Cultivating Calm & Stillness…. Even When Anxious – Rev. Darrell Jones
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
What if you could live your life where anxiety is a reality, but not your lifestyle? Anxiety doesn’t have to be at zero in order for calm and stillness to exist. However, if there isn’t a commitment to practice calm and stillness even when anxiety is present, chances are anxiety will remain an overworked muscle in our experience. Join us this Sunday as we explore ways to strengthen your capacity for calm and stillness…right now regardless of how high or low your anxiety may be. We all can live our lives where anxiety is a reality, but not a lifestyle.
SUMMARY
In this transcript, Rev. Darrell Jones discusses the importance of cultivating calm and stillness in the midst of anxiety and stress. He emphasizes that anxiety does not have to be at zero in order to experience calm and stillness. Rev. Jones shares a personal anecdote about feeling overwhelmed with tasks and how he found calm by taking a walk and practicing small incremental progress. He also suggests various techniques for cultivating calm, such as mindfulness, meditation, and stimulating the vagus nerve. Rev. Jones encourages finding support from others and emphasizes the importance of self-care for mental and emotional well-being. The transcript concludes with a song about peace and a blessing for cultivating peace and calm in daily life.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:05):
Thank you so much for that song. Good morning everyone. Welcome to this talk today. Not only are we continuing the conversation on this book embracing the imperfections in our life, but I want to just call out and I’m going to do it a couple of times during service. It’s mental health awareness month, and one of the things that I know when my mental health is going down, when it’s going into a dangerous space, I think I’m alone. I think I have to do it all by myself. I think there’s no one out there who wants to support me. I think there’s no one out there that could possibly understand the hardship that I’m going through, but as this song reminds us, remember, you’re not alone. You’re here today and everyone here in this room and those of you online, we’re all coming together to explore this talk title today, which I think would be appropriate for almost anyone.
(01:01):
If you’re breathing, does anyone experience anxiety or am I the only one? Okay, almost everyone’s hand is up here. Those of you online, check in with one another. Give a little note here. We’re going to talk about cultivating calm and stillness. Now, that’s the name of the title in the chapter that I was given to focus on, and I was like, I just want to stick with the title of the book. And then I was like, no, I need to add a little something to it. I want to keep it real. If you’ve ever heard me talk, if you’ve ever spent time with me, I’m a pragmatist. I want to keep it real. I like the woowoo, floaty, esoteric stuff, but I have two feet on the ground. I’ve got a bank account that goes up and down. I’ve got emotions that rise and fall. I watch the news and get triggered. So cultivating calm and stillness even when anxious. I want to come back to the reading from the book. If you’re not familiar with Brene Brown, some people love her, some people have issues with her, but the bottom line is, is that there’s powerful truth in what she writes. Hear these words in our increasingly complicated and anxious world, we need more time to do less and be less. Now, we could stop right there.
(02:26):
In this world that we live in today with all the going, being and doing, we need more time to do less. I can see all the wheels kicking and screaming. What are you talking about? I got so much to do. We need time to be less. This is not about trying to make ourselves smaller. This is not about not striving and achieving and trying to get things done and accomplish things, but to make some space in our increasingly complicated and anxious world. We need more time to do less and be less. When we first start cultivating calm and stillness in our lives. It can be difficult. And I want to add, if you’ve been cultivating calm and stillness like I have for over two decades, it’s still difficult, right? Yes. Okay. Maybe I need to share my coffee with everybody. Everyone’s a little like, all right, so when we first start cultivating or if we’ve been cultivating common stillness, it can be difficult, especially when we realize how stress and anxiety defines so much of our daily lives.
(03:42):
That’s a huge part that we’re going to explore today, how stress and anxiety defines us. But as our practices become stronger, anxiety loses its hold and we gain clarity about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what holds true meaning for us. Now, I love this quote and I’m challenged by this quote again, pragmatist. Daryl is coming forward, the language and the tone of it. It seems like there’s this perfect place we’re going to get to, she says, but as our practices become stronger, anxiety loses its hold and we gain clarity, and it’s like all of a sudden we’re like one of those commercials on tv. We’re just walking through a field and there’s bunnies jumping around and everything’s great and sunshiny all the time. There isn’t a perfect place that you are going to attain where there is no longer anxiety in your world. That is a natural part of our nervous system, but this is what I want to entertain. What if you could live your life where anxiety is a reality, but it’s not your lifestyle?
