The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  In that moment, instead of attaching onto the thought and indulging it by getting online and searching for a new and “perfect” house (which I’ve been prone to do), I said out loud, “There’s no perfect house.” I named the defense, and in doing so, I allowed the grief to surface. Sometimes the grief is connected to a current circumstance, and sometimes it’s connected to the nameless grief that runs like an underground river through our human lives. After calling out the fantasy of perfection, I backtracked through my heart to find the source of the pain. Oh, yes, there it is. Breathe.

  I named; I breathed; I felt. And in the naming and feeling, the top-layer defenses simmered down into a purr of contentment, the place where all experiences and emotions live harmoniously. It’s not that I bypassed the pain and found happiness; rather, I made room for the pain at the tea table of my heart and, in doing so, reversed the habitual escape-hatch fantasy of some other perfect house that would lift me out of the pain of being human.

  Every time you name your defenses, you drop out of the head-space of anxiety and into the heart-space of the present moment. It’s in this space, and through these acts of taking responsibility and embracing life instead of avoiding it, that healing starts.

  The Timeline of Healing

  As we continue along this path, it’s important to name another obstacle that can interfere with healing anxiety: our expectations of the timeline of healing. In our linear, achievement-oriented culture — with a healthy dose of striving for perfection thrown in — we expect that once we read a book or commit to a practice, we will be healed within a few months. But healing doesn’t follow the timetable of the culture. It follows the timetable of the soul, which is circular, fluctuating, and mysterious.

  We learn and heal in ebbs and flows, spiraling around the center of ourselves where our true self dwells. When we’re in a cycle of growth, we burn through layers of ego fears and touch into that core place of wellness where peace and clarity reside. Our hearts are open and alive, and we can receive and give love with ease. This is the gold of being human, and how we long to live there always! But alas, inevitably, when our fear-based self, which often manifests as resistance, senses that we’re growing “too much” or learning “too quickly,” it bucks like a bull at a rodeo. And suddenly, it feels like we’re back at square one. Then we cycle into the ebb stage, and if we don’t have a context in which to understand the cycle of healing, the fear-mind can easily grab hold of these ebbs as evidence to support our current anxiety story.

  I often receive questions from course members and comments on my website on this topic of relapses or setbacks. However, I don’t see them as setbacks as much as times when the fear-based self steps in with greater passion to try to convince you that it’s not safe to grow. As I explained, this part of us fears growth because it fears for its life: each time we grow a layer closer to true self, the fear-based self dies a bit. And nobody wants to die — even the parts of our psyche that we can’t see or touch.

  Because we live in a linear culture, we expect growth to occur linearly. We step onto the healing path and expect the curve to progress upwardly, just like everything else in life (or so the culture teaches). While this may be the path that the culture entrains us to expect — first grade follows kindergarten; second grade follows first grade; baby must follow house purchase must follow marriage — it’s not actually how real life goes. In fact, if you look closely, very few things in life progress linearly. We move toward our partner and then we retreat. We feel in touch with a higher presence, in love with our spiritual path, and then doubt sets in. We think we’ve found our “calling” only to discover a few years into the job that we’re ready to do something else.

  When you go through a so-called relapse, as you inevitably will, remind yourself that you’re ready for the next layer of learning. Remember that apathy is also emptiness, and emptiness is what precedes growth: the stillness of winter, which looks like apathy in its “deadness,” is readying the earth for the aliveness of spring. If you can avoid the pitfall of using the emptiness/apathy/numbness as evidence that something about your external life is wrong and instead sit with the emptiness itself without assigning meaning to it, you will find your clarity once again. Clarity doesn’t always mean happiness, but it does mean self-responsibility. And that’s where our wellness dwells.

  4

  TRANSITIONS

  In other words, change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t “take.”

  WILLIAM BRIDGES

  Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes

  We can’t have a thorough discussion of anxiety without talking about transitions. While some people can go with the flow during life’s changes, most people experience change as a death experience, which leaves unfinished transitions carrying the seeds for future pain, especially if the grief around the transition wasn’t fully processed at the time. Change can be enormously disruptive. Therefore, an important step in healing our anxiety is to undergo transitions consciously and take steps toward repairing the effects of the unhealed transitions from the past.

  Transitions are ruptures in the soul, when the earth of our being opens up, and through the fissure, current and old pain emerge. Transitions are potent — full of potential in terms of what can arise. And in this potent state of groundlessness, we have a choice: to seal ourselves up more tightly and calcify the protective casing around the heart, or to yield to the soft feeling that, like a hand reaches up through the cracks, invites us to take hold and heal.

