From Autopilot to Choice
Practical Mindfulness Skills to Move Beyond Anxiety
Course Description
Most anxiety advice asks you to think differently — challenge the thought, reframe the story, talk yourself down. For a certain kind of person, that advice keeps failing, and not because they aren't trying hard enough. It fails because it hands the problem back to the very system that's already overworked: the analytical mind.
Anxiety isn't only in your mind. It's in the shoulders you've stopped noticing, the shallow breath, the jaw, the 3 a.m. rehearsal. And the behaviors it produces — worry, over-preparation, saying yes, perfecting, the avoidance hiding inside your busyness — aren't separate problems with separate fixes. They're one pattern your brain learned, and kept, because it worked. The relief was real. So was the praise. That's what makes it stick, and that's why willpower keeps losing.
This course takes a different route. Rather than arguing with anxiety, you learn to see the pattern clearly, feel what it actually delivers, and let your brain do what it does best — update. That mechanism is well-studied. What it asks of you isn't effort. It's attention.
The freedom here isn't the absence of anxiety. It's choice, where the autopilot used to run.
What We'll Explore
How anxiety becomes automatic
The mechanics of the pattern — how the brain learns it, why it runs without your permission, and why the harder you fight it the more fuel it gets. You'll leave able to see your own pattern in motion, in your own words.
Listening to the body
Interoception — the trainable capacity to feel what's actually happening inside you. This is the heart of the work: the pattern doesn't change because you understand it. It changes when you feel, directly, what it costs. We build the sensitivity that makes that possible.
Meeting yourself without the whip
High achievers are expert at turning insight into a new stick to beat themselves with. Self-compassion isn't softness here — it's the thing that keeps this work from becoming one more performance. We look at why it changes outcomes, and how to practice it when it feels foreign.
Curiosity as a practice
The brain won't give up a pattern unless something better is available. Curiosity is always available, it's incompatible with contraction, and it opens the aperture when worry narrows it. We practice it until it's a reflex you can find under pressure.
Every session braids three things: a clear look at the neuroscience, brief guided meditation and embodied practice in the group, and live coaching — you bring a real pattern from your week and we work it together. Between sessions, short daily practices and small experiments to run in your actual life.
What You'll Leave With
A clear picture of your own patterns, visible while they’re running.
A felt understanding of what these behaviors actually deliver. This is the step where change happens.
Curiosity as a reliable alternative — always available, and steadier than willpower.
Short daily practices that survive a real workweek.
Choice, where the autopilot used to run.
The Details
Format
Live online · four 90-minute sessions on Zoom
When
Wednesdays, 12:00–1:30 PM ET |August 12, 19, 26 · September 2
Investment - $195
Limited to 12 participants. Small enough that we work with your actual patterns, live — not a lecture with a Q&A at the end.
Questions? Please let me know.