(04:51):
Can I get an amen? Okay. Anxiety does not have to be at zero in order for you to experience calm and stillness. Let me say that again. Anxiety doesn’t have to be at zero. Stress doesn’t need to be at zero in order for calm and stillness to exist in your life. However, if there isn’t a commitment to practicing calm and stillness, even when anxiety is present, chances are anxiety will remain an overworked muscle. In your experience, how many of us have said, I’ll just, once I get there, then I can be calm. Once I get this test done, then it’ll be okay. Once I get this project complete, then it’ll be okay. Once I move and get settled into my new digs, then everything’s going to be okay.
(05:53):
Let’s first entertain this question. Do you believe an experience is available for you where anxiety is a reality, but it’s not the major tone of your life? Do you believe it? And I want to stretch us because a lot of this teaching, a lot of this practice of spiritual and personal growth, we make it only about ourselves, but we need to hold each other accountable. Do you believe everyone else check in? Do a little 360 in your life? Do you believe everyone else can experience anxiety as a reality but not their lifestyle? We must be willing to hold this as a possibility for ourselves and for others in order for it to work. We really do. We may not know how to make it happen. And here’s the thing, cultivate not be calm. Most of us when we hear this, we hear, I have to be calm. No, you don’t have to be calm to practice calm and stillness. You just need to be willing to do it in the midst of anything that’s happening in your life. This is the beginning of opening the door to defining ourselves by something other than stress, worries, doubts, concerns, fears, anxieties, just being willing to hold it as a possibility beyond what we may be experiencing.
(07:33):
Do you realize how much we define our existence by stress? The majority of what we consider to be news that we consume every day is how bad the weather is, whether it’s cold or hot. It’s always like, what’s it going to be? That’s the energy of it. How bad is the traffic? God bless all the people that are running a marathon today that probably jacked up some traffic for people. Regardless of what we believe about the conflict in the Middle East right now between Israel and Hamas, chances are we search and we listen to the updates to see what’s happening and what we think they should be, or we start listening to what other people believe and we let that just irritate us for the rest of the day. Can you believe what those people had to say? Can you believe what they did? We focus on what is wrong, broken, disgusting, and shameful.
(08:41):
That’s what we do. We do it with others for sure, but we also do it with ourselves. We must be willing to believe the possibility beyond and anxiety, and ideally we’re willing to cultivate it on a regular basis. So coming back to this idea of may being mental health awareness month, I think it would be a good idea to bring some awareness to the difference between stress and anxiety, because oftentimes we use those words interchangeably, and I think that it would serve us to really differentiate them. So stress is something that happens outside of us. It’s usually some sort of external thing like you have to study for a test or you are having an interview for a new job, or you’re going to a doctor’s appointment. You’re not quite certain what’s going to happen there. Or maybe it’s a first date or maybe you’re giving a presentation, but everyone’s experienced some level of that stress, right?
(09:48):
The stressor is something outside, and usually once that stress has passed, the impact of it reduces. So in this scenario with stress, stress is not inherently good or bad because sometimes stress can actually be a motivator. Let’s use the example of the test. I’ve got this test. Oh my gosh, I’ve got this test. I don’t really feel confident about knowing everything. And all of a sudden you’ve got plans to go hang out socially for two or three hours, and you might say, you know what? I’m not going to do that. I’m going to take the time to study a little bit more. So on some level, we could say that the stress of that test has been somehow a good motivator for us to get more engaged in the work that we need to do. However, if later that night you’re trying to go to sleep and you’re staring at the ceiling with your eyes popping out of your head, and that way stress is not acting as a good motivator, and this actually starts to move into this negative example, moves into anxiety generally, anxiety is internal.
(10:54):
It’s stimulated oftentimes by something externally. It’s our reaction to the stress in our world. But anxiety is usually connected to this regular internal persistent feeling of dread and apprehension, and it remains fairly constant. And the really, really challenging anxiety is the kind that stays persistent even when the stressor has passed. Have you had that experience? The actual event is over, but you’re still just kind of like e buzzing around or worse when there’s no longer any data or information that says, oh, this may be a possible challenge for you. Again, you just find yourself caught in the loop. But what if if it does happen again? Oh my gosh, what if it does happen? Will I be prepared? And we get caught into this internal angst and constant spin, the pressure of living our lives, the stress or the stressors that come and go. They are important to acknowledge because they’re not exceptional.
