The body never lies." — Martha Graham
The Natural State
Anxiety is not one thing.
Sometimes it is light — a restlessness, thoughts that won't settle, a vague sense that something is unresolved. Sometimes it is heavier. A feeling of dread that has no clean explanation. Something that sits in the body and refuses to be reasoned with.
I used to say to people — half joking, completely serious — that in this life you need to meditate or medicate. I prefer to meditate.
What I have learned from decades of sitting is something I find difficult to explain simply. When you sit quietly — really sit, not just occupy a chair — something that was unsettled begins to fade. Not because you push it away. Not because you reason it into submission. It fades because it was never your natural state to begin with. Anxiety, dread, the thought that won't settle — these are visitors. Sitting returns you to what was always underneath them.
The practice is not about achieving something. It is about being aware of awareness itself. Noticing the one who is noticing. That quality of attention — brought not just to the cushion but to the day, to the work, to the conversation — is what decades of practice actually builds. Not serenity. Something quieter and more useful than serenity.
Practice has not made me serene. It has made me slightly better at noticing when I am not.
What I did not know until recently is that this was not just a psychological shift. It was a biological one.
There are approximately 38 trillion bacteria living in your gut right now. Chronic stress alters that ecosystem in ways that accelerate biological ageing. It disrupts the microbial balance that keeps inflammation in check. It increases gut permeability. In its most persistent forms it contributes to conditions as concrete as stomach ulcers — the body's way of making unmistakably physical what the mind has been carrying too long.
The gut and the brain are in constant conversation. What disturbs one disturbs the other. Chronic anxiety — even the light kind, even the kind that just makes thoughts unsettled — produces inflammatory signals that the microbiome responds to. A disrupted microbiome sends signals back that amplify the very anxiety that disrupted it in the first place.
The science is now measuring what consciousness practice has been pointing toward for a long time. The unsettled feeling in the stomach is not separate from the biology of ageing. It is part of it.
Being aware of awareness — that simple, difficult, lifelong practice of noticing what is actually happening inside you rather than being carried along by it — turns out to have consequences that reach all the way down to the cellular level.
Sitting quietly. Returning when the mind wanders. Noticing the anxiety without following it. Letting it fade back into the natural state that was always there underneath.
It is not a small thing. The science is beginning to understand why.
My honest assessment: Chronic stress is one of the most underreported drivers of accelerated biological ageing — and one of the most actionable. The gut microbiome research makes this concrete rather than abstract. What you eat matters enormously. How you manage what sits in the stomach may matter just as much. Find whatever version of that works for you — and stay with it. Imperfectly. For as long as it takes.
THE PERENNIAL
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