This is my new latest trick to manage my excessive worrying. I’m a worrier and if there’s one thing I do on a consistent basis is worry about stuff. Once I’m down some rabbit hole, it’s impossible to get out. Racing mind, flitting thoughts, fuzzy logic – all my synapses firing in my brain.
I chanced upon this method from a book by Tosha Silver, called Outrageous Openness – called the God Box. The God Box is a simple technique that helps you to let go of worry, reduces anxiety and solves the seemingly insurmountable. Out of many of the techniques I’ve worked with, this one works like a dream.
You write down your worry on a piece of paper and you place it in the God Box – surrendering and offering your problem to a Higher Power. You don’t have to even believe in God. You can call on any deity, the Universe, Love or The Force. The idea is you are relinquishing your control of trying to fix the situation to a higher power.
The box can be plain, fancy – it doesn’t even have to be a box, it can be pouch or a bag of your choice. The idea is once you write down your worry and surrender it to a God/Love/Higher Power to handle it, you trust that if it’s in the box a solution will present itself and you will be guided to it.
You can put anything in the box – from serious hurts and traumas of the past, to smaller daily matters like finding a great web designer or roommate to share rent. It doesn’t matter how big or small the problem, it just goes in the box.
It can look something like this – Dear God I release and hand over this burden of my anger and resentment, please take it from me and allow peace and forgiveness to fill me. You put it in the Box and know it’s going to happen.
Sometimes I rewrite stuff that is already in the box and once the box is filled, you simply burn all the worries, releasing them in a sacred manner to the Universe.
The technique works and I have spent many nights before bed, furiously writing down my anxiety and worries and filling up my God Box quickly. I figure it works because you are writing out these thoughts within onto a piece of paper that’s outside of you. And these thoughts when left unattended in your mind can grown and fester and give birth to new toxic thoughts. Writing them down is a cathartic form of journaling and you have released them from your consciousness.
The act of putting it away in a God Box and shutting it with an action lets your mind through physical action know it’s done. Check! And that completion with the action of putting it away tells the brain exactly that.
Plus if you revisit the thought, by simply reminding yourself it’s in the God Box, it cuts that thought loop right off. So instead of dealing with a runaway bullet train of worry and thoughts, it get derailed ASAP.
The technique of the God Box originated from a 12-step programme and there are dozens of articles on it. Everyone has their own technique – some keep it for a year and open at the end of year to see how many of their prayers and concerns were handled by God, some keep through out the years, starting new God boxes every time it’s filled, and some burn those slips of paper once the box is filled.
For me, there’s nothing like a good fire ritual to release worries into the air transmuting them with fire and seeing the smoke rise up like a prayer to the heavens.
So give it a try in this time of isolation and see if this technique helps with the worry, the stress and the anxiety. Let me know if it works for you and write in to me at AskMe@wiseinnercouncil.com to tell me all about it.