(12:00):
They are normal. Everyone experiences stress in some way, shape or form. So to make ourselves wrong, which I think we do sometimes, why am I so stressed about this? It can do a little bit of a number on our ability to manage it, and we all experience anxiety, but it’s not always the same. What causes me anxiety is not going to cause you anxiety. The way it manifests in me is not going to manifest the same way in you. But here’s a universal truth that I would like for you to take in for a minute. Take a deep breath in, exhale, your mind, your body, your spirit, and your nervous system. It wasn’t designed for constant anxiety.
(12:51):
It wasn’t. It’s not that you’re insufficient. How many of you went to sleep last night? I hope everyone raised their hand. Your body’s not designed for constant stress and anxiety. You have to go to sleep. And when you try to push the needle and run on fumes, you have those moments where you’re in the middle of doing something and what do you do? You fall asleep because your body’s not designed to handle constant stress. We have this autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. They’re like two gears, if you will. One is not better than the other. They all serve a purpose when stress is present. So there’s maybe a threat, a physical attack of some sort. There’s a test that is looming in the distance or maybe a car running a stop sign. Our sympathetic nervous system kicks into gear, oftentimes goes into overdrive, and it helps us navigate that stress.
(13:55):
It helps you fight something or someone off of you. It helps you focus a little bit more for the test that you have. Maybe it helps you slam on the brakes and swerve so you don’t get hit by the car that ran the stop sign. And once the stress has passed, we collect ourselves and we come back to a baseline. The challenge is, is that the baseline where most of us is running, it’s not really sustainable. Why? Because there’s 9,000 other worries and concerns, and now we’ve got one more. Thank you very much, idiot. Driver. Stress of driving now can be added to my list of triggers.
(14:38):
There’s always something going on. Most of the time we are cultivating not calm and stillness. We are cultivating anxiety. We constantly what if ourselves into higher blood pressure, increased heart rates and immobilizing fear and more. We must realize how stress and anxiety is the thing that we use most of the time to define our lives. So I want to share with you a little bit of a personal anecdote. The other day, I was trying to get some work done. Anyone ever tried to do that? So I was trying to get some work done but couldn’t. All I kept doing was circling around the laundry list of things that I needed to get done and I needed to do, and everything kind of felt like an emergency. It had to get done right now, in the next two hours, I needed to finish all the things that were in my immediate attention, writing this talk, writing a blog post, editing a document for a committee that I sit on.
(15:39):
I needed to cut the grass. I needed to clean the house. I needed to reach out to potential customers. I needed to write a new social media post. Oh my gosh. And what am I going to have for dinner tonight? When am I going to go to the grocery store? How was I going to get all of that done? Well, I wasn’t at least not all at the same time, but somewhere in my cluttered mind, I thought I was going to gulp and I want you to hear that word gulp. I’m going to come back to it later. GULP gulp all of this down and somehow be done with everything in the span of a few hours, not rational. The more I sat there, the more anxious I got. I realized I needed to do something else. In the midst of that little anxiety session, me thinking about getting stuff done, wasn’t doing anything to get stuff done. Lemme say that again. Me going, oh my gosh, how am I going to get this stuff done? How am I going to get this stuff done? How am I get this stuff done? I need to get this done. I need to get this done. It wasn’t doing anything to help me get stuff done. Anyone ever been there?
(16:45):
There’s this great terminology that keeps popping up in my awareness and I think of it in relationship to business, but I think it’s just a term that’s been used. It’s called the sunk cost fallacy. Reverend Amy is nodding her head. Anyone else know about this? The sunk cost fallacy. Let me break it down if you don’t know. It’s basically the idea that I have to continue with what I’m working on or with what I’m doing because I’ve invested so much time and energy into it. How could I possibly walk away or stop doing this thing now because I’ve put so much of myself into it? And the thing is, is that by continuing with it, it’s not necessarily going to make anything better, but you’ve put so much time and energy into it. How could you possibly walk away?
(17:34):
I was practicing anxiety. I wasn’t practicing calmness and stillness, but somewhere in my mind I got caught into this energetic charge of like, I can’t possibly stop thinking about all this stuff because if I do, I’ve invested so much time already, and this is the thing I got to keep fresh in my mind. The things that I need to get done sunk cost fallacy. There was no value in continuing down that path. I was cultivating anxiety. So what could I do to cultivate calm, not be calm? I was not calm in that moment, lemme tell you. But how could I cultivate calm?
