The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  Come back to this exercise as you reflect on this concept and allow the statements and memories that contributed to the belief that there’s something wrong with you rise to the surface.

  The Expectation of Happiness

  The second prominent cultural message that leads to anxiety is the expectation of happiness and the denial of shadow. We live in a culture that chases the light and abhors the darkness; in fact, “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the guiding principles upon which American culture is predicated. We worship the happy face and plaster on smiles when we venture into the world. Easygoing babies statistically receive more praise than fussy babies, and bubbly teens garner more positive attention than surly ones. In a culture that upholds the extrovert ideal as the pinnacle of personality types, we absorb the message early in life that if we’re prone to a more melancholic temperament, there must be something wrong with us. “Keep it light,” we learn. “Keep it peppy,” we hear. Sweep away the messy, unraveled, chaotic, loud parts of life and of yourself. Hide them in the dark.

  You’re sold the message early on that attaining happiness requires following the expectations and timeline of the culture: do well in school (even if it’s opposed to your learning style), have a lot of friends (even if you’re an introvert and prefer one or two close friends), play sports if you’re a boy (even if you prefer to read or do art), attend college when you’re eighteen (even if your chosen path doesn’t require a college degree), party hard (even if that’s not your style), and then find a great job, get married, buy a house, have a baby, work harder and harder and harder as you climb the corporate ladder, have a second baby, make a lot of money, buy a bigger house and more expensive car, retire. In that order. Some part of you knows that following this formula doesn’t guarantee happiness, but unless you consciously choose against the prescriptions of the culture, you’re likely to fall into the sheep line and blindly follow along. In doing so, you abdicate the beautiful intricacies of your unique personality, your gifts, traits, needs, desires, and most especially, any aspects of yourself that fall outside the box.

  If young people were taught early in life how to orient not toward happiness but instead toward meaning and fulfillment, a significant amount of their anxiety would be reduced. Instead of transmitting the message of happiness, we need to send a message of wholeness. This means that parents would receive the message from every source — pediatricians, teachers, clergy, friends, media — that there is so much more that is right with their children than wrong, and that the goal for their children is not necessarily happiness but a life of purpose, with a solid sense of self-trust leading the way.

  PRACTICEREPLACING “SHOULD” WITH LOVING ACTION

  One of the fastest ways to recognize that you’re outsourcing your self-trust is to listen when the word should populates your thoughts and vocabulary. As soon as I hear a “should” statement, I know that a client is suffering from an externally imposed expectation and is inevitably comparing her- or himself to a cultural ideal of “good” or “right” behavior, which then creates anxiety.

  For example, let’s take the statement: “I should feel more excited to see my partner.” We carry a cultural idea that if you’re away from your partner and not pining for him or her, it’s an indication that something is wrong or missing from the relationship. Our minds then go to: I’m not in love enough or I’m with the wrong person, and the anxious spiral begins.

  To heal from the “should” mindset, start to notice how often the word enters your self-talk, and then notice how you feel inside when you fall prey to believing the “should” statement. When you hear the word should, instead ask, “What would be most loving to myself and others right now?”

  There Are No Answers, Only Guideposts to Wisdom

  There have been times when I have wanted to collapse from the overpowering wave of not knowing that washed over me in moments of conflict or overwhelm: my boys at each other’s throats, my husband and I in an argument, a temporary falling out with a soul-sister, the state of the world or the homeless man on the corner. The pain seemed to storm around me like the fluttering of a thousand moths, a hurricane of emotions tipping into a flicker of despair from the awareness that we all struggle and nobody has the answers. Where’s the magic wand? Where’s the ultimate in-the-trenches parenting manual that teaches us how to ensure our kids will get along and be okay? How do we solve the world’s pain? Does anyone have the answers?

  But then something else takes over. It usually arrives in the aftermath of repair when someone has come forward with the courageous act of true accountability and the other person receives it. These moments of vulnerability soften me into submission, an acceptance that while we don’t know what we’re doing, maybe we don’t have to know. It reminds me of the famous lines from one of Rilke’s letters:

  Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

  Part of what trips us up is that we expect life and relationships to be easy. There is nothing easy about life, and relationships especially seem to stir up every hidden demon, every dusty complex, every latent unshed tear from our own life and our parents’ histories hidden away in the attics of their psyches. Relationships ask us to grow in ways that nothing else does or can. And yet, for example, when we don’t feel like kissing our partner we wonder what’s wrong. When our kids are struggling, we wonder what’s wrong. When we don’t hear back from a friend, we wonder what’s wrong. We search for answers and usually end up feeling worse about ourselves, falling prey to the implicit message that says, “If you follow my advice, your kid or relationship or life will be conflict-free and effortless.”

