No Amount of Worry Will Change It: Learning to Trust Life’s Flow and Recover Your Soul

Do you ever find yourself awake at two in the morning, trying to solve everyone’s problems in your head? You’re not alone.

In this episode, I share honestly about my own patterns of worry and control — and how even after years of spiritual practice, those old habits still show up sometimes. Worry is only natural when we love deeply, but when it takes over, it pulls us out of faith and into fear.

Together, we’ll explore what it means to release worry through the Recover Your Soul Process, learning to trust that everything is unfolding for its highest good. I talk about the difference between making and creating, how to allow yourself to feel your feelings without attaching to them, and how spiritual teachings on impermanence can help us open to change instead of resisting it.

As Alan Watts reminds us, “No amount of anxiety (worry) makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen.” When we surrender the need to control, we make space for grace, and our hearts can finally rest in the steady flow of life.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 From Night Worry To Awareness
• 1:01 Move From Worry To Faith
• 1:26 Welcome And Community Grounding
• 4:26 Two Selves: Witness And Spinner
• 5:51 Worry, Anxiety, And Energetic Outcomes
• 7:02 Powerlessness And Control Patterns
• 8:52 In The Trenches With Loved Ones
• 11:27 Turning Attention Inward To Heal
• 14:33 Attachment, Suffering, And Presence
• 17:08 Service Without Codependence
• 18:23 Worry About Others Versus Self
• 20:46 Tools For 2 A.M. Anxiety
• 24:36 Creating Versus Making
• 28:14 Hard Endings As Sacred Redirects
• 30:37 Let Them Be Adults
• 34:04 Recover Your Soul Path And Next Steps

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:32

I don't wake up at two o'clock in the morning and worry as often as I used to, but I still do from time to time, especially when there is something major going on with my kids. And worry is only natural because we love the people around us. And you might even be worrying about the planet and about our country. But when we move into worry, we are being consumed with fear. We are in the uncontrollable part of our mind that thinks it's our job to figure it out. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to move from worry to faith and to trusting the flow of everything that's happening and remembering through Recover Your Soul that we can indeed love and be present for the people in their lives and for the world around us, holding space that everything indeed is working out for its highest good. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcasting community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recover your soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcasting community. I'm Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for being here today. If you're new and you just started listening to the podcast, welcome to this incredible, incredible loving, supportive community. There are just this across the world. There's so many of us that are listening. And I hope that you feel it. I hope that when you listen, you feel and know that you are surrounded, supported, seen, witnessed. You are not alone in this. And if you keep coming back and you are returning again and again to get more inspiration, more tools, more ways to recover your soul. Thank you again for choosing and really for trusting me. I am so honored and privileged to be in your lives and in your ears. And it is an absolute blessing that I can be here, not only to help guide you, but to share with you everything that's happened in my life that has been incredibly profound in this transformation of recovering my soul. And I am still working it. I think that's one of the things that you all really like about this podcast. I'm not saying that I'm fully actualized or have it all together. Oh, no, no, no. I'm still on the journey. We are in this together. I learn so much from you, and I'm honored that you are learning from me. Recently, I've been waking up at two o'clock in the morning in worry, doing an old pattern of worry that leads to an attempt to control. And I know that many of you can really relate to this, that we have this incessant part of our brain that wakes up in worry. And I feel like there's always two sides to me that I'm working with, and I'm working to heal and incorporate them into a more true sense of my higher self being the leader in it. And more and more and more, my higher self, my soul-awakened self is the one who is in front, who's really present in my body, present in what's going on in my life. But there's also these old patterns. Rigid was the word that wanted to come to mind because it's really like this rigidity of fear that when I go back into fear, when I'm back into a place of unsure and uncertainty and feeling lack of control and it feels unmanageable, a whole bunch of old patterns arise and worry and doubt and fear are at the top of those. And when I've been waking up at two o'clock in the morning, it's interesting because I can hear those two parts of myself talking to each other. There's the part that wakes up and just starts on the, well, maybe that could this could happen, or maybe this week could do this, or maybe this would be the solution to that. And the other part of me that is watching it. And I think that one of the things that I'm so grateful for is understanding that on a spiritual level, just being able to witness and have awareness and watch and witness the part of us that goes into the spin is actually really important because you can see that the spin is its own energy. You're not in the spin, you're watching the spin while you're in the spin, while you're in the worry. And what is worry anyway? Worry is this attempt to control what is coming. Worry is this compulsive behavior that wants us to figure it out that thinks that if we worry hard enough, then some miraculous thing is gonna happen. And there's an Alan Watts quote that I pulled up that I just love because it is so true. Alan Watts said, no amount of anxiety or worry makes any difference to anything that's going to happen. I'm gonna say that again. No amount of