(18:13):
Earlier in the day, I’d already done some meditating, but I felt like something else needed to happen. I needed to get away from my computer. I needed to get away from my work. I needed to get away out of my office. The work felt looming. It was like the weight of the world was on my shoulders, and if I didn’t get everything done and perfectly in the way that I thought it needed to happen, then I was a failure to the planet. You like what anxiety does there? You hear that how extreme things got? This is all internal. No one was saying this outside. This was just Daryl dancing around inside having a conversation with himself. I had to do something to cultivate calm. I had to do something to cut the fallacy that spending more time and energy thinking about what I wasn’t doing was somehow going to get things done.
(19:03):
So what did I do? I grabbed my dog and I went for a walk slash run. Now, normally when I do this, I do about two miles, but I did four. I couldn’t stop. I needed to extend this practice to really bring things down. I had to get out of this sympathetic nervous response of fight or flight and do something to get something triggered that allowed me to be a little bit more parasympathetic. Where I was calmer now is running and walking, being still no is running or walking, like sitting with my legs crossed and hitting a bowl and chiming or chanting, no, but it did something to cultivate the capacity for me to be calm. So I got back, I made myself something to eat, got a little something to drink, and I sat down and I started doing work. I took a sip. SIP pay attention to that word. I’m going to come back to it. I made small incremental progress. Did it feel good? Yeah, it felt pretty good. Did I finish everything? No, but as opposed to spinning myself into a tizzy in the moment I did something to cultivate calm in the middle of that anxiety, was the anxiety completely gone? No, but it wasn’t the center of my experience.
(20:38):
It wasn’t the lifestyle that I was living in the moment anymore. I didn’t have to be perfect calm. I allowed space for calm to find its way into me. And what became more apparent than the anxiety was my intention. And my intention was simply I wanted to try to do as much work as I could in the afternoon before I had to do some other things in the evening, but I totally lost sight of that intention because of where anxiety took me. Here’s the other thing, not only was I aware, this is back to the idea of mental health awareness month, the awareness of how our mental and emotional self is. So it wasn’t about this one slice in time as I sat and reflected a little bit more. I looked back on the past few weeks and I was like, not only have there been this kind of low grade anxiousness around, but I found myself just having this feeling of frustration and even resentment. I was resenting everything and everyone I was telling these stories, Daryl, no one knows what you want to do and no one really cares about what you’re doing. I was in a pity party. I was having a good old time in there.
(21:50):
And then this voice came to me and said, Daryl, you need to take care of yourself. Don’t worry about all these duties and the weight that you put on yourself. Yes, they are important and they need to get done, and they will. But if you do not entertain caring for your mental and emotional wellbeing, how are you even going to be able to show up 50% of what you need in order to participate and get the work done that you want to do? When I sat down and I reread the chapter to see if there is any other inspiration for this talk, and as I close the cover of the book, what popped out at me was not the title of the book but the subtitle. So it’s embracing our imperfection, but then it says, let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are. That is one of the most stressful things I think, that we all hold who we’re supposed to be. I was supposed to being inside my head and saying really funky things and thoughts over and over again, triggering and re-triggering anxiety within myself because of what I thought I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to have had done by that time.
(23:05):
And this was a heightened moment of anxiety. It took me an hour to get back to a baseline. So this is the thing for me about mental health awareness and about our spiritual work and about any of these exercises that we do. There’s a baseline that everyone knows and feels in their bones that they know I can do life pretty well from this space. If we’re not in that space, we need to do something to cultivate ourselves back to it. We need to do something to bring down the impact of stress on our lives. So how do we cultivate calm? There isn’t a single way. Of course, I love mindfulness and meditation. That’s my jam. That’s what I talk about all the time. And I think there’s something for that discipline practice to do it regularly, but it doesn’t have to look like the same thing.
(23:51):
My wife is a holistic physician, and so I was kind of picking her brain last night when she got home from a conference. And this whole idea of the vagus nerve, is anyone familiar with that? It runs down throughout the body. When it is stimulated, it promotes calmness in the nervous system. So when we’re talking about the parasympathetic, which is where we rest and digest, the sympathetic is where we’re charged. And kind of like in that fight or flight space, when the vagus nerve gets stimulated, it helps us ease a little bit into that parasympathetic space. How can you do that? You can take a finger and just put a little bit of pressure on your eyelid. Not really hard. You don’t have to push your eyeball back into the back of your brain, but it does something to stimulate that vagus nerve. You can try humming. Let’s try that right now. Just go.
