by Sheryl Paul
The work, thus, is always the same: make room for the pain, move toward it, welcome it, love it, and orient toward the beauty and gratitude. I wrote that story in my head years ago while lying next to my unbelievably precious boy (almost five years old at the time): the one who makes my heart feel like it’s going to explode from love every day, the one who makes my soul sing, the one who fills me with unimaginable joy. I often hear my clients say things like, “But if I allow myself to long for [something else], doesn’t that mean I don’t love or appreciate my current [partner, child, parent]?” No, it doesn’t mean that at all. The seasoned mind can hold the polarities.
In fact, being able to adopt a both/and approach is one of the hallmarks of maturity and an antidote to anxiety. The world isn’t a black-and-white place. The ego-mind believes that if we categorize every experience, we will feel more in control. We can categorize our spices and organize our clothes, but the realm of the heart-mind is often a messy place that defies categorization. The best we can do is make room for the apparent opposites, to hold them both as true while knowing that one doesn’t invalidate the other. I can experience a moment of longing for a daughter while celebrating with immense gratitude my two sons. I can allow myself to long for the experience of raising sisters while relishing the adventure of witnessing the complex layers of my boys’ relationship to each other (and you better believe I’m banking on granddaughters). I can grieve and celebrate, lose and love, long and feel grateful. There’s room for it all.
The Wisdom of Longing
I’ll share another story of what it looks like to breathe into the presenting pang of longing and spiral into its wisdom.
Several years ago, over the span of several weeks, I felt a subtle pang of longing every time a luxury, high-end car passed me. The obvious, first-layer interpretation was that I was longing for a nicer car, but I knew immediately that that wasn’t it. I’m not a car person, and I’m perfectly content with the functional, safe car that I drive.
Breathe. Go deeper.
The second-layer interpretation was that I was longing for more money, as represented by the luxury sedan.
Not it. Money is fine. Go deeper.
The third-layer interpretation was that I was longing for more stability. Often the fancy car would be driven by a distinguished gentleman in his seventies, and I could feel the quivery ache of longing for the patriarch of our family who would handle things, someone who would provide the pillar of protection and wisdom as the stable trunk of our family tree.
Close. Getting deeper. Shine the light of consciousness directly on the pain.
And then I knew. It emerged from the core of my soul, the heart of my heart. It was the longing for a family home, the grief from the loss of my childhood house after my parents’ divorce. It was longing for the older generation to wrap me in its embrace and feed me at its table, the longing to feel taken care of by elders, held in the greater web of an intergenerational community.
My eyes welled up with tears. I breathed into the grief brought forth by my longing. There was nothing to do with it, nothing to fix. Further wisdom arrived a few days later, a life-changing insight that we, my husband and I, and our home were the family hub now. We could offer this, and in the offering, the ache of the longing was diminished. But at the moment when the wisdom of the longing pierced consciousness, I simply stayed with the opening of pain, purified by the light of awareness instead of encased inside the longing. And once I broke open to the root pain, the superficial longing disappeared completely.
I don’t know why psyche communicates in symbol and code. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could understand ourselves without having to do the detective work of deciphering the messages? Yes, it would, but arguing with the way psyche communicates is as futile as arguing against reality. For some reason, we’re not meant to land on the big answers directly. We are invited, instead, to spiral into wisdom, to learn our secret codes only by spending slow time with ourselves. We learn to love our hidden communications. As Pablo Neruda writes, “as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
PRACTICEBECOMING CURIOUS ABOUT LONGING
Next time you notice the pang of longing, become curious about its embedded messages. Ask yourself if it’s root longing or secondary longing, while remembering that the anxious mind can easily attach to the first-layer interpretation and run with it, which will almost invariably exacerbate your anxiety. Instead, imagine that your longing is a hand, and when you take it, you’re led into the underlayers of self. Allow curiosity to be your guide and patience to be your friend. You’re not looking for answers so much as signposts, and when you follow these signposts, you’ll be led to your wisdom. To follow these signposts, loosely follow these suggestions:
1.When you notice the feeling of longing, name it as longing. Notice what it feels like in your body. Where do you feel longing? If you could describe it as a metaphor or image, what would that be?
2.Send your breath directly into the longing. Imagine that your breath is visible and you can see it wrap itself around the longing.
3.As you continue to breathe deeply and consciously, ask yourself: What is the core longing beneath this top-layer longing? It might take time to arrive at the core longing, but you’ll know when you land on it from the aha feeling in your body and the feeling of grief that arises.
4.Allow the feelings to move through you and give them creative expression if you feel inspired: draw, paint, dance, write a poem.
