Allowing the fizz

A few years ago, in a fun exercise, a friend of mine identified one of my qualities as “fizz”. Intuitively I knew what he meant, but it was hard to put into words and felt a little uncomfortable. Fizz was something positive and yet it was somehow anxiety’s cousin, which my mind had some negative judgements about.

Around the same time, I came across a quote shared by Jeff Foster on his Facebook page. I cannot find the exact quote now, but I can share the meaning I heard in it, which for me is profoundly beautiful. I think it really speaks to “fizz” and I wonder, can you see any of this in yourself?

I heard that I may have

sensed a fizz in my system and called it anxiety,

when in fact it is

my very life force bubbling within me,

reminding me of the

mind-blowing awesomeness of the being I am,

and the

miracle that I am here to experience this wild ride known as life.

And in the moment that landed with me, negative judgements about having “fizz” as a quality, and the regular appearance of "butterflies in my tummy", disappeared.

Soon to be replaced with a fear of sharing this sort of thing, as I now feel the call to do, and the possibility of this having others think I am nuts or being offended by it.

But share it I will, because in my work as a one-to-one coach, as well as in schools, this comes up again and again. People experience relief and freedom when they encounter the possibility that the feelings they are experiencing do not mean anything about them, and only need to be felt. As soon as there is freedom to feel whatever is there, nothing is a problem and no labels are needed. 

It’s so easy in the world we live in to get caught up in a story that “I have anxiety” and therefore “I am not a normal person”, and to work hard to try to get rid of it. A whole industry is based on this desire to alter the way we feel. To want to help others suffer less is a beautiful intention, but we need to know the truth about feelings (that they’re 100% safe, come and go, and mean absolutely nothing about us) before we busy ourselves with the impossible task of trying to control them. We need to look in a different direction rather than spinning our wheels in the mud.

We’ve all heard of the current mental health crisis, and if like me you work in schools then you are also aware of the long and growing waiting lists for young people to access mental health services. So something, in the current model of labelling and trying to control feelings, clearly isn’t working.

My dream is for people of all ages to discover the truth about feelings and see beyond what we’ve been conditioned to believe about them.

It’s amazing how different life is once we discover this insightfully for ourselves, and this is possible for everyone. The impact on young people of parents and teachers discovering this is profound. This is at the heart of the work I do.

If you or someone you care about ever struggles with anxiety, I invite you to consider the possibility that things like butterflies in your tummy are actually a fizzy reminder that you are alive, rather than a sign that something is wrong with you. Your mind may label the sensation and make a judgement about it. Minds will do that. And you are not your mind.

If this has resonated in any way for you, you may like to listen to an audio recording I created, called "Why we don't need to get rid of anxiety". It uses sitting exams as an example, but applies to absolutely anything that we might feel anxious when thinking about. You can get immediate access here.

#SeeClearly #Anxiety #Wellbeing