We have been conditioned to believe that anxiety is a sign of weakness and must be suppressed. But in reality, it is not a mental disorder but a form of energy that must be properly recognized. Timothy J. Hayes sits down with Jake Yanitz Rubin, author of the bestselling book From Anxiety To Awakening, to discuss how your most heightened emotions are meant to grow and transform yourself. He explains how to decipher the messages embedded deep within your emotions, turning anxiety into wisdom, empowerment, and freedom. Jake also explores the role of media and big pharma in brainwashing society to treat basic emotions as illnesses that constantly put you down.
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Jake Yanitz Rubin – Author Of The Bestselling Book – From Anxiety To Awakening
Jake Yanitz Rubin is a clinical hypnotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author of the bestselling book, From Anxiety to Awakening: 11 Insights That Transform Worry Into Wisdom and Fear Into Freedom. Jake’s journey began with his own battle with anxiety, until a radical shift in perspective changed everything. He realized anxiety wasn’t something broken that needed fixing. It was intelligence trying to get his attention.
That insight became the doorway to deep peace, purpose, and awakening. Now, Jake helps others de-hypnotize themselves from fear, separation, and self-doubt. Through his transformational work and powerful new book, he offers a grounded yet transcendent path to healing, one that reframes anxiety not as a problem, but as a profound invitation. I’m honored to be able to welcome Jake to the show to explore this paradigm-shifting approach and the deeper intelligence guiding all of us home.
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Jake, welcome. It’s great to see you again. Thanks for agreeing to join us.
Thank you for having me. I’m excited for the conversation.
Anxiety Is Not A Mental Disorder
I’m always curious about how people get into the work they do and what drives their passion for it, and more specifically, with someone like you who has authored the book From Anxiety to Awakening. What do you want people to have as the primary takeaway from a book like this? How much of your own personal journey do you want to share with us?
I’m happy to share as much as you’d like to know. Ultimately, the takeaway that I’d like people to get from this is that anxiety is not a mental disorder. I know that goes against a lot of common beliefs. It goes against maybe what the medical, psychiatric, and psychological industries say. The reality is that anxiety is energy. What I’ve recognized over the years of doing hypnotherapy is that client after client is like, “I have anxiety. I’m an anxious person.”
There began to be a recognition that this is a shared part of humanity. It’s not a mental disorder. Yes, some people suffer debilitating anxiety, and still, it’s energy that we experience. The most important thing to recognize is that you’re not broken. There’s something wrong with you. This is an energy of transformation that leads us as humans to look within.
The anxiety comes from trying to control everything outside of us that we cannot control, and trying to predict. Finally, the mind says, “Enough, I cannot do this anymore.” That anxiety causes us to collapse within ourselves and look for some deeper answers. The reality is that it’s not a mental disorder. It’s not who you are. It’s not a defining feature of who you are. It is simply energy, and that energy has a purpose.
How did you come to discover this if the prevailing wisdom in the sciences that relate to psychology and psychiatry says otherwise?
I began to see the parallels in nature. I began to look at how life blossoms. You can look at several examples that occur in nature. One is the caterpillar going into a cocoon, going into darkness, and dissolving to become something completely different. Another perfect example is a diamond that begins as a lump of coal. Only through the intense pressure that the coal faces is it able to purify and become a diamond.
You see it with forest fires that seem at the surface to be very destructive, but the fire creates the situation, or it creates the necessary ingredients for new life to flourish. I can go on and on. A seed that’s planted in the soil seems like it’s buried. It’s under pressure. I use the example in my book, “A bull walks over and drops its waist on the poor little seed.”
Now the seed is like, “If it wasn’t bad enough for me, I’m stuck in this hole, and I’m surrounded by dirt.” That helps the seed grow. We are no different. The pressures that we experience from anxiety and the pressures that we experience in life are all meant to grow us and to transform us. To me, it became so clear because it’s a universal human experience to have these anxious feelings, to try to predict and control. To me, it seems obvious.
There’s a theme in the body of work that gave rise to Journey’s Dream, which gave rise to this podcast we’re on, that understands that we’re creating our own experience of emotions. That experience and the energy that you’re saying is energy or information carries good information for us about how to make decisions in our lives.