  A more comforting and realistic mindset is to know that every moment of flow is a small miracle: when my open heart aligns with your open heart and we experience closeness together; when the kids find their way to a creative game that satisfies them both; when friendship flows for weeks or months or years on end without a blip — all this is evidence of love at work. Why? Because there are so many ways that our hearts close, when fear or jealousy or negative habits prevail and prevent others from merging with your river, that when two open hearts meet in a cosmic, joyous collision — when your desire to kiss aligns with my desire to be kissed — it’s a moment of grace.

  We are all unformed: you, me, our partners, friends, and kids. Even people we hold up as figures of completion or perfection — the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Jesus, Pema Chödrön — are and were raw as well. The difference is that, as a result of years of dedicated practice, they’re able to move toward their raw spots with love and compassion. They probably react less impulsively than most people, and when they do “act out,” they move toward the reaction with curiosity. We all have this capacity. It just takes practice and rewiring to cultivate it.

  It’s deeply comforting to know that we’re not alone in our imperfections. The path of comparisons, which is deeply rooted in the myth of normal and the expectation of happiness, is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst. The path to liberation lies in cultivating a more loving and realistic relationship with life, one that recognizes that there is no finish line, that we are all unformed. Instead of attempting to squeeze ourselves into the unattainable expectations that the culture espouses, we learn to access more self-love as we journey on this painful, glorious planet together.

  To Be Human

  If you’re not meant to pretzel yourself into the myth of normal and the expectation of happiness, what are you meant to do? Instead of striving for happiness and normal, let’s strive to be human, which isn’t striving at all but a gentle allowing of ourselves to be exactly as we are. What does it mean to be human? When you�
��re struggling to free yourself from the negative and limiting expectations and messages of the culture, I invite you to read the following statements as reminders.

  To be human is to remember that this being human is an experiment without a goal or destination, but with a plan that includes learning about love at its center.

  To be human is to love awkwardly and without skill, for how can we practice that which we never learned or saw? We will sit with our partner in a cesspool of pain and silent confusion and have no idea how to climb out. We will feel connected and alive, and then disconnected and alone. We will doubt and exhale, find peace and forget again. This is what it is to love another with hearts that have been hurt and souls that have not yet learned how to love fully.

  To be human is to feel uncomfortable even with the people we love most in the world.

  To be human is to forget to connect to gratitude, to forget to take care of ourselves, to forget to pray. Perhaps we spend more time forgetting than remembering, which makes those brief dips in the sparkling pool of remembering ever more delicious and divine.

  To be human is to grow toward an acceptance of paradox and widen our capacity to tolerate uncertainty until we say “I don’t know” more often than “I know.”

  To be human is to struggle. Eventually we realize that when we sit under the umbrella of “shoulds” — “This shouldn’t be so hard. I should be happy.” — the pain rains down harder. But when we accept the fact that anxiety, depression, loneliness, powerlessness, grief, joy, and exhilaration are all part of the design, we step out into the rain and perhaps even dance a little.

  To be human is to grieve even when we don’t know why we’re grieving, to feel afraid even when we don’t know why we’re scared, and to feel joyful even when we don’t know the source of our joy.

  To be human is to make mistakes, and sometimes this means that we will hurt others, whether our closest loved ones or people we’ve never met. To be human is to say, “I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me” as we dance a dance of closeness and pain, remorse and forgiveness, rupture and repair.

  To be human is to experience times of ease and flow alternating with times of struggle. When we identify too closely with the struggle, we fall into despair. When we attach too deeply into ease, we slip into hubris. Just as a raft navigates the still waters and the rapids, so we float and fight along this river of life.

  To be human is to long to be seen with the perfect attunement of a new mother, and yet to know that there is no such thing as perfect attunement. In moments of clarity and wisdom, we remember that the only perfect seeing comes from our relationship to source, the divine, the one breath. In those loving and invisible arms, we are seen, known, and loved.

  To be human is to have hidden caverns inside the labyrinth of psyche, shadowlands that you cannot see or know until you’re cracked open. From the fissure, the light floods in and illuminates the shadow, causing what lives below to fly up into consciousness.

  To be human is to realize that your partner and your friends also have these shadow regions, places of darkness that you cannot see or know, in the beginning or even for years. Then one day, he or she is cracked open, and the furies fly to the surface, asking to be known, asking to be loved into healing.