(24:41):
If you’ve ever been around a parent, a caregiver with a little child and they sit there, what are they doing? A lot of the times they’re doing a little bit of humming. It’s a soothing technique. You can soothe yourself. You can bring yourself into a state of calmness. Oftentimes, when we are anxious, our breathing becomes very shallow, right? Because in a space of attack, just by being aware that you’re in that space of anxiety and going, that immediately can begin to shift things. There isn’t one thing to do. Anyone. I was talking before service. Did anyone do the trauma release exercise workshop the other week? I just did a session privately yesterday. It blew my mind to realize how much, forget about the word trauma because I think we get a little just stress. We hold so much stress in our body that we don’t allow ourselves to get rid of after an hour of doing this practice.
(25:47):
I literally am still feeling it today, a different level of okayness within my own skin from doing that practice. So I talked about sip and gulp. One of the things that I find, and I will give a shout out to Mile High Church in Denver, I was just listening to a random thing that they posted for a six minute meditation, and the person leading it talked about this idea that we are always trying to gulp life. And I made up the acronym here. So to gulp is to have these greatly unrealistic, laughable progress ideas, right? I’m going to get all the things done on my laundry list in the next two hours and be done and complete and be able to just go swim in a pool or take a nap for the next 24 weeks. Whatever. They’re laughable. They’re really outrageous ideas. But we gulp, we think we’re going to just take all this stuff in and get it done when actually, if we sip just a little bit, if we take small incremental action steps, what if there’s a project somewhere in your life, something that’s happening that’s causing you anxiety right now?
(26:58):
Yes, anyone?
(27:01):
So just hold in mind for a moment how you might be trying to gulp this down and to make a huge shift. What if you could do something to shift this thing in your life by 1%, 1%, but you did that every day for the rest of the year? 1% small, incremental progress. We’re going to call the music team up to move into our song to close things out here, but I just want to acknowledge one of the ways that I’ve been cultivating calm with about six other people in my life for over 10 years. I have a text group that every day someone is putting out a prayer request. It could be for the biggest thing like a health challenge, or it could be that their neighbor’s being really annoying and they just need a prayer for peace. But this is a way that we aren’t by ourselves.
(28:06):
Find someone and find someone. Ones that you can check in with on a regular basis and ask for help, even if it’s the silliest thing in terms of our mental health, back to that song. When we don’t allow ourselves to be alone and have to take on everything by ourselves, it gets a lot easier. Or at least the perception of it is that it’s easier. So get a prayer partner, get a circle. And I realize just in terms of practical, small progress that we can make, I meditated for over 20 minutes today, but I didn’t do it in one 20 minute sit this morning when I first got up before I kind of practiced my talk, I did five minutes. And then after I was done practicing my talk, I felt compelled to do another one. So I sat for six minutes, and then I came here and I went with Reverend Amy and some other practitioners into the room after we ran through service and we sat in meditation, and then we did a prayer blessing the outcome.
(29:08):
And then Gordon invited us into a two minute practice. So I add all that up, and I’ve been cultivating calm for over 20 minutes today at different times. You can do that on a regular basis yourself. But let’s start with a practice right here, right now. This song is called Om Shanti, Shanti meaning Peace. Let there be some peace in your body right now. Uncross your arms, uncross your legs. Let yourself sit evenly. Take a nice deep breath in, and as you exhale, I invite you to bring your hand up to your heart. Focus your attention on the love that you inherently are. Oh, feel free to sing along, but let yourself be in a space of cultivating calm and stillness right now. Peace inside my mind, God and only God is moving me. Peace inside my mind, God and only God. I live to see peace inside my mind. God and only God is moving me. Peace inside by my God and God I live to see. Oh.
(31:43):
And so I bless us as we move into the rest of this day and into this week that we cultivate peace, that we cultivate calm. We don’t have to even be it in the midst of whatever may be causing anxiety. We find a moment to breathe. We find a moment to do something, to disrupt the wheel of fear, doubt and worry. And remember that there is this Om Shanti. There is this piece that is available if we are only willing to make space for it. How grateful I am that this moment right here and right now has opened the door to that possibility and more so let us release this word and our time with gratitude, knowing that all is well. And so it is.