The difficulty is that we’re living in a culture that has trained us to believe that when we have that energy arise within us, it means someone or something outside of us is bad or wrong or needs to change. As opposed to there’s a dynamic process within me related to thought, mind, energy, and emotions that’s trying to inform me about this experience of life that I’m in the middle of.
As humans, for the most part, I felt like this is the way most of my life has been. Before my own awakening, I was like, “Life is out to get me,” and all these random things kept happening. I didn’t see the intelligence behind it. They say hindsight is 20/20. A lot of what I’m going to share on the show might sound like woo, and it’s out there. I want to start off by saying I was very skeptical, and I still am. Once you see the truth and you see it coming from all of these different directions, it’s hard to argue with the truth. There’s a knowing of who we are that goes beyond the mind. To get back to your question, I think I’ve veered away from it. What was the original question?
It wasn’t a question. It was an observation that the idea is these energies that we call emotions carry important information about what’s going on in here. We live in a culture that has tried to convince us that it’s bringing us information about what’s going on out there. “That person is screwed up, this life is wrong in this way, and that state’s laws are ridiculous. I’m only upset because he, she, they.” We’ve been conditioned for however long we’ve had language to believe that externalization dynamics can make sense of our emotions. It has never been that anything I’ve experienced is true. The best use of my emotions is as an alarm system to wake me up to the fact that something is going on in my use of my mind energy that’s producing this perspective on life.
The anxiety is an alarm signal, as you said. It’s a wake-up call to the soul to look at what beliefs you’re holding that are not in alignment with your truth. What’s the story you’re telling yourself? It’s never just the story. There’s always our own belief system that is supporting whatever is going on. You’re right.
Anxiety is an alarm signal. It is a wake-up call to the soul to revisit your beliefs and see if they are still in alignment with your truth. Share on XWhatever is happening in the world or whatever is happening outside triggers us, but it’s not the event itself. What’s happening in the outside world is neutral. It’s our interpretation of it. We see things as good or bad, and then we hold a position about it because we’re not looking at the bigger picture. It’s a sign or it’s an energy that causes us to begin to look within instead of trying to fix the outside world. The anxiety comes when we try to control everything, and we try to predict.
How De-Hypnosis Can Get Rid Of Brainwashing
It’s almost spooky how so many of the words that you’re saying are words I used to say, modified slightly. One of the things that you said that had my mind spinning a bit was that the outside event triggers us. I used to talk like that, too. I started to realize that what my mind was doing with that phrase was kidding me into thinking that I was taking responsibility. I’m still saying my emotion is triggered by this event or these people on the outside. Lots of questioning and reading different things.
It comes to me more now to talk about how nothing triggers me. The event doesn’t trigger me. What we’re calling this mechanism of triggering is when I choose an interpretation for this neutral outside event. If this interpretation is energetically connected to upset or trauma that I’m carrying with me in this moment, I’m going to feel this upset or trauma. In the same situation, the very same action, the very same words said by a different person on a different day, I choose a different interpretation, no upset.
It’s what we’re carrying. It’s like the thorn that we have. Instead of removing the thorn and saying, “This is what’s hurting me.”
We want to go out and burn every thorn bush.
Exactly. We want to try to protect ourselves. No, but nothing touches that. That’s the truth. It’s a perspective shift. I believe that what I’ve created in this book is it’s not a book of information. It’s a book of transformation. These insights are progressively peeling away the illusions of what we’re not and what is untrue so that what is true can shine.
By the end of the book, I believe you can share with me your own experience. The perspective shift is substantial because you begin to see that you’ve been hypnotized by society, by your parents, by your upbringing to believe things function a certain way, and it’s simply untrue. That’s why I talk about what I do as dehypnosis more so than hypnotherapy. It is a deprogramming of society’s parents, all of this intake that we absorb as we exist in this world.
The antidote to the brainwashing, the conditioning, and the mind programming is questioning. If I can bring myself to question everything I think I know and every belief that has been programmed into me, I put myself in an entirely different position. It’s like what Rilke said, “We must learn to live in the question.” If we cannot get comfortable living in that questioning state, then one of the things that happens is we never get out of our minds, or the trap of the conscious logical stuff.
We have to be out of our minds in that sense to get an opening for new information, insight, intuition, and inspiration to come on the scene. If I go in knowing I know I’m right, and just because I cannot grow hair doesn’t mean I’m not smart. I’m as smart as this Jake guy. I’m holding on to what I believe. When I came into this call, there was no potential for me to learn anything new. If I start to soften and move into a questioning state, now all bets are off.
