Troubled by anxiety?
Have an artistic soul?
If so, this article is for you. If you happen to be one of the many people nowadays that have to deal with anxiety, I’m here to tell you that you can and shall overcome it!
How you may ask?
Well, simply by dancing and singing your way to joy and freedom! or..
By grabbing your paintbrush and expressing yourself totally through each stroke of the brush! or..
By taking a piece of clay and manifesting your world of imagination and emotions! or..
By having plenty of fun by diving head first into the world of comedy & humour!
No but seriously, you most likely need an catharsis that will flush out all the mental tensions that have been gathering up in your psyche for these past years or decades.
A catharsis which I find to be coming quite effectively and smoothly through ones artistic expressions in life. And what might these artistic expressions be?
Well thats simple..
It’s about you being creative and spontaneous with whatever cards life presents before you. Anxieties have the tendencies of making you rigid and stale instead of your natural way of being, which is smooth, flowing and spontaneous.
Most often, these instances of anxiety attacks are traces of redundant energies stirring up in ones consciousness. Whether they be of a repressed nature or something imposed upon you through life circumstances, they nonetheless can be transcended and overcome. These anxieties can also be seen to be mental shadows that have a darn terrible habit of pestering your wellbeing. These energies are demons and you need to overcome them!
Or something like that… 🙂
Now getting rid of your anxiety could very well be seen as a rather heavy undertaking or it could clearly be seen as a game of transcendence. A game where you get to know yourself and your expressive capabilities in the meanwhile.
I find this latter attitude, the transcendence outlook, to be much more effective and truthful.
Therefore I found it to be a great idea to compile these suggestions for you, hoping that something may click for you.
Now that we have introduced ourselves, lets get “down and dirty” with these five artistic ways of relieving anxiety and other gremlins of the psychological mind!
1. Visuals (Drawing, Painting, Photography, Film)
Our sight is one of our most powerful senses of understanding the “phenomenal” world. The things that which we see with our eyes are quite frankly, infinite! Which means that the forms and patterns which we can be aesthetically pleased and absorbed by are equally so.
What does this mean for you?
If you have anything in this “visual” department that you prefer over other things, consider choosing an artform and trying it out when you are feeling anxious, perhaps your doing this already and I’m just hashing out trivia. Nonetheless, I find our visual faculty and our power to creatively create in this realm of sensation to be quite calming and soothing to the human psyche, and not only the anxious mind.
Here’s a couple of suggestions of the arts you could try that are in the visual department.
- Drawing with pencils
- Painting with brushes or your hands
- Photography with your own sensitive eye
- Filmography
- Graphic design on your computer
Have a go at these mentioned methods and see if they work out!
2. Ceramics and Sculpting
Now this second way, is also “visual” but since it sticks out so much I found it to be necessary to give it a complete dedication.
I’ve never done sculpting, but from what I’ve understood and from my own humble perspective from the outside, it’s probably the smoothest way to go about when it comes to relieving stress and anxiety.
I mean just look at the movie “Ghost” and see how incredibly sensual and relaxing it looks for the viewers, imagine how it actually feels while moulding and creating something physical with your own hands.
Here below is a great video if you would like to learn how to sculpt.
Have a peek!
3. Singing and Humming (Your Way Out of Anxiety)
Singing is probably my favorite go-to artistic expression, as a singer-songwriter myself I love listening and exploring different melodies. In doing so also furthering my own creative expressions in the musical dimensions.
When it comes to anxiety, I’ve found that humming some pleasant and soothing melody really helps with the whole feeling of being anxious. In a elegant way, one simply lets the anxiety become a part of that “symphony” that one is creating if you will.
You could try this whenever you feel the onset of some anxious energies in your psyche.
Simply sing or hum your way to relief.
It works like a charm.
Here are a couple tips you could have in your back pocket on when trying this “technique” out:
- Sing your favorite songs
- Hum something from out of the blue (Be Creative)
- Try to imitate your favorite instrument (I usually try to mimick the Armenian Duduk or Flute)
- Have fun and let your soul be massaged by the beauty of the melody
4. Creative Movement (Dance, Exercise, Complex Movement)
Movement based exercises, martial arts and qigong are three of my favorite physical activities to do when wanting to loosen up my body and mind.
Creative movement is incredibly efficient when it comes to releasing certain mental and physical energies into ones surrounding. One simply shakes of a lot of things when one moves around consciously and creatively.
When this is done in combination with the third way, i.e. singing or humming, it can almost become blissful, and all memories of being anxious will just have faded away into the background.
In other words, when you want to replace your anxiety with bliss, try to dance and sing creatively.
I can guarantee you that you will feel a powerful effect!
5. Humour (Watch, Read, Write or Do Funny Stuff)
If you feel overly anxious about a certain thing, go read a joke or see a skit on precisely the same topic. This can really help with you taking the situation less seriously and be much more relaxed in your own skin.
Stand up comedy is fun, but too much of that gets tiresome. So shake it up, have a peek at many different sources of humour. Read some funny lines by Groucho Marx, or watch a Charlie Chaplin film, that guy was a genius. Perhaps you could read some mainstream popular reddit jokes for some relief, or simply, and perhaps best one yet, just laugh yourself into a happy oblivion. An oblivion where all your anxieties can’t see the light of day ever again!
That being said, anxieties can be dissolved by a hearty laugh! So keep that in mind whenever you feel the anxious energies creeping into your soul trying to harass you.
Conclusion
I’m more than confident that employing one of these “strategies” mentioned above can relieve you of some anxiety that you may be troubled by, however deep-rooted it may be. However, it is also important to realize that by treating the symtoms one isn’t really doing anything to the underlying cause of all the anxiety.
That being said, I firmly believe that one of the best ways of going to the root of the matter, the source of the anxiety, is to employ meditation.
Meditation is a powerful tool which, if done correctly and sufficiently enough, can more ore less cure you of anxiety and chronic negative moods and depressions. Now I’m aware that these words aren’t small, but here at TR we truly believe that to consciously relax ones overthinking mind with the help of meditation is one of the best and most genuine ways.
You can begin with as little as 5 minutes a day, to start a meditation practice, heck you don’t even have to call it meditation. Just sit down and witness the content of your consciousness, without judgement or too much interest.
Daniel Seeker is a lifelong student of the past, present and future. He realized deep relaxations of the psyche when meditating in his hermit cave on the island of Gotland. His writings are mostly a reflection of that realization. Daniel has meditated & done yogic exercises daily for more than 10 years and is studying history and philosophy at Uppsala Universitet. He is currently finishing writing his B.A. thesis in history which explores how Buddhist, Yogic and Hindu texts were first properly translated and introduced to the western world in the late 18th and 19th century.