The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  No Escape Hatch from Life

  Alongside our past- or future-based worry, we also use the myth of “I’ll be happy when . . .” as an escape hatch. We fall prey to the insidious cultural message that says, “You’ll be happy when [you graduate from college, land the job, get married, buy the house, get the dog, have the baby].” or “You’ll be happy when [this test is over, this job assignment is complete, the sun comes out].” But when each of those milestones or events occurs, and you still feel restless and uncertain, you wonder what’s wrong. There’s nothing wrong. It’s just that there’s no escape hatch from life, meaning we can’t avoid the inherent loneliness, pain, uncertainty, and transcendence of being human. Let’s explore some of these states a bit further.

  Life can be a lonely journey. In fact, loneliness is part of the human experience, for it’s an undeniable fact that nobody, no matter how close they may come to our hearts, is living inside of our bodies and seeing life through our lens. One of the hidden diamonds embedded inside the questions that often plague the anxious mind is the invitation to embrace our fundamental, existential loneliness. When we’re hooked on the questions, we’re fixated on the ego’s convincing escape hatch that says, “You wouldn’t feel lonely with someone else or somewhere else.” When we recognize, on the other hand, that loneliness is part of the human condition, we can learn to meet our solitude and, perhaps, even become friends with it. When we meet the solitude instead of running from it, it changes, paradoxically, into friendship — but it’s our own internal friendship instead of that of expecting another to fill that place of longing. (We will explore loneliness in more depth in chapter 10.)

  Life can be a painful journey. For some, especially those with a wide-open heart, pain is a part of daily life. We don’t even have to know why we’re crying, but when we slow down and soften, we find that a layer of sadness sits in the middle of an open heart. We try to escape this “genuine heart of sadness,” as Pema Chödrön describes it, but there’s no escape, because life includes pain. If you’re someone whose heart hasn’t been hardened over, you will be highly attuned to this pain on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis. There’s no getting over life; we must learn to go through it.

  Life can be a transcendent journey: moments, minutes perhaps, when the soul expands, when not just the physical body breathes a full breath, extending beyond the familiar boundaries, but the soul does as well. Transcendence is when the soul recognizes itself, when the infinite part of me remembers itself by seeing itself reflected somewhere in this finite world. The quest for transcendent experiences is not a way to bypass the inherently uncomfortable fact of being a human in a physical body. But we can seek transcendence as we seek oxygen, for these moments in time where we are simultaneously lifted out of ourselves and are remembering ourselves oxygenate our souls and make life worth living.

  Where do we find transcendence? There is no formula. We find it by following the faint whispers of yes until the quiet song awakens into full chorus, until the transcendent moments aren’t isolated experiences, but mark out daily and even hourly life. This may happen when you’re hiking in the hills, sitting in prayer, looking at art, writing a poem or memorizing one, working with a dream, climbing a mountain, sitting on the beach, or petting a cat. We leap from lily pad to lily pad of yes until they string together to create one green path that guides our days and nights.

  We must make space and call on the ally of slowing down into stillness to invite the yes. We must carve out a quiet spot in some corner of our busy lives to hear the insects singing. And we must know that transcendence is not the goal and is not, in fact, separate from the pain and loneliness, the fear and vulnerability that define being human.

  Transcendence is meeting life on life’s terms, putting down the armor, stopping the fight, and simply saying, “Here I am. I allow life to flow through me and with me. I say yes to life in all of its varied expressions of pain and beauty. Here I am.”

  The Fear of Feeling Too Good

  As much as we yearn for transcendence, we also resist it, for it’s just as vulnerable to feel good as it is to struggle. In fact, in many ways it’s more vulnerable to feel good, because when you’re feeling good, you have something to lose, and the ego fears nothing more than loss. Therefore, in order to learn to say yes more often to the vulnerability of life in the present moment, we need to explore the natural resistance that arises when we’re feeling good.

  You long to feel better. You’re sick of suffering. But when goodness arises, you notice a thought process that pushes it away with something like, “I don’t deserve to be happy,” or “If I’m happy, something will come to take it away.” This is your defense system at work, your ego working overtime to protect you from the risk of being vulnerable. Because it’s as much of a risk to feel good as it is to feel pain. The only safe zone is the narrow place where feelings are muted into a manageable, numb place. This is the place that our neck-up (always in our heads) culture teaches. The path to freedom is to learn to peel back the protective layers that have kept you safe until now, and risk touching life directly again.

  One of my course members described it like this:

  I have entire days without experiencing anxiety, and everything feels so real — it’s as if I had been wearing gloves all my life and can suddenly touch the texture, shape and temperature of my emotions, and of life in general. Every moment feels very real when it’s not covered by the thick layer of anxiety and constant worries.

