There’s a simple exercise I sometimes invite people to try. Sit quietly, take a breath, and trace your life backwards. Not in a linear, résumé-like way. Not as a sequence of achievements or failures. But as a thread. Follow the invisible thread that led you here – to this room, this breath, this moment of reading these words.
If you do this honestly, something interesting begins to appear. It makes sense. Not in the clean, logical way we want life to make sense when we’re living it, but in the way a dream makes sense while you’re inside it. In a dream, the most unlikely events unfold – a door opens into the ocean, your childhood home sits in the middle of a city you’ve never visited – and yet, while you’re there, it feels natural. It belongs. It’s only when you wake up that you say, “That was absurd.”
But your life, when you look backwards, has that same dreamlike coherence. The painful relationships. The unexpected opportunities. The breakdowns. The moments of courage. The moments of collapse. The decisions you agonized over and the decisions you made impulsively. All of it led here. And when you really look, you cannot find the place where you went off your path. You can find pain. You can find regret. But you cannot find the wrong life. Because there was no other life.
The Hidden Fear That Fuels Anxiety
This may seem like an abstract philosophical idea, but in my work with people living with chronic anxiety, this fear of making the wrong decision sits right at the center. It often sounds like this: “I think I made a mistake.” “I should be further along by now.” “I chose the wrong career.” “I stayed too long.” “I left too soon.” “I missed my chance.” Underneath these thoughts is a deeper fear – a quiet, persistent tension that lives in the nervous system. The fear that somewhere along the way, you missed your life. That there was a correct path – a better version of you, living a better version of your life – and through some combination of bad decisions, weakness, or bad luck, you wandered away from it.
This belief creates enormous pressure. Because if you believe you can get your life wrong, then every decision becomes dangerous. Every choice carries the weight of your entire future. Anxiety thrives in this environment. I know this because I lived there for many years.
When My Life Felt Like a Series of Mistakes
When I was in the thick of chronic anxiety and depression, my life did not feel like a graceful river moving toward the sea. It felt like a series of mistakes. I remember lying awake at night, replaying decisions I had made or things I said, convinced I had permanently damaged my future. I believed that if I had just done or said things differently – been stronger, more confident, less afraid, said something smart or funny – my life would feel easier, more stable, more secure. But instead, I felt lost.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the feeling of being lost was not evidence that I was off my path. It was the path. Because what that period of anxiety and struggle eventually led me toward was the work I now do. If my life had unfolded differently – if I hadn’t struggled, if I hadn’t searched, if I hadn’t been forced to sit with discomfort I didn’t know how to fix – I would not have discovered the practices that changed my relationship to anxiety. I would not have spent the last 25 years teaching meditation and yoga. I would not have built DoYogaWithMe. I would not be writing this.
At the time, it felt like everything was falling apart. Looking back, I can see it was coming together.
The Exhaustion of Arguing With Reality
One of the most exhausting aspects of chronic anxiety is the constant argument with what is. Your mind is always negotiating with reality. This shouldn’t be happening. I should feel different. My life should look different. I should have made different choices. This resistance creates tension in the nervous system – not just emotional tension, but physical tension. Your body stays in a state of alertness, trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Because the past cannot be changed. And yet the nervous system keeps trying.
When people begin working with me, they often assume the goal is to eliminate anxiety. But something surprising happens. As they begin to soften their resistance to their experience – to allow their life to be exactly what it is, including the parts they don’t like – the anxiety begins to loosen its grip. Not because they fixed their life, but because they stopped fighting it.
What Rivers Understand That We Don’t
There’s a metaphor I often return to. A river never asks if it’s going the right way. It doesn’t encounter a rock and think, “This shouldn’t be here.” It moves around it. Or over it. Or waits until the rock erodes. The winding path of the river is not a mistake. It is how the river moves.
Your life moves the same way. But we’ve been taught to expect something different. We’ve been taught that life should be efficient, predictable, controlled. We’ve been taught that uncertainty means something is wrong. But uncertainty is the nature of being alive. And when you stop interpreting uncertainty as danger, something remarkable happens. Your nervous system begins to relax.
The Paradox That Changed My Relationship With Anxiety
There wasn’t a single dramatic turning point in my healing. There wasn’t one perfect decision that fixed everything. There was a gradual shift. I began to notice that the anxiety I was trying so hard to escape was not actually hurting me. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but it was not dangerous. And the more I allowed myself to feel it – without trying to fix it, control it, or understand it – the more it began to move. Like weather. Like water.
This is one of the great paradoxes of healing. When you stop trying to get out of your experience, you begin to allow it to move through you.
The Illusion of the “Right Life”
This realization doesn’t mean that your choices don’t matter. They do. Your choices shape the texture of your experience. They influence the people you meet, the opportunities you encounter, and the lessons you learn. But the idea that there is one correct life, and you can permanently miss it, is an illusion. Because your life is not a fixed destination. It is something that unfolds through you. And every experience- even the painful ones – becomes part of its unfolding.
When people look back on their lives decades later, they rarely say, “My life went exactly according to plan.” More often, they say, “I never could have predicted any of it.” And yet, it makes sense.
Your Life Is Not on Hold
If you are living with chronic anxiety, you may feel like your life is on hold. You may feel like you need to fix yourself before your real life can begin. But what if this is your life? Not the future version of you. Not the healed version. Not the fearless version. This version. What if the confusion, the uncertainty, the searching – what if this is not a detour? What if it is the path itself?
This doesn’t mean you stop caring. It doesn’t mean you stop growing. It means you stop carrying the extra burden of believing you’ve done it wrong. And when that burden lifts, even slightly, your nervous system feels it. The body begins to trust again.
The Moment People Realize They Were Never Broken
One of the most meaningful moments in my work happens when someone realizes, often for the first time, that they are not broken. That their anxiety is not evidence that their life has gone wrong. That they don’t need to find their way back to the “right path.” Because they never left it. And in that moment, something softens. Not because their life suddenly becomes easy, but because they stop fighting the life they have. From that place, real change becomes possible. Not forced change. Not anxious striving. But natural movement. Like a river finding its way.
You Are Already On Your Way
If you could trace the thread of your life forward ten years from now, you would see things you cannot currently imagine. You would see how this moment – this uncertainty, this questioning, this search – became part of something meaningful. You would see that you did not miss your life. You lived it. Fully. Imperfectly. Humanly.
Perhaps, right now, you can allow yourself to consider this possibility: you are not behind. You are not lost. You are not off your path. You are exactly where your life is unfolding. And you don’t have to force the river to reach the sea.
It already knows the way.
David Procyshyn is a leading voice in the world of wellness — a writer, speaker, story-teller, yoga and meditation teacher, and founder of DoYogaWithMe, who blends ancient practices with modern science to help people heal from chronic anxiety.
Check out his other articles related to this topic:
Why Chronic Anxiety Is So Hard to Heal — And What We Can Do About It
7 Simple Mindfulness Steps to See Anxiety with New Eyes
When Your Thoughts Become You and What To Do About It