  Most people struggle to some degree through the major milestones in life — kindergarten, adolescence, graduating from high school and going away to college, graduating from college, starting a career, getting married, having a baby, buying a house. Those who are more sensitive, because they’re acutely aware of the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life punctuated by the fact that loss and death exist, feel the daily death-and-rebirth transitions more acutely than the average person. This means that transitions both small and large — dawn and dusk, anniversaries, the change of seasons, birthdays — need to be honored and acknowledged in order for well-being to exist. While in the midst of change, even if the change is toward something joyous and positive, like a wedding or moving into your dream house, it is normal and healthy to feel: sad, confused, angry, disoriented, scared, terrified, numb, lonely, or vulnerable.

  Most people lack basic information about transitions that can help them contextualize these emotions, make sense of them, and move through them effectively. Culturally, we focus on the externals of a transition — planning a wedding, buying the car seat, packing the boxes — to the exclusion of the inner realm. While the externals are important, when we bypass working consciously with the emotions activated during transitions, we decrease our chances of adjusting to the new life as gracefully as possible. This can have long-term, negative consequences not only during the transition at hand, but for our lives in general, and can lead to a buildup of anxiety.

  The Three Stages of Transition

  Every transition involves passing through three phases:

  Letting Go. During which we separate from the old life, grieve the losses, express and explore fears and expectations about the new life.

  In-Between or Liminal. During which we’re in the liminal (limbo) zone of transition — detached from the old life but not yet established in the new one — a highly uncomfortable place, characterized by feeling numb, disoriented, depressed, and out of control.

  Rebirth. During which we embrace the new life and identity and feel confident, comfortable, and excited about the possibilities of growth that a new beginning holds.

  Each day and year, everyone goes through multi
ple life changes that, with simple information and consciousness, could be transformed from anxiety-inducing and depleting events to life-affirming and transformational experiences. We habitually think of transitions as hard or negative, but most people fail to recognize that embedded in these predictable life-cycle occurrences are opportunities that invite us to spiral into our fears and grief so that we heal at deeper levels each time. Instead of powering through transitions as quickly as possible, we would benefit greatly by embracing them. (After all, we’re all in the transition of life, bookended by birth and death; it’s just that some transitions stand out in greater relief than others.) Life is ever changing, and when we approach transitions with the intention of growth, we eventually learn how to accept this truth with grace. And, most importantly, when you walk through a transition consciously, you’re given a potent opportunity to shed a layer of mindsets, beliefs, patterns, and habits that are contributing to your anxiety.

  The Transitions That the Culture Doesn’t Talk About

  Anxiety festers in the shame that is bred through unrealistic expectations and faulty information. When we respond to the cultural expectation that we shouldn’t feel the sadness inherent to the smaller losses in life — the micromoments that few people name and discuss — our inner fields are ready for sowing the seeds of self-doubt and shame. When voiced, this can sound like “Everyone seems so happy about this upcoming holiday weekend, but I feel dread and sadness, so I guess there’s something wrong with me,” or “I get a pit in my stomach every Sunday night, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about it, so I guess there’s something wrong with me.” When the statement “There’s something wrong with me” enters your inner dialogue, you’re just a few steps away from anxiety ensuing.

  As a culture, we desperately need more language about both the obvious and subtle breaking-and-renewing points in our lives. You need to know there will be times, like at the day’s end when you peer off the cliff of afternoon into the vast blue sea of twilight, when a great emptiness may arise. The tendency is to run from it — to find something or someone to take it away — but when you know that the emptiness is normal, and you have even a vague sense of why the sadness is there, you can more easily remember to sit and breathe through it until it passes through, and a great fullness is revealed. When we don’t know what to expect, we fall into our default modes, which are shame and anxiety.

  Let’s explore a few of these micromoments so that you can begin to notice and name the many emotions that may be stirred up around them. The first of these — the shifting of light to darkness, of summer to autumn — hits me square in the heart every year. If I don’t attend to it directly, it comes back around in the form of anxiety, but when I remember to meet life on life’s terms and sink into this annual yet subtle transition, I can continue on in the flow of life.

  Loss of Light

  Light fading, time passing, big boy is ten, baby isn’t a baby, and the time for having babies is over. I see the pregnant woman in the checkout line, and suddenly it’s eleven years ago, and I remember being pregnant with my own belly of hope and love, on the threshold of everything new and exciting. There was pain then, too, but now the joy and anticipation come flying to me from past to present — another layer of recognition that a stage of life is over. Oh, this life. Oh, the sensitive soul with the acute awareness of the passage of time and how it just keeps on marching on.

  Light fading, time passing, my birthday week. When the passing years are filled with more wisdom and equanimity, why does a birthday bring grief? It’s not the birthday itself; it’s the transition that a new age can only happen by letting go of the old. There’s a birth and a death. It’s the law of transitions, of every rite of passage. It’s the heart of my work, my deepest passion, and yet every year, I grieve the time change, the loss of an hour of light.