As humans, we are obsessed with knowing, like we need to know. There’s tremendous power in recognizing and being okay with not knowing. Not only not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow, but not knowing even all of how this miracle of life works. Our mind isn’t set up for it. What I’ve done in this book and what I’ve worked so hard to do is it’s not anything that I need to prove. It’s simply pointing the direction for the reader to examine certain beliefs.
Humans are obsessed with the need to know. Although there is tremendous power in knowing, it is also okay not to know. Share on XThe reality is that most of what we believe to be true is not what it appears to be. Most of the things that we have discounted as woo and not real are what are actually real, and of substance. This book was almost a book of paradoxes. If you look at my insights, freedom begins where control ends. You are everything and nothing. When you stop fighting life in yourself.
How The System Keeps You In Treatment
Let me interrupt you, because I’m holding the same list. I could go at it too, but I wanted to back up and make sure we have this foundation. One of the things you want people to take away from the book is that anxiety is not a mental disease and not a mental disorder. I’m not sure if I mentioned it to you, but Dr. Roger McFillin is a younger psychologist who’s out there now with his own podcast and banging the gong about this very thing, how we are being trained to believe, being conditioned, being programmed, or being taught by our media and the psychological and psychiatric profession that our basic emotions are an illness. There has to be a process. They need a pill. They need therapy. They need surgery, or whatever.
It’s clear why. It’s unfortunate, but this is a system that profits by keeping you in treatment. I used to be the guy who trusted doctors, trusted scientists. You have to look at the reality of the situation. What they’re doing is labeling normal human emotions as diseases. By doing so, you’ve given your patient or client a label. “I’m an anxious person, I have anxiety, now I need the treatment for it.” The most important first step is, let’s call it what it is. It is not a mental disorder. I went out on a limb to say that, and I think others are following because the energy of the world is changing now, and recognizing that these normal human emotions, even depression and anxiety. These are normal human feelings that are not mental disorders.
They can go to an extreme, in which case, there’s a tremendous amount of discomfort, pain, or suffering that can happen. Intervention might be useful at that level, at the extreme. What people like Roger McFillin and his Radically Genuine Podcast are pointing out is very much the same thing you want people to take from your book. It’s that your emotional state is not a disorder. It’s not a disease. It’s a very useful part of being awake, aware, and alive as a human on this planet.
As humans, we believe that we’re supposed to live in this perpetual bliss and ease, and things are supposed to work out, but there’s no growth in that. That’s not the design of life. Life is meant to challenge us. It’s meant to grow us. It’s the same in nature. You see it in so many different examples, but people have been led to believe that’s not how it should be. We slap a medical label on it, and we go, “This pill will help you feel better.” The pill is not getting to the root of what’s going on.
The thing that will benefit people most when they’re uncomfortable as a result of what their internal state is, mentally, emotionally, physically, etc., is not the things that will make drug companies billions of dollars.
Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. It’s unfortunate because I feel like most medical professionals, therapists, psychologists, and doctors go into it because they do want to help. What happens is they get into a system that’s unfortunately funded by drug companies. It’s a profit machine, and there’s no profit in curing you. Nobody is talking about a real cure.
Also, there’s no profit in helping you see that you don’t need to be cured.
Even more so. There’s zero profit in that. It’s heartbreaking for me. Every time I get on a phone call with a new client and then I’ve had anxiety my whole life. I’m an anxious person, and at that point, I was like, “You’re not, this is not who you are.” It’s a process of shifting perspective, and openness to a new perspective is so important.
What True Spirituality Looks And Feels Like
The next piece I want to put in here is that you talked about the woo-woo and wanting to avoid getting labeled as woo-woo. That’s why I hear that. I think about one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite teachers, Guy Finley. He says, “There’s nothing more practical than true spirituality.” What he’s defining as spirituality in that instance is an accurate description of the way things work.
People don’t associate it with that necessarily. Unfortunately, religion has done a huge disservice to spirituality. I used to consider myself agnostic on a good day, an atheist most of the time. I thought we lived, we died, and that was it. When you start to study spiritual traditions, when you start to study true spirituality, everything is pointing to the same truth, and now quantum physics supports it. It’s all out there. The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics went to physicists who confirmed that the universe is not locally real, which is mind-blowing. It means that things don’t have permanence or they’re not in space and time unless we’re looking at them, which tells you right there that something fishy is going on.
