I discovered a surefire way to dramatically elevate my anxiety level. All I have to do is try to control or guarantee the outcome of a situation. Works like magic every time! If I stick to what I can control, then I’m fine. So what can I reliably control? My actions: what I say and how I move my body and the energy, or emotions, that I hold within my body. Beyond that, I’m pushing others to follow my will and there are a number of problems with that:

• When I do push others, it’s always based on my internal issues. I’d like to think these issues are external but they never are. So I’m just projecting my issues onto others in an attempt to avoid looking within myself for the true issue.

• By pushing or controlling others, I’m not bothering to seek alignment on shared values with others.

• Pushing or controlling others is like herding cats – highly ineffective and never successful. People will only change their actions when they are ready.

• Pushing or controlling people to achieve my desired outcome, especially before they are ready, is a form of violence that can really harm them. (Think of teaching someone to swim by just shoving them into the deep end vs. building alignment on wanting to share the wonderful experience of swimming and facilitating their introduction to swimming by demonstrating your skills in the shallow end until you are both comfortably swimming in deep water. Scare them good enough and they’ll never go near the water again without fear.)

I see this whole issue as very circular. Controlling others causes me to feel anxiety but I started trying to control them because I was fearful in the first place. Why do I become fearful? Because I imagine or perceive that people are going to be invalidated or harmed in some way. This also goes for animals, Mother Earth and me.

Here’s an example: A coworker of mine, feeling fearful about a certain situation, broke ranks and e-mailed my superior to express her concerns. At first, I felt angry and invalidated. I thought I had acknowledged her concerns and that we had jointly decided on a course of action to address those concerns. But here she was taking unilateral action and acting as if I did not comprehend her concerns and that I had not fully conveyed the situation to my superiors, hence her need to bypass me. So I had a choice:

• Did I want to express my anger and convey to her that I thought I was in control of both her and the situation? Or….

• Did I want to acknowledge her commitment to our success underlying her concern, ask questions for clarity to see where we had become separated, rebuild alignment so we could get back into action and in the end, foster our mutual growth?

Yes, I could remind her of the chain of command and who’s in charge and I’d feel a certain surge of energy from being “right”. But being committed to our long term working relationship and to our mutual growth, I took the more powerful course of action. By checking my values and commitments, I found the strength to bundle up my anger into a ball of white light and hand it off to an “angel” for proper disposal. This cleared my emotional blockage and enabled me to take enlightened action with my coworker.

Will what I did guarantee that she will not do this again in the future? Nope. If I had read her the riot act, she may never do it again but only out of fear of my anger. I guess that’s the price of growth as there is risk associated with the investment. I can only guarantee my actions, not hers. I have to have faith that demonstrating my personal power lovingly will “pay off”. My commitment to personal and planetary transformation has to be deeper than my need to feel “right” or “in control”.

I can now see that when I come home feeling apprehensive or fearful about a situation, it’s due to the fact that I’ve lost sight of the transformative possibilities. I can only imagine a fearful outcome. I’ve learned enough over the years to know that I can change that. So I come home and break out of the fearful rut by:

• Going to the gym or doing yoga and exercising that fearful tension out of my body.

• Grounding myself and meditating to find a state of mind that is free of fear.

• Opening my mind, body and spirit to allow transformative possibilities to enter the situation through me. This may occur while meditating or by looking at tarot cards and reviewing my transit report with Inga and gaining comprehension as to what energies are at work.

• Proactively align myself with those energies instead of reacting to those energies.

• Having faith that I do not need to specifically know what those possibilities are, just that they’ll be transformative and therefore, loving, healing and powerful for everyone involved.

• Gathering up this transformative energy and storing it in my body, leaving no room for fear.

If I truly heal my fear, the situation always turns out better than I had imagined for all involved. And I can only find the strength to face and heal my fears by truthfully answering these questions:

• What I am truly committed to? (Transformation or control?)

• What are my core values based on? (Light and Love or fear and darkness?)

• What actions can I take based on my commitments and values? (What will I say? How will I move my body? What energy will I hold in my body, mind and spirit?)

• Who are my allies in this situation? (People, guides, teachers, entities, planets, archetypes, etc.)

These fears represent a blockage in my personal transformation and a lack of body/mind/spirit alignment. By healing that blockage, I become more integrated and gain greater access to the real, powerful, enlightened me. My stubbornness is transformed into tenacity, my intelligence into wisdom and control becomes dominion, grounded in Light and Love. If something external is scaring me, all I need do is look within for the blockage and heal it to become personally transformed. And somehow, the world around me is subtly transformed and never quite the same. It’s never easy but it’s what I’m committed to and it’s the only true source of Joy for me. It’s funny how my fears have become road signs that lead me down the road of transformation to true happiness. */:-)