anxiety, I'm using the word worry, makes any difference to anything that's going to happen. And what I actually would say is that the anxiety and the worry does make a difference, but it generally isn't in the direction in which we want it to go. That we think that if we worry and we have anxiety over it, we'll be able to figure it out and then we'll be able to head off whatever problems are coming. But the truth is you're actually bringing to yourself the energy that resonates with the fear. In this process that we're doing in recover your soul, what we're really having clarity about is the life that you live, the reality in which you live is based on the thoughts that you think. What you think and feel and believe creates the world in which you live. And that can feel really confusing because there's a lot of big stuff happening out there. There's a lot of things that we are powerless over. Yes, that is step two in the recovery soul process. We are powerless over everything outside of ourselves, and that we've been learning to control and manage and fix and try to manipulate and help and be all the codependent, people-pleasing things that we've been doing for so long to try to make things better for the world and the people around us, ultimately for our own safety. Because if they're okay, we can be okay. If they're okay, we can be okay. And what we can look at is no amount of anxiety or fear or worry or control can actually make anything else change or be different. But we can begin to notice and see and feel that the way that we interact with those thoughts, the way that we um feel in our body, will actually create the way that we are in our body and how we interact with it and see it and feel it. That was a little convoluted, I'm sorry, because I'm thinking of myself at two o'clock in the morning, um, waking up in the middle of the night with these thoughts. And what I think is so interesting is when I have been in this space of all this anxiety, I'm reminded of the years where this was a constant. And what I know about so many of you are in the community is you are in the thick of it, in the real trenches right now in your life, either with a spouse or a child or a loved one who is making choices and decisions that are really complicated and really hard. And many of you have come here because of Al-Anon or because of the word codependence or people pleasing. And that's what this recover your soul community is about. We are learning to recover our soul. We've been giving it away for so long. We've been so splintered and fragmented in all of the energy that we have out there trying to fix and control and manage everything around us that we've lost the ability to remember our innate wholeness, to really stand in our sovereign state, which says, yes, it can be very hard to have people around us who are making decisions. It can be really hard to watch somebody that you love so much have to go through their challenges. But we're letting go of the belief that we have any control over any of it. But we can actually elicit changes that are beneficial to everyone when we turn the attention to ourselves, when we look at those depths of patterns and beliefs and stories. It's what we do in step three in the soul recovery process to really see how much we actually think it's our job to take care of everybody else. And we learn how to connect to something even greater still, to a higher power, to turn it over. And so this worry that I've been feeling over the last couple of weeks, um, as I've talked about in the last couple of podcasts, it's not new, right? This isn't like something happened that has been new. It's it's this recurring situation that's happened in my life that we all have, in whatever way, whether you have addicts in your life or not, because we have family members that we love so much. And everybody is on their complicated wild journey making decisions and having to live out the consequences of the choices that they're making, because that's why we're here is to have this wild ride and to fall down and fail and pick ourselves back up and learn from those experiences and to have moments where we have to hit a wall. But none of us thought that that was what the journey was when we started out. Somehow we had this fairy tale, this crazy belief system that I know I did, that it was like, nope, everything's supposed to be great. It's supposed to be hunky-dory and dandy and sweet and loving all the time, and no one's ever supposed to have any problems, and everyone's supposed to love each other, and no one's supposed to be upset or or do anything that's hard. And yet, when I look back on my life and my experiences, there was so much that was really painful and really hard, and so much that was really beautiful and really incredible and filled with love. But I've been so consumed with trying to not have any of the hard stuff that I missed out on really being present with and enjoying the parts that were really good because my energy was always on what isn't working. Because if I can fix what isn't working, that's the worry. If I can fix what isn't working, then everything can be steady. And if it's steady, I can relax. Well, what if you open to the flow? What if you recognize that no amount of anxiety or worry is going to actually change the outcome, but it will bring you more suffering. And in the Buddhist determinology, the suffering is our attachment, our clinging, our wanting, our desperately striving for it to be something other than what it is. And what we're learning in spirituality is we're learning how to be more present with what is without all of the noise and the story that goes with how it should be, but has more clarity of what is, so that from your recover your soul self, you can look at it with a with a higher self that can see it without the fixing it or the potential or the if they would just be this way, then I can be okay. And you can make decisions for yourself that allow you to understand what your part is, how you can be of service from a healthy way, when to when to help people? When is it a hand up instead of a handout? When are you being supportive instead of being codependent? When do you need to walk away instead of continue to try and