  When I am in this space, though, I sometimes feel very scared and actually do get very anxious. I am afraid something bad will happen. I feel I don’t deserve to be happy, to be content with my partner and my job, despite all the imperfections. I am uncovering this deep belief that it is dangerous to be happy. Any guidance on how to deal with this fear?

  If this description sounds familiar, you’re not alone. You’re suffering from what Gay Hendricks, in his book The Big Leap, names the Upper Limit Problem. Here he shares his own process of discovering this phenomenon:

  I had just returned to my office from lunch with a friend, and we’d spent a congenial hour talking about the projects we were working on. My work was going well, and I was happy in my relationships. I leaned back in my chair and gave myself a good stretch, letting out a sign of relaxed satisfaction. I felt great. A few seconds later, though, I found myself worrying about my daughter, Amanda, who was away from home on a summer program she has very much wanted to attend. A slide show of painful images flickered through my mind: Amanda sitting alone in a dorm room, Amanda feeling lonely and miserable away from home, Amanda being taunted by other kids. The inner joy disappeared from my body as my mind continued to produce this stream of images.

  He then calls the program director and learns that his daughter is fine. He feels foolish and wonders how he could go from feeling good in one moment, then watching the slideshow of painful images in the next. Then he realizes that his mind sent him the painful images because he was feeling good. As he says, “Some part of me was afraid of enjoying positive energy for any extended period of time. When I reached my Upper Limit of how much positive feeling I could handle, I created a series of unpleasant thoughts to deflate me.”

  Sound familiar? Let’s deconstruct the belief that it’s not safe to be happy.

  I always like to zoom out to start at the biggest layer of a belief, which in this case resides in the collective unconscious. Remember the collective unconscious is the part of the mind that is shared by all humans and is even connected to the memory of our ancestors. In other words, we often believe that we’re the only ones to experience or feel something, but when we zoom out and connect to the invisible web, we see that our personal experience is also the collective experience. Gay Hendricks describes how the fear of feeling too good is interwoven into the collective layer, how human beings have struggled through adversity for thousands of years, and that it’s only recently that we have evolved to allow ourselves to feel good for any length of time.r />
  Of course, not everyone on the planet is blessed enough to worry about life being too good. There are millions of people who suffer on the most basic level of survival. The fear of feeling too good, while collective for many, isn’t universal, and would be categorized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the very top tier: self-actualization. This doesn’t invalidate how painful and self-limiting it can be when you’re suffering from the fear of feeling too good, but I do believe it’s important to approach that fear with a healthy dose of perspective.

  The next layer to address is the level of ego. Again, the ego is committed to one thing above all else: avoiding loss by maintaining control. In pursuit of this futile quest for ultimate control, it convinces us that if we believe its lies, we will successfully control the future. In this case, the ego says: “If you acknowledge the good things in your life, you’ll make them go away.” Can you hear the magical thinking in that statement?

  And finally, we address the personal story, times when you were torn down by peers, teachers, siblings, or parents for shining your light brightly. I can still remember the cliquey girls in fifth grade saying to me about another girl, “She’s so conceited,” or “She thinks she’s so great,” with great disdain. For a young child for whom peer acceptance is the entire world, it’s a small leap from hearing those statements spoken about someone else, to then introjecting them into one’s own code. In that one moment, we learn to remain small.

  In the end, it’s about recognizing, over and over again, where you have control and where you don’t. You can’t control the future; you can’t control the outcome of most events in your life. But you can control how you choose to respond to the fear-based, what-if thoughts that descend on your mind like an avalanche and try to pull you away from this moment, right here, right now. You can control how you respond to your inner world and how much responsibility you’re willing to take for your well-being. This is what you’ll learn in the next practice.

  PRACTICEWORKING WITH THE FEAR OF FEELING TOO GOOD

  When you’re noticing that the fear of feeling too good is in the picture, use the following practice:

  1.Notice it. Bring awareness to times when your good feelings suddenly shift into worry and rumination. The more consciousness you bring to this habit, the more easily you’ll be able to change it.

  2.List your ego’s beliefs and call them to the mat. The ego is most powerful when it works in darkness, hidden behind the great Oz curtain. When you pull back the curtain, you discover that the ego, just like the wizard of Oz, isn’t a big, scary person with a loud voice, but is actually just a small, little, scared part of us. When you write down all of your ego-beliefs, you shine the light of consciousness on them, and they begin to dissolve.

  3.Write or explore times in your life when you’ve been torn down by others. Or write about experiences that led to the belief that it’s not safe to be fully, extraordinarily, beautifully, magnificently, brilliantly you. Most people learn somewhere along the way that it’s not okay to think they’re wonderful and that it’s safer to stay small. When you explore these experiences, you release them from your individual unconscious and can bring truth to the beliefs that were formed during those times. Grief may also surface as you come into direct contact with memories in which you were made to feel small, especially when those memories are connected to your parents.