  “It’s a melancholic time,” my husband says. “And beautiful.” A strong strain of melancholy runs in his artist’s soul. He seems more welcoming of the loss of the light than I do. I find it no coincidence that I was born shortly after the time change. The Jungian analyst Marion Woodman says that we go through transitions much the same way as we come into the world (breach, late, C-section, natural). Perhaps it’s also true that our soul’s callings are connected to the season in which we were born. I know there are people who welcome the darkness, who feel at home in months that require insulation. I do, too, but it takes me a little while to get there.

  “It’s a time of loss,” my husband says, reminding me of everything I teach. It’s the time when old losses filter up to consciousness. The loss of his father. The loss of my grandmother. Her birthday week as well. I miss her. I sense her close now. I see her roses behind my eyelids. I feel the light of her smile when she greets me at the front door. I taste her chopped string beans and barbecue chicken and salad fresh from my grandfather’s garden. She was one of my angels, and is still.

  I listen to my clients and hear a sad chord of loss for many of them: a grandfather passing; a relationship that didn’t bloom; the memories of mothers and fathers that are no longer here. We hold hands through this birth canal, all of us tender human souls that must endure loss as part of our stay on this planet. For those of us who are attuned to transitions, a time change is a portal, and we’re squeezing ourselves through it, contorting uncomfortably to the rhythm.

  There is one accessible relief for the discomfort. It’s the medicine that nature-psyche-soul has given us for loss: grieving. What starts as emptiness as I watch the fading light turns into fullness once the tears drop like rain into my inner well. I cry and write and surrender to what is. There is no fighting nature; the seasons change, and time passes, and no matter what humans exert onto this great, beautiful planet, we will never change the laws of nature. She is teaching us, always, the perfection of her rhythms: that when we surrender and grieve — which means stopping long enough to allow the tears to rise up and release — we are offered an opportunity to tend to the sadness that lives in the heart. It’s so easy to run from it during the warm, active seasons of long daylight. These shorter days signal the beginning of the time to turn inward, to snuggle into the sacred and vulnerable places, and allow for the emptiness, the dormant time from which the new seeds for next spring’s rebirth will gestate. When we breathe into the darkness instead of running from it, we remember that there is nothing to fear. When we meet it, we transform emptiness into fullness and turn what could be a moment of anxiety into a moment of gold.

  Sunday Anxiety

  Sunday anxiety is a common experience that strikes many people who struggled with school as children or with work as adults. It’s the anxiety that hits when we know we have to show up on Monday for a life that currently triggers anxiety or causes us to recall past anxiety. Years ago, I worked with a client who struggled intensely with this particular anxiety. Instead of acknowledging it directly, she would project it onto the familiar screen of her partner’s face and listen to the well-worn song on the track of her psyche called “Not Enough.” She would analyze their day (Were we connected enough?), analyze his face (Cute enough?), and analyze herself (Am I enough?). Eventually she was able to recognize this as the hypervigilant part of herself: the part that was scanning the horizon, looking for lurking danger.

  As we talked it through, I encouraged her to give her hypervigilant Sunday anxiety a name — the name of someone who had accompanied her through decades of life. Now was the time to invite it out from the shadows and make it real so that it didn’t have to make a sideways appearance, demanding attention by banging on the back door and making a ruckus about her lovely husband. Once she had a name for it, I encouraged my client to make a preemptive strike. Instead of waiting for the anxiety to play the “Not Enough” song the next Sunday, invite it in through the front door for conversation. Then she could dialogue with it directly and ask what it was needing. With a loving parent at the helm of the dialogue, did they need to time travel back to those painful Sundays as a child, when
school was on the horizon? Did they need to sit on that single bed together, loving parent and young child, while the child told the adult her story and buried her head into an imaginary loving shoulder while she cried? When my client sought out her Sunday anxiety and engaged in a dialogue, she simmered the anxiety down to the core need — needing time and space to revisit past grief and loneliness — and the presenting projection disappeared.

  It takes courage to travel into these uncharted waters, which make themselves known in the liminal zone of Sunday evening. It takes courage to trust that you can handle what you find there. It takes courage to become your own friend, the one that can cradle your pain and seek comfort when the pain feels too big to handle alone.

  Morning Anxiety

  We’re all familiar with the term “morning sickness,” yet few people discuss another common malady that affects many of us: morning anxiety. My clients and course members who struggle with anxiety often describe waking up in the morning with knots in their stomach, unable to eat, dreading another day of facing their anxious mind. And the common question is: Why? Why does anxiety seem to hit hardest first thing in the morning?