In this episode, Anxiety has stepped forward as our volunteer to show us just how important context is! Case and point: Say I am a rider who has come to recognize anxiety as a fairly familiar part of my riding experience. In fact, I am so intimate with my particular brand of riding anxiety that I’ve started to view it as a part of my personality and identity. This presents a few different problems for me. First up, I’ve taken something that is intrinsically mercurial- an emotion- and given it a sense of “fixed-ness”. Owning it as a part of me creates a sense of permanency. Secondly, when I DO find myself in the midst of an anxious experience, I see it as a flaw or weakness on my part (enter the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee from Stage Left), rather than something I can learn to understand and work with. And thirdly, I cut myself off from developing true understandings as to the nature of emotions and what it is they are trying to tell me. In this episode, I provide three possible contexts for the experience of “free-floating anxiety” (you know, that anxiety that just “appears” in situations that seem to have no justifiable reason!) beginning with intuition, and ending with understanding the nature of traumatic stress and the formation of memory at both a conscious and unconscious level. I hope you enjoy it!