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THE REALM OF SOUL
Everything has become speeded up and overcrowded. So everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton wrote the above quote in 1973. How much faster and more crowded our world has become since then! One of the key messages embedded in anxiety is a call from soul to slow down, to clear out, to come home. Soul does not move at technological time; it moves at the rhythm of nature, whose pace has remained constant since the beginning of time. Both the presence of anxiety and a sense of numbness are strong indicators of a parched soul. It’s as if the soul is saying, “I can’t hear myself think. I can’t connect. I can’t breathe. Please stop doing and step into being.”
The Well of Being
One morning, when I was getting ready to leave for a family gathering, the term “well-being” popped into my head. It’s a term we hear a lot these days, especially if we frequently use resources that promote a healthy lifestyle. And I thought, “Well-being. A well of being. Well-being means that you’re able to access a well of being inside of you.”
There may be no medicine more effective to neutralize anxiety than accessing your own well of being, the quiet resting place inside where you can hear the noise of your mind settle down and physically feel your soul relax. It’s your own private retreat that’s accessible and free. It’s what the Buddhists call refuge, often in reference to our tendency to seek comfort in fleeting external objects and conditions instead of the sustainable inner realm. It’s a well whose waters are filled by nourishing acts of non-doing, also known as being.
There are so many ways to fill the time and space these days, endless distractions that draw us away with magnetic pull from the inner world. Anything you do that externalizes your sense of self depletes the waters of your well of being. This includes spending time on social media with the intention of avoiding yourself and real connection with live people; watching too many mindless movies; staying busy by completing tasks on your endless to-do lists; giving in to the cravings of addictions (including the mental addictions of ruminating, obsessing, and worrying); scrolling, clicking, texting, staring, binging, gaming, posting.
We all spend time engaging in acts that externalize self, and, in balance, some of these actions are essential to a different kind of well-being. But when the external far outweighs the internal, or the externa
l isn’t balanced on a daily basis with real time spent inward in nourishing ways, it begins to take a toll and anxiety ramps up. Thus, it requires a strong commitment, an ironclad decision to learn how to turn off screens and other forms of externalization and turn toward the quieter, slower ways.
The way to grow your well of being is exactly as the term suggests: you learn to cultivate a relationship to being. Being is non-doing, and it’s beyond non-doing. You could say that you’re “doing nothing” when you’re stretched out on the couch watching television. And while this may help you unwind after a long day, it doesn’t fill the well with nourishing waters. For most people, watching TV or surfing the internet are not simply acts of unwinding but ways to check out by avoiding the inner world.
True being is a quiet, still, often solitary place without distractions. It’s a feminine energy. It’s reflective and inward, qualities inhabited by the night, the moon, water, darkness. It’s slow, compassionate, soft, curious, and without agenda. It’s slower than slow, in fact; it’s timeless. It’s everything our modern world and our modern self are lacking.
In order to create a well of being, we need daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retreats. Some people call these windows of inwardness a Sabbath or a day of rest, which is the original intention of a weekend. As Rabbi David Cooper writes in Renewing Your Soul:
Modern civilization suffers from a chronic condition of anemic, starving souls. The sages teach us that if we feed our souls, we will experience a new kind of happiness and more meaning in life. They say we will see nature more clearly and a new world of inner peace will open. Renew the soul and one’s perspective of daily life will completely change. It is simply a matter of taking time, slowing down, shifting mundane consciousness into realms of higher insight, giving oneself the gift of reflection and contemplation.
How do you fill the inner well? There are many paths, and what works for someone else may not work for you. But deep inside, you have a sense of what opens your heart, what connects you to the deeper flow of life force or vitality, places and actions that help you turn inward and fill you with a sense of calm and connection to the realm of soul. As you read through the following words, notice that sense of yes, then take the actions each day that nourish your soul.
•Offering gratitude
•Recording and tending to dreams
•Fresh air and sunshine
•Smiling at a stranger
•Gardening
•Beauty, flowers, color, trees
•Sitting near a body of water, or immersing yourself in one
•Walking and talking with a close friend
•Taking the long way home
•Meandering
•Encountering a wild animal
•Pets
•Reading a poem, and writing one
•Drawing, painting, writing, dancing, singing, chanting
•Being in nature
•Autumn colors, snowfall, spring buds
•Walking in the rain
•Talking to the moon
•Looking at the stars
•Listening to crickets
•Candlelight
•Baths
•Stillness, silence, and solitude
•Doing less and being more
•Being in silence
•Meaningful rituals
As you can see, none of these actions or experiences require spending money, getting in your car, or even much time. The paths to your soul are free and always accessible to you, and your anxiety is pointing the way.