When you start to study spiritual traditions, you will discover that everything is pointing to the same truth. Share on XIf we can bring ourselves into that questioning space, believe it or not, what you said helped me remember that this morning I was having a conversation with my dentist. The conversation with the dentist was about radiation and X-rays. Got any idea where I’m going? You’re a genius if you do. Where I’m going with this is they used to teach us that the lead vests were protecting the people’s various sensitive body parts when you got an X-ray of your hand or your mouth or whatever. What they later found out many years in the past was that the lead collects and concentrates the radiation.
I didn’t know that.
It was hurting people more than helping them. These days, things have been progressing. The thing that brought this on was that I was in the office, and my dentist said to her assistant, “Let’s get an X-ray of this before we finish this up.” She walks over and picks up a handheld device from the counter that was sitting there, walks across, puts this in my mouth, says beep, and then walks away.
No vest, no hiding behind walls, no running outside the building, and then the alarms go off. I said, “Wait a minute, are you telling me that’s an X-ray these days?” That’s how we talked about so many of the things we’re taught, and this is the truth, and this is the way it is. It’s a snapshot in time and what we understand at this moment. The fact of the matter is, and one of my favorite things is, “There’s a lot more going on here than we can know about in any given moment.”
I mentioned that in the book. Take a moment and step back and recognize that there’s more to this thing called life than you or we may understand at this time. We’re so stuck in certainty around this. This is the way things are. Until you step back, it’s hard to progress forward. Open-mindedness is key.
Writing “From Anxiety to Awakening”
Let me offer to bring you back to the list of insights that you’ve published and you’ve written an entire book about. The series of eleven insights, some of which surprised me. They’re delightful and a surprise. Several of them, I’d say probably eight of them, are like, “That’s what we teach.” Yeah, that’s from this book. Yeah, I know that one. I learned that last year.” You have them numbered from 1 to 11. I was curious as I was reading them. Did this sequence of numbers speak to you to come out in that order? Is there no particular order? Is there a key insight or two that you think all of the others hinge on?
The insights came at one time as a download, and then the reflections came separately and from examples in my life and the realizations I had. The insights are sequential in the sense that they are layers. You cannot understand insights 10 and 11 without first going through the previous ones. There are progressively deepening insights. Once you understand one, then you can go to the next level and deeper and deeper until you begin to see the nature of reality the way it is. When you went through the book and recognized certain ones and other ones, what was your impression as you peeled it back? Did it feel to you like you were discovering more and more as you went deeper?
It felt like it was building, which is why I asked the question. Yes. Is this a random thing?
No.
Were you building this in this sequential way?
It was very intentional because certain understandings have to be in place before you can get to the next level. The sequencing and organization of the book took a tremendous amount of time.
What prompted you to write it?
I didn’t originally want to write a book. This is the irony of the whole thing. I was working as a hypnotherapist, enjoying my practice. This nudging voice kept telling me that I needed to share what I was doing with the world. I knew from a very young age that there was a book in there somewhere. I never knew what it was going to be about. When the time came, the voice got a little bit more and more insistent. This book, I had to share it. It had to come through me.
Even though there was hesitation, I started the process because it needed to come out. I know it sounds like I didn’t intend to write the book, but that’s the truth. It came through me, and it needed to be shared. It made sense of everything that I’ve learned over 30 years of studying the mind and trying to understand this reality, this world that we live in. Finally, everything is coming together and being crystal clear for me in a sense of a deep knowing.
Was there a time in your life when you carried the label of a disorder of anxiety?
I was seeing a therapist, and I had a label. I never went and got diagnosed. It was not with anxiety. I had depression, ADHD. I was on medications for them. I always felt anxiety was constant in my life, like the other shoe was going to drop. I never felt safe. I never felt relaxed. My mind was never in the present. It’s through these insights that I was able to completely shift. I don’t worry anymore. I don’t have stress in my life. If something comes up, I deal with it. There’s a different way of being that I operate in the world now. I suffered for decades, and now I’m not on any medications. I’m in a place where I truly enjoy my life, and I’m living in alignment.
What period of segment of time would you say transpired between being in the place on the meds with the label and being able to say what you said, that you live your life differently now?
