A Carefree--and cheap--approach to worries : For only $5, an Arizona guru will take ashes from your (written) problem and toss them to the winds.

Gregg Warren’s admittedly crazy idea has struck like lightning, turning him into something of a guru for America’s worrywarts.

It’s an odd line of work for the decidedly un-gurulike Warren, a 44-year-old Los Angeles refugee and former college tennis player with a nice tan, a bald spot, cowboy boots and an easy smile.

But he’s also a devotee of Buddhist philosophy who believes that one of the best ways to get rid of your worries is to toss them out the window of an airplane.

Warren calls his soaring little concern Worry Free, and it goes like this: If you have worries, write them on a piece of paper, burn the paper, send Warren the ashes and, for $5, he’ll toss them out of a plane over the tiny town of Carefree.

The response has been astonishing: Since July, Warren has handled in the neighborhood of 5,000 such requests.

“I started doing this as a lark,” he said. “But people really believe in it. I think they’re looking for answers.”

Warren said he came up with the idea after spending a month in Thailand studying with Buddhist monks. One of the techniques they used to maintain peace of mind was to reduce their troubles to ashes and wear them in a pouch around their necks.

After a few days, they would trundle up to the mountains and toss them into the wind.

“The Buddhists say that people take a thought and attach to it, and they have to find a way to detach,” said Warren, who recently left Los Angeles after 14 years in the commercial real estate business.

“Thoughts are real things, like cars or lawn mowers. The more we hold on to them, the more cluttered the mind is and the less peace there is. In meditation, you learn to let those things go.”

When Warren returned home, a deceased relative was cremated and the ashes were scattered from a plane. That got him thinking. He discussed the Worry Free idea with friends, which resulted in about 15 requests to scatter their worries.

They told him it worked, so he took out a small newspaper ad and waited for worrywarts to beat a path to his post office box.

So many have torched their troubles and shipped them to Warren that he had to stop sending back a Worry Free certificate and a page of handy suggestions for ditching worries.

These included gazing into a large candle flame while concentrating on transferring your worry into the flame. Then blowing out the candle.

Another tip was to pick out a tree, and as you’re walking to it, immerse your mind in one worry. Make it bigger than anything in your life. Completely weigh yourself down with it. Then hit the tree and be rid of it.

But Warren was spending close to $2.50 on each shipment of certificates and suggestions, and it got to be too much.

“I just want this to work for people,” said Warren--who has a pilot’s license but no plane, so every time he goes up he has to rent one for around $70 an hour. “If I make $2,000 on this or $10,000, it doesn’t make any difference to me.”

About 15% of Warren’s worriers include letters detailing their troubles.

Some samples: Can’t pay the rent. Haven’t filed my taxes for two years. What does my blind date look like? I’m too short. I’m too fat. How will I look this summer in my bathing suit?

The list goes on. Some are funny: I worry because all I seem to do is worry. Afraid I’ll bounce the check I wrote to the company that consolidated my bills. Won’t be able to afford my bankruptcy. My biggest worry is that Rush Limbaugh might be right.

But many of the letters are serious. One worrier wrote: “Just doing this is a release and I might send more. Is that OK?” Another said: “I feel better already.”

One desperate soul wrote: “I know that God is alive and living in Carefree.”

Warren says that such cries for help tell him that his simple idea has hit a powerful nerve. He’s got a backlog of 100 sets of ashes to scatter, then he’s planning to write a Worry Free book and conduct Worry Free seminars. But first he wants to finish the acting class he’s taking.

In fact, that’s the worry guru’s biggest worry: that he won’t have enough time to do the things he wants to do in life. Like everyone else’s, his brain works overtime producing too many thoughts.

“They’ve clocked human thoughts at a thousand a minute,” he said. “Think of it as stock quotations with the numbers running along on a board. The trick is getting these thoughts out of your head. When you write them down, you’re halfway home.

“You can go to a shrink who’ll charge $100, and after an hour all he’ll be able to tell you is your name. I charge $5.”

But dumping ashes out the window of a plane has its hazards. The first time he did it, the ashes were in a manila envelope, and most of them blew back in his face. Now he puts them into a long-stemmed plastic bottle for easy dumping.

“Of course, they probably come down somewhere in New Mexico,” Warren said. “But what matters is that they’re thrown out over Carefree.”