After introductions, calming ourselves with a guided meditation, and catching up on challenges and victories over the past week, we began an open discussion of what our anxiety feels like to ourselves. We didn’t introduce a new focus topic this week but we found ourselves speaking of the way that sharing our anxiety experiences with others who understand anxiety experiences makes us feel about ourselves. Like all people for at least some of the time, we will have anxious feelings. This thought led to many stories of specific moments and of our responses while we were dealing with anxiety. Sometimes, it seems, we need to give ourselves permission to ignore something … or to plan on thinking about something at future date. This applies to compulsions too … those things that we feel driven to do in efforts to avoid anxious feelings. This was a rich discussion among five of us sitting together in the meeting and four others who joined the meeting through ZOOM. We all seemed to see a little bit of ourselves in each other’s stories. The idea of giving ourselves permission to ignore something worrisome at the moment by promising to think of it later came as a welcomed discovery for several of us. Talking amongst ourselves we came to agree that giving ourselves permission to ignore something actually does work … particularly when new anxieties sneak up on us like shadows while we are trying to get something done in the present.