146

I read something recently that said, “the antidote to anxiety is not calm, it’s trust.” I have to say that I disagree. The antidote to anxiety isn’t calm or trust, it’s - you guessed it - faith. 

Think about it. Faith is akin to believing in something, be it a spiritual entity, God, the future, or pretty much anything. How can we possibly trust anything we don’t believe in, whether it’s ourselves, our futures, or the people around us? The more time I spend with faith, the more I believe it’s the baseline for all sanity and well being, and most of us are walking around without it these days, in part because the word is so strongly associated with religion that it feels unavailable to the rest of us. 

In reality, faith is available to us all with - and I’m not going to sugar coat it here - a LOT of practice. Like, a lot. A bummer of an amount of practice. This is why it’s much easier to stay skeptical, cynical, or just plain miserable. Think about the amount of effort and repetition required to create an adult human being. We are incredible, spectacular, magnificent creatures capable of wonderful things, but Lawd have mercy, do our brains require a lot of practice to master even basic tasks. If you watch a baby trying to grab a spoon, you understand what I’m talking about. There is a reason why professional athletes are endlessly, endlessly, endlessly practicing. 

The same is true for acquiring and keeping even a basic faith, especially for those raised without it, raised against it, or raised in a tainted or punishing version of it (which is, let’s be honest, most of the human beans walking around on this planet, unfortunately). The primary motivation for writing this blog is to document and humanize the trial, error, and malfunction required to practice faith. 

Twenty years ago, I started praying. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but it turns out it was prayer. That’s how disconnected from my spiritual life I was. I was just talking to the wind and saying, “please help me” because I was miserable. Meanwhile, some pretty amazing things were happening in my life, some of which I could see as profound and others I couldn’t make any sense of. 

I did that slapdash, helpless, confused version of intermittent faith and prayer for fifteen more years (fifteen!), before I reached a point where the potential rewards of living with faith far outweighed the risks or side effects. It wasn’t rock bottom, per se, it was more like had-enough-ing-ness. I was just tired of being stressed and underwhelmed by life, and Gabby Bernstein’s book, The Universe Has Your Back, made me feel like I could be an active participant in my life, my faith, my future, and that I could still build a life that belonged to me. 

I think, sometimes, believing in God (or Good) makes us feel like we don’t get to have any say in outcomes, that we have to be totally passive observers, and anything bad that happens is the result of dealing with a God who has a bone to pick. Gabby’s book and my own machinations on it made it clear that, call it what you will, whether it’s faith, prayer, intention, attraction, or cognitive behavioral therapy, the way we think about our life, our world, and our future impacts the way we operate in it, and the outcomes available to us. 

Once I started believing that I could be an active participant in faith, just by choosing how I thought about my future, the people in it, and my own goals, I started to make different choices about what kinds of opportunities and what kind of future was available to me, which had a very satisfying and generally positive snowball effect. 

Can I control other people with my mind? Nope. Ha! Hilarious (and, boy, do I wish sometimes).

Does prayer work? Yep, no question, absolutely. Whether I believe that it is Good (or God) acting on my behalf or it’s just me repetitively focusing on a goal which I then make positive choices about because I feel like it could be an option doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is I feel like an abundant, fruitful, happy future is available to me as long as I keep believing, practicing, and participating as though that were true. 

I will say that generally speaking, I am no longer an anxious person. Do I still get stressed or “activated” (I am not a fan of the word triggered, for a variety of reasons)? Heck yeah. Those areas of my life require a lot more introspection, pause, and prayer. Do I worry the BLEEP out of my future anymore? Nope, not at all. I focus on it. I pray about it. I work toward it. But I also have complete faith in it, because too many magical, wonderful, spiritual things have happened for me to ignore at this point. I trust in a positive future. 

Will there be unanticipated hardships? Yes, of course. Do I have faith that I can navigate them? Certainly. Do I spend my time preoccupied with what might happen next? Less and less so, every day. There are definitely some areas of my life where I need to step up my prayer game, so let me just commit to that now. I will report back on those endeavors as they unfold.

But, in the grand scheme of things, if you are struggling with anxiety, trust, or calm, let me suggest you try faith first. It may just be a path to improving all those other things.