How to Stop Feeling Anxious About Your Goals

This quote from Ram Dass struck me today so I thought I would write about it here. I have had a love/hate relationship with the idea of being in the present moment since I was a kid. What kid doesn’t look forward to the future and get excited? You think about going places, getting things for your birthday, seeing friends, growing up it’s all so full of mystery and wonder. This addiction to the future never stops as we get older but it does transform. For some of us, the future does seem exciting, many of us have things we look forward to in our future. Births, moving, starting college, starting a new job, all of this can be points of excitement. But more often than not the excitement for the future turns into anxiety, worry, and obsession about achieving the next goal and the next one after that.

Who am I?

“Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death.”

When I first started to study mindfulness and meditation I had a hard time keeping the concept of the ego straight. What really was the ego? Was it good or bad? To put it in simple terms, the ego is your personality. The ego is the personality you developed throughout your lifetime and is capable of being changed over that lifetime. It also is ultimately eradicated at the end of your life on Earth. Many people are concerned with the death of the ego but actually, the ego dies multiple times in many different ways throughout a lifetime. Most of this change is subtle like the change in personality you experience from age 30 to ago 40. Some are more obvious like the change in personality you experience after the death of someone close to you or after being traumatized by a car accident.

This is not to say that the ego does not exist or the experience of the ego is invalid to our life experience. On the contrary, these changes are what facilitate the lessons that we learn throughout our lives. I would go so far as to say that the experience of the ego is the experience that we came to this planet to learn about. But that is the point, you as a spiritual being are the observer, the ego is what you are observing. If you’ve ever studied the law of attraction you know that our perception shapes our reality. This is the true self-observing through the lens of the ego.

By sitting with who we are where we are right now we can fully realize the lessons that we have learned and connect our past with our present. This in itself can be enough to give us some hope that our life has meaning even if that meaning is not obvious in physical reality. When you are able to observe your physical reality in the present moment you are able to feel contentment, joy, love, and all these feelings that many of us are trying to feel with adding more to our lives.

But the secret is that once you stop and observe yourself as you are now you will find that the work you are truly meant to do will add itself to your life and you will be happy to do it. It will no longer feel like a “grind” or a “hustle”. You cannot be overwhelmed in the here and now because you are not observing the future like you normally are when you are looking at the work itself.

The bigger question is, why does death scare us so much? There is no better time than now to look at this question from a spiritual perspective. From the perspective of source consciousness and not the ego death is a transition to a new form. It is a stopping of your life in this physical form and a beginning of a new life in a non-physical form. The ego causes the fear of death out of a desire to keep going because the ego is not meant to exist in any other form but the physical one that you are now. All the ego knows (all it is meant to know) is that if you stop living in this physical form that it will no longer exist.

All that being said, is it wrong to live purely from the ego? No. Because living from the ego is just one form of expression of a desire to live. It’s certainly always preferable to have a desire for life than a desire for death. The ego is not something to be eradicated, it is a necessary part of life. It is your personality that you present to the world and use to relate to others. But when the ego gets out of control and we experience anxiety, fear, or depression then it is worth taking a break and remembering that we have control over it and simply be here now.