Our modern lifestyle packs a punch when it comes to stress. We are bombarded with ideas that we can control the uncontrollable, bend reality to meet our expectations, and twist other people's wills to meet our needs. We have an arsenal of irrational thought patterns that don’t jibe with our lived experience and that dissonance we feel is anxiety showing up. As comedian William Sharoyan once quipped, “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.”

Even in the best of times, our anxiety can run amuck. But in times of intensity and heightened stress, our desire to stay calm, patient, and unruffled is tested to the max. It feels almost impossible to find the calm we so badly want. Our brains are hard-wired to scan for impending threats in order to keep us safe, and the body automatically keeps score. We can’t escape this.   But we can learn to work with what is naturally happening so that it doesn't pull us under. 

This two-hour workshop will give you tools and strategies for working with and moving through anxiety into a calmer, gentler way of working through panic and stress. These ideas will serve you well during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the skills you learn will stay with you far beyond this current crisis. 

Anxiety always starts as a mental phenomenon, so to understand and quiet it, we have to do some mental heavy lifting. While long baths, hot tea, and restorative yoga can enhance our work to become more calm, they can’t get us there alone. The scaffold you build now will serve you well as you encounter moments of agitation and panic in the future. In fact, this is some of the greatest self-care you can give yourself. 

We can’t expect our lives to be free from angst or 100% wholly serene all of the time, but we can commit to building our own raft of calming ideas and practices to call upon when life gets rough.    

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