How do you guys deal with anxiety?

[vision-master]

But, the excercise is preventative, if you're in a bad place and need something now, I highly recommend drugs (I take the 'legal' kind) and or your favorite pup.

Those legal ones (like Ativan) give me a hangover...............

[SabreKai]

If I can't sleep, its a cup of warm chocolate milk with rum.

Works pretty good for me.

Sabre

[Spiderman23]

Wow I really appreciate everyone's ideas, makes me feel a little less crazy when I know many others are having the same issues.

I think what makes me calm lately is a little poetry:

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

[Candy*Land]

Then get thine feet to the pavement, VM. 

Yes, everyone -- whatever works.
I installed a poetry "gadget" on my igoogle, and this came up. I really like it today.


Lullaby for the Woman Who Walks into the Sea
   Poem beginning and ending with halves of a line by Ilhan Berk



Take your nakedness to the sea
and lie down at the tide line while the tide is still out.
Lie down at the wrack-ridge where sand pipers skitter
over dried seaweed, your whole body exposed that way,
your whole spirit exposed as you lie waiting.

With your whole spirit exposed as you lie waiting,
remember all that has passed that led to this place.
Remember the tall fields of childhood—
how you nested in the small circumferences your body
hollowed out in hip-high grasses, how the sun filled
the circle of sky you could see from that perspective.

Only the circle of sky you could see from that perspective
was contained enough to blanket you with its comfort.
Sometimes small quick swallows transected the wholeness,
their flights, diameters. Beneath you, the shaken universe
of the insects went on without your knowing. Out of your own
shaken world, Orphan, you had escaped to lie there

as in this shaken world you have escaped to lie here
naked and waiting at the perimeter of the sea,
for the tide that will, in only hours it seems,
return and wash over you, its watery brine a balm
on your face, its foam spreading under you,
lifting you like the mother you lost, her arms extended.

As it lifts you like a lost mother, your arms extended,
you will become a raft, bones rope-bound, wood buoyant,
and give in to the back and forth rolling of your own heartbeat
which keeps its watch over your body, which will become the sea,
which is, even now, beginning to be washed out, washed
into the waves and long sweep of wild waters.

Into the waves and the long sweep of wild waters,
you bequeath your grief, the many griefs that have entered your cells
and left their mark, the way algae clogging a pond surface
with its heavy green layer hides clear water. You bequeath the days
when your heart was a carousel of rise and fall.
You bequeath the reins. You let all you meant to control go.

The world you wanted to control and could not—you let it go
into the distances, into long sweep of wild waters.
You wait to be lifted by waves, mother-lightly, your arms extended,
away from the shaken world, Orphan, you have been wanting to escape,
all the sky you can see from that wide perspective will fall into the sea,
your whole spirit exposed as you lie here at tide line waiting—

willing your nakedness to the darkening inswell of water.



Patricia Fargnoli


Then, Something
Tupelo Press
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14554

[shaleoh2]

red bud, definitely