The Manipuraka Chakra and Worry🔗

Worry is nothing but the gap between your expectations and reality. It arises from the inability to accept the reality of the present moment. Worry takes root from your own thoughts or words. Understand, there are two kinds of ‘talking’ that continuously happen in you. The first is dialogue – talking to another person. The second is monologue, or what I call ‘inner chatter’. You either talk to people outside or you continuously chatter within you. In either case, words and thoughts are the ‘building blocks’ that make up worry.

The manipuraka chakra or navel energy center is the point from which your thoughts arise. When you create more thoughts inside due to worry, the load on this chakra increases. This energy center responds directly to worry, and affects the stomach. That is why, when you worry about something, your stomach starts churning. Or when you hear some shocking news you say, ‘I can’t digest it...’ The stomach is very sensitive to thoughts. If you notice, people who are very ambitious, or who are perfectionists, often end up with stomach trouble and ulcers. There is an extreme form of habitual worry that can slow down the entire functioning of the individual. It is known as Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). According to research done by the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA, GAD affects about 6.8 million adult Americans, and about twice as many women as men. When worry becomes a habit, it causes many psychosomatic diseases and even cancer. Psychosomatic diseases don’t have any carrier. They happen purely due to the way the mind and body of a person interact. That is why worry needs to be addressed and removed from the system.

Worry is a deeply embedded pattern in us. It is like a virus software programmed into your brain! It works randomly, without any solid reason or justification. For example, let us say you usually experience anxiety at ten o’clock every morning when you enter your office. Without your knowledge, ten o’clock gets recorded as a low-mood time for you. Gradually, you will start experiencing the same anxiety every morning at exactly ten o’clock - even if it is a Sunday! Most of our worries revolve around a few issues – money, or health, or social status or relationships. The nature of worry is such that it always goes after something that is not available at the moment. If you have wealth, it will go after relationships. If you have relationships, it will go after education. If you have education, it will go after good looks! Once this programming happens, we feel we are missing something if we don't have anything to worry about! I often tell people that if you sit in your house and worry, you call it house-work. If you sit in the office and worry, you call it office work. If you sit on the beach and worry, you call it vacation, that's all!

Worry can never have an external cause. Externally, events happen. They continue to happen. But your inner space is what decides your response to them. If you really want to come out of your worries, you will come out right now, without trying to justify any of your worries. If you seriously analyze every worry that arises in you, you will see that nine-ty nine percent of your worries are baseless. But the problem is, our very worries have become our comfort zone. We don't want to get out. Also, the ego has invested too much in worry! When we have worries, the ego feels solid. Just try telling someone that his or her worries are not worth anything. They will be highly offended! Worry becomes an axis around which the ego revolves. That is why, if the worry is taken away, the ego suffers! The mind has a clear identity only with pain, never with joy! Even when you are at the peak of joy, you are always worrying about when the joy will end! Joy never gets recorded as thoughts, but pain does. Joy is like a blank re-cording! That's why our internal recordings are always negative thoughts.

There are two things to understand: chronological planning and psychologi-cal worry. People think that planning always has to involve worry. The worry of work and the worry of responsibility are classic examples of this misconception. Understand, the idea of hard work itself is a myth. Hard work is really just worry plus a little work, that's all! Real hard work never causes worry. It simply rises and falls like a wave, with great dynamism and intensity. It will never dilute itself with worry. When you work in a relaxed way, you spontaneously make the right deci-sions.

You only have the present under your control, so why waste time living in the past? In the same way, the future is completely open. You can make the best happen. But just by worrying, you end up making the same mistakes in the future also. When you live without expectation, you are already fulfilled. There is no space for worry or discontent to thrive. Worry thrives on past experiences and future expectations. In the present moment, there is no space for worry to take root. When you take care of this moment , you create a blissful future, because every moment takes birth only from the previous moment.

There are two ways to overcome worry. The first way is through intense awareness. Worry is an unconscious mental pattern. The moment you shine the light of awareness on it, it dissolves. Once you see clearly how you are creating worry for yourself, you can simply break the pattern and get out. Meditation increases awareness tremendously. When awareness increases, outwardly you might be completely involved in the outer world, but inwardly you will be untouched by anything that happens. That is the real worry-free life. The other way is to surrender to Existence. When you clearly understand that you are part of the grand plan of Exis-tence, no worry can take root in you. Existence is a live being with tremendous intelligence and energy. The same intelligence that takes care of everything is available to us too. Surrendering to the laws of Existence is the greatest relaxation from worry. Once you surrender, you start seeing that everything that happens is auspi-cious!