The emotion is free to naturally arise and pass, and you are strengthening your capacity to rest in an open, witnessing presence

Radical Compassion, Tara Brach, pg 32

Feelings are signposts, I've said this many times. However, you don't have to always follow them. It's good practice to sit with your emotions, and let then naturally rise and fall, to see what gets kicked up alongside them. Feelings don't often come alone, they bring along memories or other feelings, and sometimes we can gain new understanding of ourselves by looking at what baggage comes with our feelings.

The hard part is not acting on the feeling, not investigating, or analysing, but simply acknowledging and allowing. This allows you to feel through the feeling. You notice how it makes you feel physically, what you feel the urge to do to soothe it or distract yourself. This is all really useful information, if you can hold yourself there.

This email is entirely reader funded, you can get weekly writing from as little as £5 a month.

Once we notice the feeling, and the baggage that comes up with it, we may have more feelings: sadness, anger, shame. It's okay. This is messy work.

I'm going to France later this week. A friend is having surgery and her post-surgery support dropped out last minute, and I can make it work, so I'm off.

The time between me finding out about the situation and booking the tickets was maybe an hour.

Younger me cannot believe I'm dropping things so easily to go travel (except I'm not, it's between clients, so I'm not really dropping anything).

Just the idea of travelling so easily is new to me. It's a sign of my willingness to engage with uncertainty, and trust in my ability to manage the unknown.

I've been anxious since booking the tickets though. It's like my brain didn't go through the anxiety prior to making the decision, but now it's making up for it. There are other things in the mix, naturally, but the trip is definitely the inciting incident.

I've done all the necessary things: picking up travel sized toiletries where needed, checking the size of my bags etc. I've even paid to choose my seats, so that issue is not causing anxiety.

Now I wait. It's the tension of doing something quickly but then sitting for a week to implement the rest of these plans. I get stuck in waiting mode occasionally, but normally it's about something that's happening on the same day, not something that's a week away (well, 5 days at time of writing).

Waiting mode is deeply frustrating, because you have energy and motivation to do things, but only the thing you're waiting for. So I'm antsy and distracted, because I can't do the one thing that my anxiety wishes me to do. It doesn't help that it's too hot, so I'm grumpy on top of it.

I'm trying to witness this anxiety and grumpiness, to sit with it, and try to soothe without distracting or trying to pacify it. Ideally, my anxiety would like me to be in France, because then I'd have fewer uncertainties.

I can't give my anxiety what it needs, but what I can do is be with my anxiety, just like I'd be with a client in this moment. I'm here, I'm hearing my anxiety, and I know I'll move through it.

It's allowing myself to have these feelings, to be weird and messy without acting on it, and to know that I can do that that is how we build resilience and self compassion.