  4.Name your fears. Write down what scares you about doing inner work that might result in feeling more grounded and joyful. When you’ve spent years or decades identified with your pain and anxiety, it can feel scary to imagine a new identity, one based on feeling well. Most people resist committing to their inner world because they’re scared of what they’ll find.

  It is essential to take your inner work slowly and with great gentleness. You are likely fused with your core stories, like a tenacious weed that has wrapped itself around your core self: if you pulled out the weed by the root too quickly, it would feel like your core self was collapsing. Since you’ve lived with your stories and beliefs for so long, it’s part of the internal structure or building block of your psyche. Like a gentle gardener, the work has to be slow and methodical, perhaps pulling out the top portion of the unwanted weedy vine before carefully digging into the ground to unearth the root.

  When ego tries to scare you with one of its favorite lines (“If you commit to inner work and grow, something bad will happen, or you’ll find out something terrible about yourself.”), it’s also essential to grab onto a bit of cognitive truth and know that what you’ll find is yourself. What you’ll learn is how to love, both yourself and others. What you’ll realize is that unattended anxiety takes up a tremendous amount of space, and then when you begin to dissolve its tentacles, your heart will open in untold ways. In short, nothing bad will come from doing your inner work; that’s the ego’s fear of change at work, trying to convince you to leave well enough alone and act like everything’s fine. If anxiety is in charge, everything is not fine. And the more you turn inward and find the courage to come face-to-face with your raw spots that live in the vulnerability of the present moment, the more you will find your freedom.

  PART TWO

  THE FOUR REALMS OF SELF

  Healing Anxiety from the Ground Up

  We need to learn to take a walk in the sunshine and see the colors of the earth, to respect our physical bodies, to wake up to the music in life, to listen to our dreams, to show affection to the people we love. Then we can make peace.

  ROBERT JOHNSON

  We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

  7

  THE SEAT AT THE HEAD OF YOUR TABLE

  Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarepa suggested: “Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life.” A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.

  DAVID RICHO

  How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

  In order to meet the essential task of attending to your four realms of self, you need to have a loving, competent, and clear inner parent or inner friend at the helm of psyche. Just as kids feel safe when there’s an attuned parent sitting at the head of the metaphoric dinner table, so your inner characters — Anxiety, Judgment, Fear, Jealousy, Critic, Taskmaster, Good Girl/Boy — feel safe when there’s a loving, clear, attuned parent at the head of your inner table. Neglecting this one essential quality of self can lead to more anxiety, overwhelm, and confusion, especially when engaging in deep inner work. Whereas growing the quality will allow you to meet your body, heart, mind, and soul in ways that allow you to listen to and act on anxiety’s messages.

  The Qualities of a Loving Inner Parent

  We all have this calm, compassionate place inside us, but if you didn’t witness emotional regulation role-modeled when you were growing up (and very few people did), it can be difficult to access it. This doesn’t mean that this part of you doesn’t exist. (Remember: one of the favorite tactics of the character of resistance is to tell you that you don’t have a loving inner parent, and therefore can’t do this inner work.) It just means that this part is a weak muscle inside you that needs your attention in order to strengthen it. To do so, it can be helpful to know which qualities you’re looking for, so that when you notice them, you can say, “Yes, there’s my inner parent.” Whatever you water will grow, and in this case, you want to grow a particular part of you that can hold steady when life swirls around you and as you dive more deeply into your inner world and healing process. Following are some basic qualities of a loving inner parent.

  •Just as a loving outer parent listens to and honors a child’s needs yet pushes them past their comfort zone when necessary, so a loving inner parent brings compassion and intense curiosity to your inner world while
making sure that you don’t fall into the realm of indulgent pain or laziness.

  •Just as a loving outer parent carves out time to drop down into the present moment and connect eye to eye and heart to heart with their child without distraction, so the inner parent recognizes how essential it is to create long pauses in the otherwise run-on sentence of our increasingly fast and busy days so that she or he can listen with full presence to what’s needed. This means that phones are turned off or placed in another room. It means that we hush the voices — the work, the calls, the emails, the bills — that pull us away from the dropped-down time of presence. We cannot feel safe, loved, or worthy if the parents in our lives — both outer and inner — don’t take time to listen.

  •In addition to being a listener and holder, the loving, wise parent is the part of ourselves that sets boundaries and limits. It’s the part that says yes to this (“Yes, I’m going to exercise now even though I don’t feel like it”) and no to that (“No, I’m not going to drink alcohol tonight, because I know it will cause me to wake up feeling anxious tomorrow”). It’s the part that can make decisions and trust those decisions.