I would say it was overall a 30-year process of continually shedding layers, questioning things, researching, reading, meditating, and finding ways to get beyond the noise of the mind to get to these truths. The reason you’re saying that it’s so similar to everything, other books, and other things you’ve found, is because there is one truth.
The truth doesn’t need to be learned. It just needs to be discovered. Once you align with that truth, your life becomes easier. I think what I’ve done well and I’m proud of in this book is explaining it in a way that is very approachable for most people to understand, and how they can apply these understandings to their lives.
Whereas most books, you’ve got this whole group of books all around anxiety, talking about breathing exercises and meditation techniques. You’re anxious, but here’s how you get out of it. You’ve got all these spiritual books that say, “This is all ethereal stuff.” Nobody is connecting the dots. I was surprised by that. It became so clear to me that I was the one commissioned with the job of connecting the dots between anxiety and awakening.
I’ve been doing this work for a lot of years, and there’s a part of my brain that knows, “Tim, some people were listening to Jake just now, and they heard him say, if you buy my book and read it 30 years from now, you’ll be happy.”
It doesn’t take 30 years. It took me 30 years to get to that. That’s the whole point.
You didn’t have the book.
I didn’t have the book. It’s the book I wish I had.
We both know, we’ve worked with clients who know that the predisposition is to go to that ultra negative, I cannot achieve it, and woe is me thought. Is there a way that you’ve had this book out here long enough or that you’ve been teaching the principles of it enough, that you can say what people’s experience has been, that it doesn’t take 30 years?
It doesn’t take 30 years. You can awaken in a moment. I’ve had hypnotherapy clients who have been in traditional therapy for decades, 10, 20 years, and have told me they’ve gotten more from 1 or 2 sessions of hypnotherapy because it’s getting to the root. It’s helping them connect with a part of themselves that is beneath the noise. Once you glimpse that, once you can connect with that, things start to change and things start to evolve.
There was a client who had panic attacks every day for ten years. After one hypnotherapy session, they stopped. This client was told as a young child by a parent. Their dad was stable, but the mom was mentally unstable, and the father told my client, “You need to not let your emotions get too high or too low. Keep yourself contained because mom cannot handle big emotions.”
This person grew up in a closed system, unable to express emotions. That created intense anxiety intense panic within her. The moment that I was able to take her into hypnosis and let her know that this programming doesn’t apply anymore. She’s not that little girl anymore. She has the freedom to express herself. She can be happy, she can be sad, she’s allowed now, she’s free. The panic attacks went away. You don’t need to understand every aspect of the book to awaken.
Awakening is not an end goal. It’s an ongoing process of shedding layers that don’t serve you, that aren’t based in truth, and you don’t need 30 years. If you read the book and allow yourself to sit with it, there are no exercises; there are no things you need to do. Read it and let yourself sit with it, and it starts to work its magic, and you start to transform because this book was downloaded. It was not coming from my mind. It was coming from a higher place.
You Are Not The Mental Activity
I think that’s evident, and certainly with the impact on me and how I was so anxious to get this interview recorded so we can share it with others. When I looked, there were so many of the eleven insights that I’m looking at here. I looked at the clock and I realized that in about ten minutes, we have to be done. Let me ask you to get centered and think about whatever questions I’ve asked and what you’ve already given us. Where do you want to take our last ten minutes? What’s the juicy, meaty stuff you want to share with the audience?
There are two aspects of this that are key to getting to a place of inner peace. The first one is recognizing that you are not the mind, you are not the mental activity. Mental activity happens, thoughts happen. You get to observe them. You get to watch them. I use the analogy in the book of the wild horse, that the mind is like a wild horse, but you’re not the horse. You are the owner, the trainer, and the rider. Start to change your perspective, step off the horse, and observe what the mind is doing. See what’s happening in the mind, and recognize that most of that noise is coming from old programming, old belief systems.
Oftentimes, from parents or childhood. The child who raises his hand in class one time and says something, and all the kids laugh at him. Now, all of a sudden, he has a belief system that says if I speak up, I get ridiculed. That child may grow up to be an adult with great ideas, but be afraid to share those ideas because of a belief. It’s about recognizing your mind wants to keep your status quo. It’s like a safety mechanism.