  To be human is to have blind spots. No matter how much we delve into the interior realms, there will always be places we cannot see ourselves. This is why the most honest and courageous question we can ask a trusted loved one is, “What am I not seeing?” And when the blind spots are illuminated, we sing a song of gratitude that another veil of illusion and mis-seeing has been lifted.

  To be human is to age. The fine lines in your thirties will deepen to creases in your forties and fifties and beyond. Because we live in a culture that tries to erase the lines, we’re forgetting that our lines tell the stories of our lives: “Look, that’s when I laughed so hard, I cried. Look, that’s when I cried so hard, I crumpled into silence.” And where are the silver-haired women? They’re being dyed out of the culture, so fierce is our fight against time. What we don’t often see is that with aging comes wisdom, with time comes acceptance, and with the shortening of days comes the lengthening of gratitude.

  To be human is to serve, whether it’s the patch of earth outside your dwelling, the furry creature at your feet, the people with whom you share a home, or in a broader, more public context. One form of serving isn’t superior to any other. When the service overflows from the waters of the well of self, we connect to the source and to a place of meaning. As Jane Goodall says, “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

  To be human is to connect to every other being on the planet, not just through information but through the brain of the heart that opens with strength and courage until the young, limp boy being carried from the water in the arms of an aching soldier is my son, and his mother is my sister, and from across all the seas and lands of this vast yet small planet she collapses in my arms, and I hold her there, the grief of my prayers catching her in an invisible blanket.

  To be human is to love and be loved as best we can, and to remove the barriers that prevent us from loving fully and freely so that we can bring our love into the world that so desperately needs us.

  To be human is to know that we are imperfect and whole: we will hurt and be hurt; we will feel disappointed and will disappoint; we will stumble and fall and get back up again.

  PRACTICENOTICING YOUR INTRINSIC, POSITIVE TRAITS

  Let’s pause here to take some time to begin the process of rewiring what’s “wrong” and focus on what’s right, whole, and healthy. The most effective way to do this is to write an appreciation list of who you are in your highest, most essential self. This isn’t a list of your achievements, degrees, or anything external. Rather, it’s a list of your intrinsic, inviolable qualities that speak to your character and your heart. For example, when I ask course members to do this exercise, they will often share things like: “I’m a kind and giving person. I care about animals. I like the way my nose crinkles when I smile, and I have a good sense of humor. I know my sensitivity is a gift, even if I don’t always see it that way. It helps me in my work, and it helps me to be a good friend. I work on myself, and I try to learn and grow. I’m here, taking this course (or reading this book), which is one way that I’m trying to grow.”

  I suggest including this exercise in your morning or evening journaling. It is a way to rewire the habit of seeing the glass as half-empty (focusing on what’s wrong) to a new habit of seeing the glass as half full (focusing on your goodness and wholeness) and embracing the mindset that you’re okay exactly as you are.

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  ROADBLOCKS TO HEALING

  Anxiety is not optional in life. It’s part of life. We come into life through anxiety. And we look at it and remember it and say to ourselves: We made it. We got through it. In fact, the worst anxieties and the worst tight spots in our life, often, years later, when you look back at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new. . . . And that can give us courage . . . in looking forward and saying: Yes, this is a tight spot. It’s about as tight a spot as the world has ever been in, or at least humankind. But, if we go with it . . . it will be a new birth. And that is trust in life. And this going with it means you look [and ask], what is the opportunity[?]

  BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST

  The Character of Resistance

  Even if we can touch down into our intrinsic wholeness and shine the light of curiosity on our wounds from a place of compassion, we can still experience roadblocks on the journey of healing. Many of you, I’m sure, have had the experience of starting a new practice — like meditating or making green smoothies every morning, both of which can help with anxiety — only to find that within a week or a month, you’ve fallen off the horse. Why is that?

  It’s because of the inner characte
r of resistance, which I talked about in the introduction. Why would we resist growth and healing when they can only lead to positive change? The answer is in the question: it’s the change itself that is terrifying. We all have a part of us that longs to remain in the realm of the familiar, safe, and predictable, and it’s this part that resists our attempts to grow.

  Resistance, which is a cousin of fear, manifests as feeling too lazy, scared, or tired to engage in the practices or actions that you know will serve your higher self. It’s the part that would rather binge on Netflix at the end of the day instead of write in your journal. It’s the part that would rather sit on the couch than go for a run. The more you can name when resistance is running the show, the easier it will be to choose against it in service of your intention to heal and grow. To help with the naming, here are some of the key characteristics of resistance/fear: