“Normally our need to escape from unpleasant feelings is so urgent that we do not give ourself the time to discover where these feelings actually come from.”
– Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche, How to Solve Our Human Problems

Anxiety arises when we anticipate situations we feel we won’t be able to handle. This causes mental and even physical pain. According to Buddha, these unpleasant feelings start because we believe that something other than our own state of mind is what causes us happiness or suffering. Anxiety sets in when we worry, “What if this terrible thing happens?” When anxiety becomes a habit, it’s our first response to every situation, and we end up identifying ourself as “an anxious person” – always feeling stressed and tense.

Unfortunately the things we’re most afraid of will come to pass. This is Buddha’s First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. Whether we’re rich or poor, male or female, old or young, we are all currently trapped in a state of suffering that ultimately leads to aging, sickness, and death.

Buddha didn’t point this out to depress us, but instead to motivate us to look at the source of our suffering, so that we can understand it, reduce it and finally abandon it altogether. We do this through the practice of meditation.

Meditation is the practice of cultivating inner peace, and is the real source of happiness. The goal isn’t simply anxiety management or just feeling a little bit better – we want to experience a profound change and become a deeply peaceful person. We want complete anxiety eradication! This is possible if we use meditation to develop a calm and peaceful mind as well as the wisdom that understands where our anxious thoughts and feelings come from.

The first step is the development of inner peace. First we focus solely on the breath and by virtue of doing this we stop paying attention to everything else. By focusing our mind in this way, an experience of peace naturally arises. We then turn our attention from our breath to this experience of inner peace, allowing it to completely pervade our mind.

From this we will be able to glean two key wisdom insights: inner peace and happiness are natural to the mind, and with practice we can increase that peace and happiness. The more we practice, the more inner peace and happiness we’ll experience, and the more familiar we’ll become with our new identity – that of a peaceful, happy person, free of anxiety. Tapping into this deep potential for authentic happiness is truly revolutionary.

Watch this video with Kadam Morten, where he talks about this process based on Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s teachings: