Anxiety Spiral? Kundalini Yoga Tools That Help

Introduction: A Macramé Course in Mallorca

During COVID, my daughter and I took an online macramé course together. We were living in Mallorca then, and macramé was something I had done as a child. I hadn't done it for many years, but I still remembered it clearly.

I wanted to go back to it and pass it on to her, to enjoy it together and just take our minds away from all the chaos in the world. I remember how completely it took us in: hands moving, eyes on the cords and all of our attention in the present moment.

We were just there. Those were anxious months for almost everybody, and in the middle of them I had these moments where my mind was quiet and I felt more at peace.

I still do things with my hands. I love to paint and to experiment with new things, and I've come to see that what I was looking for with the macramé is the same thing I look for on the mat.

So today I want to talk about creative potential, about what happens to anxiety when we use it, and why Kundalini Yoga is one of the most direct ways I know to get there.

Kundalini as Creative Potential

Let's start with the meaning of kundalini. In the yogic tradition, kundalini is the vital energy every person carries. It's the same energy that creates the universe, and it's present inside each of us, like a seed, on a small scale.

I understand it as our creative potential. And we have to remember that creative isn't only artistic. It's the capacity to create your own life, to start something, to find a way through, to give life to something that wasn't there before. A meal, a project, a conversation that goes differently than you expected.

The tradition also says that when we live in survival mode, this energy is busy with the basics: staying safe, getting through the day, looking after the body and the people we love. And as it rises through the energy centers, the chakras, it shows up in different ways: our sexuality, our actions, our capacity to connect with others, and also expression, clear thinking and intuition. It is the same energy, with different expressions.

We live in a moment that makes that potential a little hard to reach, because so much information gets in every day. Little bits of things that have nothing to do with each other most of the time. A headline, a message from work, a recipe, someone's holiday photos, a notification about something you ordered. Our attention gets cut into very small pieces, and the mind jumps between them from the moment we wake up until we lie down to try to sleep.

Creativity doesn't grow well in that environment. Anxiety does.

The Anxiety Spiral

Recently I read Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck, and if you don't know her, please read one of her books. I'm always coming back to her. She's a sociologist and a coach, and she struggled with anxiety for a big part of her life. She describes what she calls the anxiety spiral as a feedback loop. A worry appears, the body reacts, the mind explains the reaction with another worry, and around it goes.

Her proposal is simple. When we get anxious, creativity shuts down. And it works in the other direction too. When you do something creative, anxiety has less space to grow. She says that if you are being creative, anxiety can't function.

It matches what I feel in my own body. I can't be in the anxiety mode and in the creative mode at the same time. It's like a switch: one goes on and the other goes off.

And I know the spiral very well. For me, it starts when I begin to look at everything I have to do and how little time I seem to have. Everything I am not doing right, everything I'm not getting to on time. I call it putting on my crappy glasses, and I see all of life through those glasses.

When I am in this mode, I can only see the negative. There is no room for anything else, because everything has that tint, and it grows. It's a snowball that gets bigger with every turn, and if I don't have something to get me out of there, it just gets worse and worse. Maybe it happens to you too.

Building Your Bucket

Martha Beck points out something I like. Most people who are anxious don't feel like being creative. Of course they don't. Nobody in the middle of a spiral thinks this is a good moment for watercolors. So her advice is to have your things ready ahead of time.

One of her exercises is a list of what you love through each of the five senses, so that when the spiral starts, you don't have to invent anything. I think of it as a bucket. A handful of creative things you already know work for you, ready to reach into.

And creative doesn't have to mean artistic. Cooking, singing in the car, knitting. A lot of us stopped doing these things because they didn't feel productive, they didn't feel like they were leading somewhere. So maybe it's a good idea to bring one or a few of them back.

With the yoga practice, it's the same. I remember when I was studying yoga for pregnant women, I asked my teacher which types of breath were suggested for the moment of giving birth. She explained something very interesting. The point is not to hand a pregnant woman the perfect breath. The point is to let her know her breath so deeply, to let her experiment beforehand with different types of breath, so that in labor she will be guided by her instinct to the one she needs.

I think that is the best way to relate to our yoga practice too. Be curious, experiment, pay attention and learn what serves us best in each situation and what it ignites in us, so when you need to take care of your energy, you know what to use.

The Kundalini Yoga Tools in My Bucket

One of the practices I love most in Kundalini Yoga is meditating with mudras in motion. It combines mantras and mudras, the hand positions, with movement. You sing, you change mudras, your body moves with the rhythm. It's one of my favorites because it is a very creative experience, and you can only follow the sequence if you are completely in it, in what you're feeling, in the moment you're in.

Your mind doesn't have much space to wander, and if it does, you are reminded almost immediately and can come back again. It's something done with your hands and your body, like many artistic expressions.

People often think meditation is always sitting still, but it doesn't have to be. One of the things Kundalini Yoga teaches us is that stillness can come through movement and through singing, so the body can relax and arrive in that moment of stillness.

Another meditation I especially like when I feel I'm getting stuck in an anxiety spiral is the Kundalini Yoga meditation for stress and sudden shock. You repeat Sat Nam six times and one Waheguru. That's all. Counting the six times helps you keep your mind focused. If you want to try it, it's very simple: Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Waheguru.

You can also do it in your mind, and it's a way to go beyond the thoughts and into your essence, into your true self.

There are so many simple techniques. Focusing on the tip of the nose. Balancing postures, like standing on the balls of the feet or in tree pose. Anything that asks for your whole attention. Chanting mantras, or lengthening your exhale so it's longer than the inhale. All of this brings you back to a calm state, and from there you can better face the different experiences the world brings you.

The more time we spend getting to know ourselves, the more in touch we are with that inner self. The more we practice and breathe and move our bodies, the easier it becomes to take care of ourselves when we spiral. So I invite you to practice and to notice, inside the kriyas and the meditations, what works best for you in different moments. Get curious and experiment. It's not so much about the technique itself, but about what it ignites in us and how it can serve us.

This is one of the things I love about going deeper into Kundalini Yoga and doing the teacher training. The wisdom is so vast and gives us so many tools to get in touch with ourselves that it becomes a lifelong practice. Sometimes you connect more with the physical practice, sometimes more with the mantras or the meditations, sometimes more with the pranayamas. In the end, all that wisdom is there to help us remember the truth inside of us, beyond all the noise.

Closing: Learning to Hold Ourselves

As adults, we have the responsibility to take care of ourselves and learn to regulate ourselves through the different experiences we have in life. When we were children, our parents held us. Now we have to hold ourselves.

It can be something very simple, like cold water on the face, which activates the vagus nerve. We have to find out which things help us most and learn to use them when we need them. Maybe it's just taking a few breaths.

If you want to try one now, here is a small one. Put one hand on your forehead and the other on the back of your neck. Close your eyes and take three slow breaths, lengthening the exhale. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. One more time together. And gently open your eyes.

This week, I invite you to build your bucket. Write down two or three creative things you love doing. Nothing major, please. Simplicity is key. Add one practice from Kundalini Yoga that you can reach for, something very simple. And the next time you notice the glasses going on, reach into your bucket for two minutes and notice how you feel.

I still think about that macramé course in Mallorca. We were learning to tie knots, and something much more profound was happening.

Thank you so much for sharing this space with me. If you think this might be useful for someone you know, please share it, and remember to subscribe so you can receive the next episodes. Sat Nam. I send you a big hug.