be all right, and then when he went in to talk, I realized that he was able to drop the fear. He allowed himself to experience the fear fully and then let it go. Most of us don’t do that; we stay with the fear instead of letting it go. This is what he means when he says, I have no fear.”

What Krishnamurti did, according to Dr. Weinniger, was focus his consciousness on the anxiety. He experienced it fully. He didn’t judge it, or repress it, or take a drink or a prescription pill for it, he just brought his full attention to it. And it was gone.

That is a very Buddhist thing to do. It is also how Eckhart Tolle recommends you deal with anxiety in his book, The Power of Now. The anxiety itself is brought on by unconsciousness, and living outside of the present moment. It is consciousness that brings it to an end by diving deep into the present moment.

Observe your mind. If you are experiencing pain and suffering, sit with it. Acknowledge it. See what happens.

In a new book, Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life, written by Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D. with Spencer Smith, there are numerous exercises that can help you put these ideas into practice. There is a lot of emphasis on living in the now. It discusses mindfulness in great detail with exercises to help you get it—to understand what that experience is all about. The subtitle of the book is The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the authors say, is not about fighting your pain; it’s about developing a willingness to embrace every experience life has to offer. It’s not about resisting your emotions; It’s about feeling them completely and yet not turning your choices over to them.

Clinical trials suggest that ACT is very effective for a whole range of psychological problems. It’s sort of a scientific version of The Power of Now. I recommend it. If you suffer from anxiety, you will find it a much needed tool and resource.