The secret to not worrying about the future

The Self Salutation Newsletter

Greetings and Salutations!

Before I get to today’s message, I want to invite you to check out the Web-based version of the Self Salutation App!

If you want to learn emotional mastery and experience the freedom from negative emotions that is possible through meditation, this is your moment!

The app has an in-depth course on the Self Salutation method for emotional mastery. It also has a section with guided meditations so you can practice anywhere.

Plus, it has all the material from the Knockout Your Inner Critic Challenge — in case you missed some of that event, or your inner critic has been acting up in new ways lately.

Okay, now onto today’s message…

Today I want to talk about a universal challenge: worry about the future.

Now there’s a lot of conversation about cultivating positivity in our society and I’m a big believer in that for sure.

But I think where people often go astray here is that a lot of what I hear is a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach—or an encouragement to just try and bulldoze your heart with positivity.

This just doesn’t work for a lot of people who aren’t good at faking things and it also creates a superficial dynamic.

It’s kind of like going to the gym and instead of showering just putting on another layer of deodorant. It’s kind of better than nothing but not necessarily.

It’s a common tactic among salespeople who sometimes whip themselves up into a positive attitude but it’s painfully apparent to the rest of us that underneath that smile there’s something else is cooking.

But it’s also common in spiritual circles where people know about the power of staying positive and they really want to stay in that mindset—but it’s far easier said than done.

So if you’ve ever wanted to be more positive than you are able to be, this message is for you.

When positivity was an absolute necessity for me

Let me start by sharing a time when staying positive was critical for me even though I struggled with it.

After I left the monastic life I struggled to find work so I spent six months or so doing a job they give to just about anyone willing to do the work: I stood on a street corner asking for donations for nonprofits.

The irony of that job is that while you’re out there working to help raise funds for some of the greatest nonprofits around, it was probably the most egregious form of cutthroat capitalism I’ve ever been engaged in.

It was a brutally difficult job with zero job security.

You could raise thousands of dollars one week and be out of a job two weeks later because you didn’t make your quota.

They churned through canvassers at a crazy pace.

The key to success at that job was relentless positivity. You had to stare down rejection after rejection with a smile on your face, convinced that the next person would be nice.

If you did, you always got rewarded. Your positive energy attracted people and inspired them to give.

If you failed to stay positive, you suffered intensely.

Because you were always on a razor’s edge, on a difficult day it was incredibly easy to start worrying.

How to break free from this and all the syndromes

Storm Approaching Syndrome is just one of the states of mind that I call Syndromes of the Lost Self.

These negative feeling states cloud your psyche and use up tons of mental energy that could be used for positive outcomes.

The key here, though, and the secret to breaking free from these negative states is to recognize that the syndromes are all secondary layers of emotions. They emerge whenever we push a more intolerable feeling out of sight.

It’s the illusory, surface emotions, these syndromes that give emotions a bad rap.

They’re untrustworthy, unhelpful, and actually unresolvable on their own.

You can spin around in these mental traps for days on end without getting anywhere.

The key is this: To break free from the syndrome, you need to pry beneath the surface to uncover the deeper emotion at work.

Only when you uncover the deeper fear going on in your heart, will the syndrome get resolved.

What’s below the surface?

When you’re stuck in Storm Approaching Syndrome, the issue you need to examine is one we don’t spend much time considering: your relationship with life.

Do you feel in your heart of heart hearts that life is trustworthy?

Or do you harbor the fear that life will be unbearable in some way?

And why is it, exactly that you fear being hurt, or disappointed, or failing at something?

These may all seem like very natural fears to you because they are so pervasive in our world but on a deeper level, on the level of your wisdom self, this is not so.

When you look back on your life you will see that even the great disruptions were ways that brought you tremendous growth and strength.

So why is it that we continue to harbor fears over such disruptions?

Is it that we doubt our own resilience?

Is it that we fear the temporary experience of pain which is sometimes necessary to arrive at a deeper state of integration?

Is it a lingering disbelief in the goodness of life?

The thing is this. The worry about the future means there remains within us a frightened child who feels overwhelmed by the world, who hasn’t truly learned that we live in a benign universe.

What this child needs in order to heal is for your wisdom self to step forward and first and foremost give that child the assurance you know to be true.

This is most powerfully done in meditation when you can enter your heart of hearts and fill yourself with the recognition that in the deepest ways—despite all the chaos and challenges of the world—all is well.

A word for people of faith

For people of faith, when I speak of your relationship with life, I am really speaking about your relationship with God.

But I’m not speaking in terms of “life” to avoid the G word or because the message is for people who don’t believe in God.

Even for people of faith, I recommend you think in terms of your relationship to life because it can make it far easier to uncover how you feel as opposed to how you want to feel.

You see, it’s incredibly easy for people of faith to want to believe that a purely benevolent God is in charge—but in your heart of hearts you can feel very differently about the matter.

The way to bridge that gap is to uncover the true state of your heart.

Then you can tend to yourself in the way I’ve already described and grow into a deeper state of confidence in the benign nature of the Divine.

This is what got me through my challenging hours as a canvasser. I had to confront my deeper fears. I learned to comfort the frightened child within me—afraid of my own survival in this sometimes hard world.

It’s something I still practice whenever I need to.

What’s still astonishing to me is how quickly and completely the clouds can part when you get to and resolve the real feeling that is beneath the syndrome.

An afternoon that seems stormy and grey turns into a clear, sunny day.

When I did this while canvassing, I found that almost immediately I would start meeting friendly, generous people.

Everyone else wanted to be stand in the sunshine.

May the clouds part and the sunshine peak out on your day today as well!

Until next week,

Simon

P.S. Don’t forget to check out the Self Salutation App! Learn emotional mastery and experience the freedom from negative emotions that is possible through meditation: