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.Withthe goal of starting to think about working with instead of against anxi-ety, I want to quote another metaphor from the work of Steven Hayes.He calls it the Quicksand metaphor.Why the metaphors? By meditatingon them, we can get out of our heads and shift perspectives to focus onnew strategies and face old problems.Suppose you came across someone standing in the middle of a pool ofquicksand.Without ropes or tree branches to reach them, the only wayyou can help is by communicating with them.They shout, Help, get meout, and begin to do what people usually do when they are stuck insomething they fear: struggle to get out.When people step into some-thing they want to get out of, be it a briar patch or a mud puddle, 99.9%of the time, the effective action to take is to walk, run, step, hop, or jumpout of trouble.This is not so with quicksand.To step out of something it s necessary 196 Curious?to lift one foot and move the other foot forward.When dealing with quick-sand, that s a very bad idea.Once one foot is lifted, all of the trappedperson s weight rests on only half of the surface area it formerly occu-pied.This means the downward pressure instantly doubles.In addition,the suction of the quicksand around the foot being lifted provides moredownward pressure on the other foot.Only one result can take place: theperson will sink deeper into the quicksand.As you watch the person stuck in the quicksand, you see this pro-cess begin to unfold.Is there anything you can shout out that will help? Ifyou understood how quicksand works, you would yell at the person tostop struggling and to try to lie flat, spread-eagled, to maximize contactwith the surface of the pool.In that position, the person probably won tsink and might be able to logroll to safety.To the person trying to get out of the quicksand, this is an extremelycounterintuitive idea.Someone struggling to get out of the mud maynever realize that the wiser and safer action to take would be to get withthe mud.If you re like most human beings, too often you get stuck in the quick-sand of your own anxiety and try to thrash your way to a resolution whilebypassing the optimal anxiety that adds excitement and leads to peak per-formance.If you want to know what it feels like to be stuck in the quicksand, goto a quiet place where no one will be around so you can get into the fol-lowing exercise.Okay, I am going to ask you not to think about something.Ready.Here itcomes.Now remember, don t think about it.Don t think of.warmchocolate cake.You know how it smells when it comes out of the oven.Don t think about it! On the outside of the cake, there is a moist, warmlayer of chocolate frosting.But don t think about it! Think about anythingyou want, just don t think about the cake.Close your eyes for a minuteand whatever you do, don t you dare think about that warm, moist,frosted cake. The Anxious Mind and the Curious Spirit 197Did you think of it? How hard was it to move your mind to somethingelse?If you are like most people, you thought about the cake.This is becauseI put the idea into your head and then basically asked you to ignore it.That s the irony of trying to hide, or suppress thoughts, feelings, or im-ages.Trying not to think about something binds us even closer to it.Wecreate a rule in our mind that says, I refuse to think about that emailwhere my brother called me a prick. Now, every time you try not tothink about it you are forced to go over this rule again, which leads youto think even more about it.I spent a year working at the Veterans Administration Hospital inCharleston, South Carolina, treating combat veterans traumatized by theirwar experiences: guns being fired at them, carrying injured friends intheir arms, and witnessing the limp bodies of civilians and innocent chil-dren.They couldn t shake these images, and the harder they tried, themore vividly they returned, interfering with ordinary activities like fall-ing asleep or listening to their child tell them about school.If you haveever tried to avoid thoughts because they made you feel uncomfortable ortried to escape (through drugs, work, exercise, sex, collecting porcelainfigurines of hippos, you name it), you have something in common withthese veterans.What do you do? To begin the change process, I want youto meditate on this metaphor of relating to your unwanted private experi-ences in a new way.Imagine that you are in a swimming pool with an inflated ball inyour hands.The inflated ball is the thoughts or feelings you don t want.So, what do you do? You try really hard to push it under the water so youdon t have to look at it anymore.Now, it s hard to hold an inflated ballunderwater.Isn t it? If you don t put all of your energy and focus into it,that ball is going to burst right back to the surface.Now, as long as youput a lot of energy into it and you aren t distracted, you can keep that ballunderwater for a long time.Unfortunately, you rarely ever get the poolall to yourself.From the corner of your eye, you notice several beautifulwomen in tiny bikinis with perfect bodies smiling at you as they walk 198 Curious?toward the pool (or gorgeous men with washboard abs and sculpted bi-ceps).What happens? You forget what you were doing, that ball shoots upto the surface, and there it is that thought you ve been trying so hard toget rid of.And so you submerge it again.You look down because youcan t watch and flirt with those beautiful people and keep the ball underwater.And then the most beautiful of the lot jumps into the pool, swimsover, and starts talking to you
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