try and try and try again? When can you know that it's not time to walk away, that you need to be in it and to learn and grow and see what more there is to be in that experience, to finish that particular game as I've been talking about it with some people recently. Don't leave in the fourth quarter sometimes when there is actual lessons to be learned for you, knowing that you're in control of your experience, of how it feels to you. And worry, I think, is so interesting because worry so much for me, and maybe this is just me, but it's really coming to me. Worry so much for me is about other people. It's interesting how I don't worry about myself as much because I've worked so hard on having more clarity and more sovereignty in my own well-being. The worry is around other people. So, as the situation with Bodhi has uh happened over the last couple of weeks, it's been interesting because I've gotten to see him. I got to be with him in Halama when we went on our camping trip. And in that space, when I was present with him, the worry really dissipated because I was able to really be present with the soul that he is, the human being that he is, the absolute faith and trust that I have in him as a human being. He's a remarkable, remarkable human being who has his stuff that he has to work on. We all do. We all have our stuff we have to work on. But when I'm in his presence, I let go of the worry because I can see and feel the truth of who he is in those moments. Same with Alex and his family. Sometimes I can get all caught up in all of these worries of like, well, what are they gonna do? Are they gonna stay in this apartment? Are they gonna, you know, what are they gonna do for jobs? What's gonna happen when Lexi needs to go back to work? And I don't I don't have control of all those things. I'm absolutely powerless over those decisions. And really spinning my wheels on their choices makes it so that I'm not spending that time on me, on what's going on with me. If we all think about, it was I've had this conversation with so many people in so many different ways, but if we all think about what we've been through in our own lives, and most of you who are listening here have had some life underneath your belt, whether you're my age in the 50s or beyond or or or younger, if we really give ourselves credit, we've been here for a minute and we have done some work. We have been through some pretty intense life experiences. And if you give yourself credit, you have been through a lot and done really, really well. You've done really, really well. And some of those greatest experiences were when you had to figure it out for yourself. And you listened to the spirit that's within you, and you heard the guidances, or you went against convention and you did something that was beyond what somebody else wanted. And that ended up leading to the next step, the next step, the next step that has brought you to where you are. And is it perfect? No, perfection is doesn't exist. The only thing that's perfect is you are a perfect child of the universe, not broken, whole, enough, beautiful, smart, incredible. You have everything that you need to be in this very complicated experience of life. What if we can trust that the others have that too? And that whatever choices that they're making, no matter how hard it is to watch them go through, and there's some intense stuff that's happening in our community. There are people who have children who are homeless, who are on drugs, who are making decisions that they may not make it. They may not live for either their own hand or in drugs or alcohol taking them. And those are some of the most painful, literally heartbreaking experiences to be in and to witness. And yet at the same time, when we do this spiritual work and we move into a place of saying there is no amount of worry that I can have, no amount of anxiety, no amount of trying to control it that I can have that potentially will change the outcome. I can't remember if I talked about this in a previous podcast, but there was a comment on the private Facebook page. And if you're not a member of the Recover Your Soul private Facebook page, I hope you'll join us because there's, I think we have almost 2,000 people now that are in that group. And I'd love to have more conversation with everybody, really just sharing questions of what's going on with each other, because when those interactions happen, they're so powerful and beautiful. We're we're in this together. But one of the responses was if I stop managing, if I stop controlling, if I take my fingers out of everyone else's life, what if my child dies? What if, you know, their world falls apart? What if they don't get up and go to work? If I'm not there as an and having an adult person in your life. And I'm not talking about children under the age of 18. I'm I'm talking about adults. And a lot of us are still working with our adult kids, minor 27 and 29. We're working with, you know, these adult children who are really grown and on their own journey, and we're still treating them like we did when they were 13, 14, 15, 16. And they were in their own process of figuring themselves out. And there's been a lot of changes in the years since we were kids that have made it feel very intenable sometimes, untenable sometimes, to be in the world as it is. Well, we're here in the world as it is. What if their souls chose to be here right here, right now? What if their souls chose to have these experiences? Just like our souls chose to have this experience. And this worry that we do is our attempt to control what is not ours to control. But when we can move into faith and move into the flow of the universe and let go of control, we're actually handing it over to a power even greater still, that is unlimited, omnipotent, full of love and grace. I don't believe in a higher power that is condemning or judgmental or fearful. That's not me. I believe that we are being held by something even greater still, that is all about us awakening and remembering that we are not separate from, but one with, that this experience that we're on is for our greater good. That we can actually look at our lives in a way that shifts our perception. And we begin to understand that