You can harness it, but you have to recognize that the noise that it’s producing is that. It’s not the truth. You observe the mind. The other aspect that is so key is insight number two, which is that the present moment is all there is. We spend so much time worrying and thinking about the future or analyzing the past when the present moment is all we have. It’s the only thing that exists. You cannot fast-forward and go into the future, and you cannot rewind and go into the past.
The present moment is where all of your power lies. I used to live my life constantly, never present. The present for me used to be a stepping stone. It’s like a step towards a future moment that was more important. The moment I realized, “Wait a minute, I’m missing my life because I’m so stuck in the future.” I wouldn’t tell people, “The only moment you need to take care of and the only moment you can take care of is the one you’re in right now.
You cannot fast forward to the future or rewind to the past. The present moment is where all of your power lies. Share on XIf there’s not something that needs your attention right now, then don’t start to project into the future. Be here now and deal with whatever is in front of you.” If there’s a choice or a decision you need to make, make it and make it from the highest place possible, but make it with your eyes open and trust that whatever is unfolding is unfolding for you. That’s a more a deeper concept.
That’s insight number seven. Life is happening for you, not to you.
I’m happy to talk about that. Some people think life is random. We see the chaos in the world and we think, “How can this have any rhyme or reason? Children are dying of cancer, and all this.” The intelligence that created life doesn’t work on a small, short timeline. It works on an infinite timeline. The things that seem to us now to be challenges and obstacles that are chaotic are the building blocks for a more positive future. It doesn’t seem like it when we’re in it, but there is an intelligence to the system. There is no actual chaos. If you study chaos theory, there is no chaos. Everything has an underlying order. People think, “Everything has an underlying order except my life.” No, it applies to your life as well.
Knowing Yourself Beyond The Physical
The ability to take a breath and step back and question all the beliefs and conclusions I’ve come to about my life opens the space where I might learn that there’s more going on here than I had thought. The other aspect of it is that you’re not just the physical body. If you’re not your thoughts and you’re not just your physical body, what are you? That fundamental question is the core of some of the deepest spiritual teachings that have ever come up on this planet. Let’s spend a few years of your life figuring out who you actually are. That’s a pursuit that’s worth every bit of energy you can pour into it.
The great philosophers said, “Know thyself.” It’s not just about knowing yourself on a surface level. It is to know who you are at the deepest level. At the deepest level, you’re an energy. You’re an energy of awareness and an energy of consciousness.
Consciousness and awareness are even separate from energy. Try to wrap your mind around that. The idea that I’m not just energy, and my awareness isn’t energy. It’s something other than energy. Energy is this other thing that my awareness can observe.
You’ve done the work and you understand it at a deep level. For most people, to get to that requires a level of understanding. What I’ve worked hard to do in the book is lead the person to begin to see that, and to begin to understand who you are beneath the physical, beneath the passing waves, in this field. It’s a field of awareness. It’s a field of consciousness.
As Rumi said, “It’s out there beyond right and wrong, good and bad, and I’ll meet you there.”
Remember the old farmer’s story in the book. We like to label things as good or bad, but life is a long story. The world or reality is a long story, and it’s not so cut and dried.
If you get outside of the Western logical mindset-driven culture, you understand that you’re better off knowing how little you know rather than knowing. The ancient Eastern traditions have been, and I’ll paraphrase it, “He who says he knows doesn’t know. She who says she knows, she’s onto something. She who says she doesn’t know, she’s onto something.”
If I stay in this space of “There’s so much I don’t know and I would love to learn,” now I put myself in a position where it’s possible for me to learn. That’s one of the things I hope your book does for people. It’s to help them start to question what everyone of these eleven insights will probably bump up against an opposite belief or tradition that most people reading the book with are going to bring with them into that reading. Hopefully, your book can help them open up to questioning it.
I know it can because I’ve gotten enough feedback now from people who have read it to say and hear from them that “I’m looking at things a little differently. I’m starting to understand that there’s more to life than what I thought. Maybe it is working for me. Maybe the challenges have gotten me to become who I need to be.”
I look back now at all of the little synchronicities of life that have gotten me to where I am. I think that’s something every listener and reader would recognize in their own life. You have gotten out of situations that you probably thought would destroy you. Where you are in life now is a direct result of millions, if not billions, of things having to go exactly the way they did.
