“What do you mean worry is trust in the negative?  That’s not true.  I worry to avoid negative things from happening to me.  I don’t trust the negative.  I worry about things that I’m afraid will happen.  My worry keeps me on my toes.  It helps me prepare for the worst.  I don’t know what my life would be like if I didn’t worry.  My mom said she worried about me all the time.  She worried about me because she loved me.  She didn’t want bad things to happen to me.  She wanted good things to happen to me.  Her worrying was her way of supporting and loving me.  I’m sorry.  You are wrong on this one!”

I hear you.  Worry does seem to be one of those institutionalized and sanctioned ways our parents raised and loved us.  They taught us that worrying prepared us for the worst.  If we’re going to drive up the mountain, we were told to worry about our tires, our breaks and our engine.  If we worried hard enough then nothing bad would happen.  We were told to call when we arrived at our destination so our parents could rest and know we were safe.  They wouldn’t have to worry anymore, at least not about the drive.  Now they would have to worry about the bears or snakes or trees falling on us or something.  And, worrying worked.  Our tires didn’t fail and the trees remained standing . . . proof that worrying was valuable and that it worked.

Whew!  How exhausting.  Worrying does other things as well.  It increases our blood pressure.  It makes our system acidic.  It shuts down our digestive track and many other things.  It becomes a superstitious ritual that is never ending.  It is, in short, a very ineffective way of dealing with the unknown – the future.

If it is true that we get what we focus on, then worrying is a wish or a focus on what we don’t want to happen.  Action follows thought.  The computer you are using was a thought in someone’s mind long before it became a physical object.  Better yet, start thinking about a piece of chocolate.  Notice your mouth is starting to salivate.  Now think about a car crashing through your front door.  Don’t hold these thoughts for too long however.  I just want you to truly understand how action follows thought or we get what we focus on.  We have also heard this as the Law of Attraction, or as a  “self fulfilling prophecy”.

When we worry, we are creating what we don’t want to happen.  We are losing in our visions.  If we hold these visions long enough, we probably will get them in one form or another.  Sometimes the results happen quickly, often the results show up years later and we wonder why we are experiencing so much suffering.  We created the suffering in our worry pattern 15 years ago, and it just took a little while for our negative vision to come true.

You could say, “Robert, you don’t know that!  You don’t have any proof!”  Right.  Think about that piece of chocolate again and sense that delicious taste on your tongue.

How do we heal this super-sized ritual?  Several ways.  One is to do the “Five Steps to Change”.  Another is to realize that your inner worrier is your ally and we just need to learn to work with it more effectively.  We need to ask our worrier how it serves us.  It usually says, “I am here to keep you safe.”  That’s nice.  I like that, however our worrier’s method of keeping us safe makes us sick and brings us the negative results it’s trying to protect us from.

Is there another way of protecting us from being hurt or to keep us safe?  Notice I just moved away from a painful statement to a positive statement?  We want to focus on being safe, not on avoiding hurt.  That right there is the shift of our conscious we are looking for.  We want to focus on what we want.  We could ask our worrier to help us focus on safety.

So, how would this look or sound?  Let’s go back to the driving up the mountain.  Our mom could ask us, “Are your tires in good shape?  Are your brakes in working order?  Is your engine tuned up?  Let’s read up on snakes so you can enjoy the wide variety of reptiles in the mountain.  And, beware of bears they eat you!  No, no.  Have you studied how bears have learned to survive around humans and what to do when you see them in your area?  All of these, except for my joke, are focused on a positive outcome of being safe.

Be watchful.  Notice how your worrier speaks to you and how often.  Ask it to help you focus on being safe.  Ask it to help you enjoy your life with ease and grace.  Ask it to speak to you in kind gentle words toward those things that set you free.