every single person has the resources to be able to choose a life that is happy, free, abundant. And that if that is not the experience that they're having, they have to take some level of responsibility for the experience that they're having. So I was just talking to Bodhi this morning, and he was talking about uh what's going on in his life right now, and he was taking huge accountability for what's going on with him. And that's the only thing that I can really ask for, right? Like the incredible pride that I feel to listen to this man say, yeah, I made some, I made some not that great choices, and I'm in the process of having to figure out how to make decisions to right some of those wrongs and to be able to really see who I am and what I want next in my life. And I get really overwhelmed, but I'm actually really proud of myself that I'm just putting one foot in front of the other and keeping his spirituality in his forefront, his spirituality. And what I think is so great is in that first week when things were a little bit crazy, I went into the mode of worry. I was awake every single night at two o'clock in the morning, not sleeping, thinking about all the solutions, all the things. And you have to give yourself some grace that when you're in a situation where it's it feels pretty crazy in that moment, it's pretty hard to just go back to sleep. But I have tools now. I have tools, including turning on meditations and listening to them in my headphones so that I'm not disturbing anybody else. I have meditations and insight timer if you want to listen to me, or go on YouTube and listen to meditations, listen to spiritual music, listen to affirmations. It takes your mind off of what is spinning in your head because the what's spinning, the worry, the obsession, the anxiety is trying to control an outcome that hasn't come yet. But when you utilize the tools, so then I'll do meditations in the middle of the night, and let's say I can't listen to a meditation, I'll repeat a mantra. And sometimes my mantra is all is well. Sometimes I'll do a whole visualization where whether it's Alex or Bodhi or Rich or the world or the politics or the things that are making me feel overwhelmed, I'll use the Tonglin process, which is a Buddhist process that is around having enough space and compassion in your heart that you're not trying to fix it or take it in as yours, but you're recognizing that you're feeling feelings around compassion and fear, and that you bring in those feelings into your heart. So if I'm maybe if I'm thinking about one of the kids, right, I'll I'll bring them into my heart and whatever the thing that I'm I'm concerned about for them. And I bring it into my heart space and I fill it with light and love. And I see them as whole, and I see the situation as working out for its highest good. And I remember that spirit, that source, that the universe, that God, whatever you call it, is holding them, that can heal them, they can see them, that if they choose to pick up their mat and choose to be healed, it is available to them. And I'm just holding space in it in your in-breath, you're bringing in that heaviness, the fear, not for you to take it in, but for you to hold it in a compassionate space. And then the out breath is releasing it, letting it go, sending it out in light and love to the universe to be released, to be healed. And I'll do this process breathing it in, letting it go, breathing in and letting it go. And that light that I'm feeling, that wholeness that I'm feeling, that ability for things to work out in miraculous ways, brings me peace. But sometimes I'll bring myself into that space, that I need to recognize that I need that. I need the healing, I need the wholeness, that I can be present with myself in a way that is new and different, and that I can release it to the light. And eventually, sometimes it happens in 15 minutes, sometimes it takes two hours. I give myself grace that of course I'm worrying because my heart is so full. Full with my kids, or full with my husband, or full with my parents, that my heart is so full for the world. But if I take it in and think that it's mine to fix, mine to do, that's really my ego. That's really me trying to make something be different. In spirituality, there's a lot of talk around creating versus making. And the concept of making is us forcing, trying to make it be different. How many times have you heard yourself saying, I'm gonna make that be something else? I'm gonna make them see this. I'm gonna make it be different. Feel the energy that's around that, that's really around this forcing, this manipulation, this efforting to make it be different. And that almost always doesn't work out because we don't know what the larger spectrum is. We don't know what the bigger experiences are, what the soul contracts are, what somebody's supposed to learn, how things are going to work out. And man, if I look back and I think of all the ways that I would have made things be different in my family, I would have cut off a lot of things that were really intense and really hard and hard to go through, but ended up opening up doors to new ways of being. And even this job that I have now, this this being here with you, speaking into a microphone with my eyes closed, being present with all of you, this would have never happened if I was making my life be what I thought it should be. When I let go, when I open to creation, when I one of the things in 12 step is service and recover your soul. Service is a huge piece of it too. But not service from a codependent, people-pleasing place, service from a place that says, lead me where you need me. What would you have me do with my day? Being open to the flow, the creation of the day, the creation of how you can bring light and love into your own life and into the life of the people around you, not in a supposed to fix them place, but in a being present place, in a way that says, if I can be a vessel for spirit to work through, how can I be a vessel? So in this situation that is going on currently, I'm watching in the last three weeks this incredible transformation of a human being who I am honored enough to call my son. And it makes me cry because there's so much heart there. There's