That’s not an accident. That’s by design. There’s an orchestration going on. There is an intelligence moving through us. It is us. Once you start to be open to that, you don’t even have to understand how it works. I don’t think we can fully understand in this dimension. That’s okay. It’s like trying to explain water to a fish. It’s like you’re in this thing. It sustains your life. You have no idea what it is. Without this, you couldn’t live. The fish is like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What water? What are you talking about? What’s water?” That’s how we are.
I don’t know the absolute truth of it. God hasn’t been whispering in my ear, etc. However, I can tell you this much. I’m borrowing this from Brene Brown’s husband, where he said, “I don’t know that that’s true, but I can tell you this much. The more I pretend it’s true, the better my life gets.”
That’s where the trust element comes in. That’s where the surrender comes in. People have this misunderstanding about surrenders. “I’m not going to surrender.” Surrender is not what you think. Surrender is where your power lies. When you try to control everything, that’s when you end up with debilitating anxiety. Trying to control every aspect of your life, to control how that person treats me, and what’s going on here and what’s going on in the Middle East, and I’m not happy about this, and I don’t accept that.
From Anxiety to Awakening book cover: From Anxiety to Awakening: 11 Insights That Transform Worry Into Wisdom and Fear Into Freedom
When you stop for a moment and go, “Maybe things are happening for a reason, and it’s part of the unfolding. I’m going to trust the flow.” We are all on this river of life, and we can paddle upstream, and we can fight the river, but you’re not going to win. The moment you go, “I’m going to let the river carry me.” You still have free will. You still have choices you can make, but life will carry you where you need to go.
What’s Next For Jake
I realize we’re at our time. I thank you so much for being willing to share. Do you have another project in the works?
I do have a second book that started coming through, and I’ve started to write a bit. It’s called I’m Awake Now What?
It’s like carried by the water. There you go.
I’m thinking about that. It’s nothing imminent, but right now I hope to spread the message of this book and help people who are suffering and open to a deeper understanding of what this term of anxiety is, recognizing there is a path to freedom. It’s a tool for your awakening. It’s not meant to destroy you.
How do you prefer people connect with you?
The easiest way is on the website, AnxietyToAwakening.com. Over there, you can find links to the book, to my resources. You can contact me there if you have questions or anything you’d like to know. The book is available on Amazon, on Spotify. I did an audio version. Whatever works for you as a listener or reader, take a look and see if it resonates. I think this book can make a difference in a lot of people’s lives.
I appreciate your sharing it with us, and I look forward to the second book if it comes to fruition.
Thank you, Tim. I appreciate it.
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Jake Yanitz Rubin is a clinical hypnotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author of the bestselling book, From Anxiety to Awakening: 11 Insights That Transform Worry Into Wisdom and Fear Into Freedom. Jake’s journey began with his own battle with anxiety, until a radical shift in perspective changed everything. He realized anxiety wasn’t something broken that needed fixing. It was intelligence trying to get his attention.
That insight became the doorway to deep peace, purpose, and awakening. Now, Jake helps others de-hypnotize themselves from fear, separation, and self-doubt. Through his transformational work and powerful new book, he offers a grounded, yet transcendent path to healing, one that reframes anxiety not as a problem, but as a profound invitation. I am honored to be able to welcome Jake to the show to explore this paradigm-shifting approach and the deeper intelligence guiding all of us home.
Important Links
- Jake Yanitz Rubin
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- Radically Genuine Podcast
- From Anxiety to Awakening: 11 Insights That Transform Worry Into Wisdom and Fear Into Freedom
About Jake Yanitz Rubin
Jake Yanitz (Yah-NEETZ) Rubin—clinical hypnotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author of the bestselling book From Anxiety to Awakening: 11 Insights That Transform Worry into Wisdom and Fear into Freedom.
Jake’s journey began with his own battle with anxiety—until a radical shift in perspective changed everything. He realized anxiety wasn’t something broken that needed fixing—it was intelligence, trying to get his attention. That insight became the doorway to deep peace, purpose, and awakening.
Now, Jake helps others de-hypnotize themselves from fear, separation, and self-doubt. Through his transformational work and powerful new book, he offers a grounded yet transcendent path to healing—one that reframes anxiety not as a problem, but as a profound invitation.
We’re honored to welcome Jake to the show today to explore this paradigm-shifting approach and the deeper intelligence guiding all of us home.
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