How Anxiety Taught Me to Surrender Instead of Control

Anxiety has a funny way of speaking to us and showing up in our lives.

As you read this, reflect on how anxiety may show up for you. In your life, and how it influences your decisions, relationships, and actions in life.

I’m realizing lately that the energy of anxiety is like a frenetic energy that runs like electricity, and it urges us to use our imagination to create and assume the worst case scenarios.

It tells us we need to take action, or force a situation out of a lack of trust.

It tells us it is not safe, or that we should worry.

It keeps us up at night, through ruminating thoughts.

It tricks us into believing that control equals safety, that if we just plan every detail perfectly, we can avoid discomfort, uncertainty, or pain. I know this because I lived it.

I grew up from parents, who worried because they had to. For survival of 4 young children. As immigrants from Vietnam, they learned ways of surviving in the United States that encouraged worry, anxiety, and not trusting in the systems and environments they lived in.

As an adult, I reflect now that I had absorbed these patterns and see how this energy reflects through work, my emotions, and my relationships.

One of the biggest lessons learned is transitioning out of a corporate job, because it was unfulfilling to me. It was soul-sucking dry, and did not feel like my way of making impact or helping the world.

Until one day, I realized: this is not for me. I’m meant to do something else, something that helps people in a more intimate way. I had to listen to this deep stirring of change within me, even if it felt scary. It felt like if I didn’t do this, my soul cup would shrivel and I would feel even more confused and lost.

Jumping & Surrendering

I learned one of the most valuable lessons about life: surrender.

Surrendering control.

Surrendering to the process.

Surrendering to life.

Surrendering to the mystery.

And still ‘til this day, I’m learning and re-learning the lessons of surrender.

That the feelings of anxiety, or frenetic energy, or ruminating that kept my ancestors safe and survived actually no longer serve me.

This led me to leave my corporate job, and this jump led me to Chinese Medicine.

After jumping off the cliff, it changed my life completely. I moved, I reconnected to who I was, and what I wanted to do in this world.

I had to trust that process, the uncertainty, and face the fear. And by doing that, it changed my life.

So, in short, anxiety taught me how to surrender. It taught me strength and mental resilience during times of challenge, uncertainty, and a lot of energetic stuckness.

We’re not meant to figure it ALL out right now. We’re just meant to be led by life, and respond in a way that feels aligned to us.

The Moment I Let Go

Of course, this shift didn’t happen overnight.

It wasn’t that my problems disappeared. It was that my relationship to them changed. My relationship with anxiety and this energy shifted.

I started trusting that life, like the seasons, has its own natural rhythm. Just as the trees don’t force their leaves to grow, and the waves don’t fight the tides, I realized I didn’t have to control everything for things to unfold the way they were meant to.

Returning to Yin is similar to this. When we trust the reception and intuitive nature of ourselves, we can know that we’ll be guided to the next step, and the next. This is the essence of Yin energy.

When we embrace the Yin, we surrender to the wisdom of not knowing. We trust that things will reveal themselves in divine timing.

Practices That Helped Me

If you struggle with anxiety and control, here are a few tools that helped me shift into trust:

1. Meditation & Awareness

For so long, I lived in the energy of doing, achieving, planning. And doing it because of what other people expected or wanted from me.

I had to unravel those layers, and come back to my true essence, which meditation has led me to.

2. Embracing Yin Energy

Yin energy asks us to trust. It asks us to listen to our intuition. In however shape and form looks like for you.

3. Releasing the Need to Know

I started journaling a simple question:
"What would happen if I let go of needing an answer right now?"

But the more I sat with this, the more I softened into trust.

4. Trusting in Divine Timing

Through inner work, self-reflection, reparenting, and facing fears , I began to understand that my life has its own unique rhythm. Anxiety arises when we resist the natural flow of our journey. But when we surrender, we open ourselves to unexpected grace.

You Are Exactly Where You Need to Be

If you’re in a season where everything feels out of control, just know, maybe it’s not falling apart. Maybe it’s falling into place.

Like Erykah Badu says, “evolving involves elimination” which things must fall away in order to make space for the next opportunities in our lives.

And maybe, just maybe, life is already holding you in ways you don’t even realize.

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Many blessings forward!