When mainstream approaches to anxiety run out: exploring energy, trauma and unconventional methods is your next step 

This blog is an extract from lecture 50, part 5 of  The Calmness in Mind Process.

If you have already worked through the core process—repeated the videos, addressed lifestyle factors, clarified intentions, practised positive ERP, and still feel stuck with anxiety or depression—then the next step is not more of the same. It is to deliberately open the parts of the mind that have been trained to dismiss anything that cannot be measured in a lab.

Anxiety and depression often behave like dense, low-frequency states. One under-used route out of them is to expand perspective into the energy-based, non-linear territory that Eastern and spiritual traditions have described for centuries: karma, blocked energy centres, ancestral or past-life influences, collective thought-forms (egregores), and the possibility that we are intelligent energy fields interacting with a larger intelligent field. These ideas cannot be proven with conventional maths. They can, however, be tested experientially. That is the point of this kind of ERP: expose yourself to concepts you currently doubt, in case they contain something useful.

Twenty years ago my left brain resisted these directions so strongly that I postponed them for years. Once I suspended the demand for immediate proof and simply tested, results appeared. One example: an aura reader described a past-life trauma I had no conscious memory of—a child witnessing violence and being blamed for it. I followed the simple instruction to imagine that child, offer it safety and love, and allow whatever emotion arose. After twenty minutes of silent focus a wave of grief and dread surfaced and moved through me for half an hour. When it finished I felt distinctly lighter, roughly twenty percent happier, and the shift has remained. Whether the story was historically true is secondary; the stuck energy left and the subjective reality improved.

The same principle applies to the freeze response that some people experience—time slowing, dissociation, a sense of being trapped inside a momentarily paralysed body while the Observer watches. This pattern commonly tracks with significant earlier trauma. Practical responses include revisiting the original event in imagination, allowing the body to complete the incomplete action (running, fighting, speaking), or simply sitting with the sensation until it discharges. Changing the ending of the internal story, even if the new ending is not factual, can release the muscle-memory fear that keeps the alarm system hyper-vigilant.

Other tools that have produced measurable shifts for me include EMDR (disrupting the neural pathways that keep old traumas sticky), simple muscle-testing / kinesiology as a yes/no feedback loop from the body, Bradley Nelson’s Emotion Code process, and, for those willing, carefully facilitated plant medicines or clinical ketamine sessions. Under ketamine the over-controlling prefrontal cortex quietens, the non-verbal Observer becomes more accessible, and trapped energetic material sometimes moves. Again, the mechanism is secondary to the result: when the density drops, the system feels freer.

Collective energy fields (egregores) offer another useful frame. Groups of people thinking and feeling in similar ways generate attractor fields that influence anyone whose frequency matches them. This may explain why anxious people share so many behavioural patterns, and why moving into higher-frequency attitudes (optimism, trust, responsibility) can feel like stepping out of an invisible current. Raising frequency is less about analysing the current problem and more about releasing what is heavy and consistently acting from the level you wish to inhabit. Nature appears to respond by granting access to more energy and clearer perspectives.

A common intermediate stage after anxiety lifts is a neutral, almost empty feeling. That phase is temporary. Higher states—periods of profound peace, silent knowing, or overwhelming love—do appear, often after sustained work and sometimes during retreats or intensive group settings. They function as reminders that the effort is not wasted.

None of this requires belief. It requires willingness to test. Prioritise happiness over being right. Drop the need to understand every mechanism before you allow benefit. And recognise that remaining the same person while expecting anxiety to disappear is the least sensible strategy available. Become someone in whom anxiety has less room to operate. The path is individual; the only reliable method is to keep trying what has not yet been tried.