Worry

By Irma

One way that I express my fear is by worrying. I have a daughter that lives in another state that I don’t see often. I used to worry about her all the time. My fear was that she wasn’t making good choices. Perhaps drinking too much or selecting the wrong friends.

Besides expressing my fears, I thought worry was all just part of being a good parent and not something that a good parent just stops doing.

I meditated on this. Why do I worry, really? A couple different themes came up. I remembered how my mother always worried. If she was cooking, she would worry that food would burn, or turn out too salty. She worried that we didn’t have enough money for groceries. She worried about losing socks at the laundromat. That the bus would be late. That the house wasn’t clean. Lots of worries.

During the mediation it hit me that I learned how to worry from my mother. If I was having fun cooking, she would say I wasn’t taking it seriously and it was sure to turn out badly. To please her, or at least get her off my back, I would at first pretend to worry. I stared at the pan and stirred so she could see that I wasn’t having fun and I was serious about cooking it well. She always found something wrong with my cooking so eventually it stopped being fun and I really did worry about how it would turn out

Ok. So, we all learn things from our parents but why did her lesson become this habit of worrying all the time? Once again, I meditated on this and realized that worrying made me feel like I was doing something about a situation. If I didn’t think about the situation and was carefree, I felt that I was being negligent. Just having a good time and not at least trying to do something about it.

When I worried about my daughter, I felt like I was helping her somehow. By thinking about her it also helped me to feel connected to her. Even though worrying kept me up at night and made me unhappy, I liked being connected to my daughter and I prayed constantly for the universe to rescue her for me.

In the case of my daughter, I hung on to my fear because I didn’t know how else to keep her present in my life and help her. I couldn’t accept that it’s her right to make her own choices, without consulting me. I was doing my part by worrying about her.

This meditation method has a way of bringing our deepest truths to the surface and once I saw my fears and how they manifested as worry, I also started to see better ways to help and connect with my daughter. And I learned to accept her as she is, bad choices and all.

I learned that worry isn’t a necessary part of being responsible or doing a good job. We could still do everything well and be just as responsible without the worry. Having fun doing a task or project actually doesn’t take away from the quality of the work and definitely increases the joy in it. Worrying about someone you care about doesn’t help them at all. In fact it makes it harder to be helpful or to have a good relationship with them.because your worry puts a burden on them as well as you. It truly has been a great freedom to discover how worry became a part of me and leave all that worrying behind.