Anxiety

Anxiety: lurking, deep, swirling, gripping, pervasive. Hard to get at. Hard to eliminate. Seems to be ever-present. So much in the background we hardly can say it’s a “thing” separate from us.

And that, of course, is its secret to lingering – far beyond its welcome.

As we deepen in our devotion to the Inner state, many notice a tidepool of anxiety lurking deep within. Far beneath the surface of self assurance and busyness is this place where we are scurrying around trying to make sure we never sink in too deep. It’s just too scary and uncomfortable there.

This anxiety has many faces, names and nuances. But it exists for all of us. Many would deny this. The busyness of their lives keeps them occupied enough that they haven’t really noticed it, yet.

But nearly everyone I know who has begun the Inner Journey stumbles into this pit sooner or later.

It is so intensely uncomfortable it feels like we’d do ANY thing to get out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

What I notice is that – right where we feel anxiety welling up --- this is the place to go. To open. To be curious. Willing to see our own selves there.
It is good.

All of us – every single one of us – learned in some way in our lives that we are not completely OK just as we are. In some way – in some small or big way – we had to change to fit in, to meet our parents’ expectations or needs or deficiencies. We had to fit in to our culture or – gads – we would be a “misfit”. That statement, unto itself is terrifying. If we don’t fit in to society it spells not surviving. By whatever primitive means our minds operate around this principle, it speaks to the most basic of Garden of Eden scenarios. Being banned. Excommunicated. Removed from the garden of our most basic sustenance. Forever.

Very, very terrifying.

Underlying all this programming is a deep societal fear that IT (society) won’t survive if individuals are allowed to be different. And – this is more than fear. It is a recognition of a truth. Society, as it is, WON’T survive if individuals learn they don’t have to meld and mold themselves to the norm of the general trend.

The basic fear of all this devolves from the most basic lack of trust. A lack of trust in an inherent sense of order that might reveal itself and evolve if we each were allowed to follow the bliss of our hearts – rather than strive and struggle to conform to the norms defined for us by the society that already exists. Bound by traditions, religions, parents and corporations. It reflects a belief that somehow we are, at our base, not OK. Not OK. We have to be defined by some external standard to bring ourselves up to an idea of acceptability. Unlike forests, animals, stars and all other acts of nature – we are somehow deformed at birth and base. We don’t trust the basic goodness of life as it moves through US. Our minds believe we have to DO something – something different – in order to be “allowed” to live. To survive.

Forget the “lilies of the field” malarkey. We humans are different. We need cars and cell phones and designer jeans.

Really?

Stop here. Pause and take the time – right now – to just open in to the question: “What, in me, says ’No way!’ to the idea that I am perfectly, wonderfully fine – right now – just as I am?”

The answer to this question – and I encourage you to ask it often – will deliver you from such deep anxiety. It is worth the pause.

Trusting Ourselves

I had a lovely conversation with a friend recently about “why things happen”. We agreed there is the possibility that things are just random. Stuff happens – and it is our lot to sort out how we’ll respond, given this or that in our lives.

I lean toward thinking that we may have something to do with our lot in life, though. Not in the pejorative way that many of us were taught to believe; ie: roiling with guilt about what we did wrong to bring this craziness into our lives. But rather, that there is a natural trajectory to the things we think, say and do. There are consequences of the sort that to push a ball in one direction is to increase the likelihood it will move in that said direction. There are other parameters to deal with. The slope of the land. Whether the ball is full of air and so on. But still – our action has an influence.

And so it is in our lives – any given tendency toward which we lean is likely to reap some sort of benefit, for better or for worse.

The secret for many of us, laden as we are by the aforementioned guilt, is to unhinge from the self-splattering we can get into in response to the circumstances of our lives. The same lines of reasoning would inform us that to beat ourselves up is to provoke another whole set of circumstances in which we are the victims of our own brutality. And, I notice, that is what often happens.

In our good-hearted search for the lesson to be learned in the conundrums of our lives, we tend to cast blame. “Why did this happen?” is often construed to mean “What did I (or you) do wrong to get this mess?” To dig deeper in the undoing of the maladaptive messages of our own mind is to question that premise at its base. Forget that sort of figuring out.

Ask, instead, “Given this (and this and this), what is the best/kindest/gentlest response I can come up with here?” What I find is that if there is some awakening to be had in terms of that which I may have done to provoke any given situation, it will most likely be revealed in a useful manner under these conditions. A gentle environment in which to come to revelation.

Let that be our goal, then: to be safe enough with our own selves that we dare to reveal that which we most need to see. Plenty will come out of hiding fast enough when we do this. Because we have proven ourselves to be trustworthy where it matters the most: to our very own selves.