so much feeling. And so when our hearts are breaking, we have to give ourselves grace and the ability to feel those feelings and allow the worry to dissipate and to move into a place of trust and faith and co-creation. Step four in the recovery soul process is co-creating with the higher power of your understanding. When we move into this place where I am so honored and blessed to have these two beautiful children in my life who live their own worlds that don't look anything at all like what I would choose, and addiction and self-esteem and ADHD and all the things that they have gone through are their experience to have as souls, as part of how their brains work, as part of how their bodies work, as part of how they interact with the world. And the amount of worry that I have expended over the years to try to make their lives be different oftentimes just made me miserable. And my being miserable only made them miserable. I'm remembering a line with one of my coaching clients recently who was talking about her son and how he's afraid to really share what's going on with him because he doesn't want to worry her. Right? The responsibility that they feel about worrying us. And I know my kids feel that way. That sometimes they don't want to actually share what's on their heart because the worry that I feel is a burden to them. But it's getting better because we've Been working on our relationship and our communication and our ability to be present with each other for exactly who we are for so long. And so it isn't about not allowing yourself to feel the feelings. Because even these feelings that I feel, that my heart's just so tender, it's tender on so many levels. It's tender on the, oh, I wish it didn't have to, you know, be so complicated. And at the same time, I feel this incredible knowing that this is exactly what's supposed to happen right now. That this thing that's happening right now in Bodhi's life is part of a timeline shift, a door opening of a recalibration for something that was that was happening in his life because the universe is always working to guide us to our highest good if we will so listen. And sometimes those guidances are, they feel like everything's falling apart. I've had those in my life so many times. The whole work situation that I had as the office manager and how that completely crashed. And even when I worked at the church, that had kind of a crash at the end. And each of those moments, I'm thinking to myself, what is happening? Why is this happening? Why does this have to be so hard? Why, why? Well, you know why? Because if it wasn't hard like that, if there wasn't some big situation that happened, I may not have been willing to move on. I may not have been willing to move forward. This happens in our friendships, it happens in jobs, it happens in relationships. Sometimes we're so willing to be compliant and complacent and small in our situations. Our souls are calling for us to be bigger, to expand more, to trust ourselves more, to be willing to see more, for us to grow more. And so it pushes, pushes, pushes until we hit a place where we're willing to do whatever it takes to make the next changes, the next steps. Sometimes it feels so counterintuitive, but when you look back on your life, you think, oh, that whole thing had to happen for me to leave that marriage. That thing needed to happen for me to leave that job. I had to get to the place where I was really in the depths of my alcoholism to be ready to quit drinking. It's pretty interesting to really be revisiting that part of my life again as I'm continuing to work on the memoir with Maddie. And I almost forget the level of alcoholic that I was at the end because it's so not who I am today. So when we look at our lives and you see where the formation of the worry is, it's important to give yourself the ability to feel the feelings, but not to be consumed with that compulsion to spin the wheels, trying to figure out and solve all the problems when really what we want to do is we want to work more with spirit, with source to guide us to better understand what is ours to do in each of these situations. And as I've done that, I'm getting more clarity, again, another even level of clarity again with my kids, as to how to let them be adult men and to trust their process and to be curious about what's happening with them, and to be excited in a weird way about what's next. What's next for both of them? It's absolutely beautiful to witness their growth, and their growth has come through some pretty difficult, complicated situations. And I continue to hold and hope that sobriety will be part of their journey at some point. But I hold on to that less and less and less all the time because it's not about using that's that's really the main focus. It's about what's underneath with them as souls and as human beings, trusting and loving themselves and allowing their talents to be their forefront, to recognize their gifts, and that they are constantly choosing to see through the eyes of love instead of being in fear. That they're making choices that are around creating and not making, that I can model for them a way of being that gives them more permission to trust the flow of their life and to be more intentional in what they think and what they say and what is in their manifestation of what they want in their lives. And when those things really are in the forefront, it's pretty amazing how we can let go of the worry and trust and allow and see and witness and come back to ourselves and be curious about our own journey, our learning, our exploration of ourselves. That's what it is to recover your soul. It's to remember yourself and your life and how you choose to see it and being part of the creation that chooses to see through the eyes of love. If you need help with any of this, if you're curious about how you too can recover your soul, I hope that you'll reach out either to do one-on-one coaching with me or in upcoming group coaching, which I'm super excited about coming up in 2026, or doing the program modules on the website. This process of recovering your soul is around you finding your heart and what is best and right for you and how you choose to see it. Until next time, Namaste.