The Essential Function of Healthy Rituals
The soul needs healthy rituals in order to stay well nourished. For most of human history, people have engaged in time-honored rituals to walk them through the tenuous thresholds of milestones and transitions when the veil between the worlds is thinner and we’re more aware of the passage of time, change, loss, and death. Sensitive children and then adults are aware of how vulnerable we are at these thresholds — and in the entire threshold of life. Without a healthy tether to ground and anchor, the soul feels adrift, and we turn to obsessions and compulsions as a way to hold on to and create an illusion of control. These obsessions and compulsions may manifest outwardly in the form of checking that doors are locked and stoves are off, or inwardly in the form of mental obsessions like seeking endless reassurance on the internet for the current hook that your anxiety is hanging its hat on.
While the culture likes to diagnose these obsessions and compulsions as indicators of a disorder, I see these symptoms as indicators that there’s something unspeakably beautiful inside: a soul of such exquisite sensitivity lost in a world that doesn’t value its beauty, so it is left to find anchors in the only ways it knows how. What we call compulsive rituals are spiritual sensitivity gone awry: the ego’s attempt to control something bad from happening and define an uncertain future.
What we should have been taught as children, and need to teach our “outer” and inner kids today, is how to find healthy anchors so that we can safely dive into the deep and rich waters of life. The healthy anchors are meaningful rituals, prayers, and poetry that can help you connect to your inner resources of safety, connectedness, and comfort. If you woke up and went to sleep each morning with these elements, your sense of safety and protection would increase, and your anxiety would diminish.
When you connect to meaningful rituals, you connect to something bigger than yourself. Simply slowing down for a few minutes with the intention to turn inward helps you connect to the hum that connects all living beings. This hum is always there. All you need to do is drop underneath the surface of things, risk letting go of the compelling and addictive vine of control and mind-chatter, and you’ll find that you can tap into this hum. Ancient peoples have known for thousands of years that rituals connect us to the healthy web and remind us of our place in the world. It’s time we excavate that wisdom and meet the root need that’s manifesting itself as mental addictions, and thereby honor ourselves at the deepest level possible: the level of soul.
PRACTICEDEVELOPING HEALTHY RITUALS
Consider what your morning and evening rituals will be, and commit to doing them every day. I suggest creating a simple ritual altar with a candle, a bell or gong, a meaningful photo that inspires you to connect to self, and a couple of sacred objects (shells, rocks, spiritual symbols).
Keep in mind that you can and must create rituals that are aligned with your values and belief system. If you are already grounded in a religious tradition, you have an abundance of rituals from which to choose: you can read spiritual texts, recite prayers, light candles. If you’re not religious, don’t let the word ritual scare you. It simply means a meaningful act that you engage in on a regular basis. We all have rituals that inform our lives, but most of them lack meaning, so they don’t serve the function of creating an inner anchor and protection system. We have bedtime rituals, like washing our face, brushing our teeth, putting on our pajamas, but they’re more rote routines than actual rituals. Now is the time to create rituals that are aligned with your values.
As you sit before your altar, light a candle, take one or more of the following actions, and watch as your soul receives the nourishment it so desperately needs.
•Read a meaningful quote or spiritual text (leaving a book by your altar is helpful).
•Say prayers.
•Breathe.
•Practice mindfulness.
•Say a mantra to help connect you to self-love.
•Listen to an audio track that helps you feel connected (anything from soundstrue.com).
•Memorize a poem.
•Practice yoga.
•Write a gratitude list.
•Write down your dreams.
•Set your intention for the day.
•Open your senses to receive and notice the world around you: listen to the birds singing in the morning or the wind rustling in the trees at night. If you live in a city, see if you can open your heart to the hum of compassion
that connects every living being like an invisible web.
The more you begin to implement and incorporate the mindsets and practices I teach throughout this book, the more adept you’ll become at tuning into the first niggling of anxiety that taps at your soul, and instead of responding by tightening around it you, you’ll be able to turn inward and ask, “What is needed?” Sometimes what’s needed is simply to get up, walk outside, and breathe in fresh air. This is the soul saying, “Enough sitting. Enough working. Enough zoning out. I’m starving and I need attention. Let’s go sit on the earth, or let’s go read a poem.” Walking barefoot on the grass or sitting next to flowers can restore the soul in seconds.
Remember: anxiety is your friend, not your enemy. It’s a messenger pointing to a need or wound that needs attention inside. The more you respond with curiosity, the more you will heal. And the more you heal, the more you’ll be able to bring the gifts of who you really are into the world around you.
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WHEN ANXIETY HEALS
The final stage of healing is using what happens to you to help other people. That is healing in itself.
GLORIA STEINEM
