The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  When I tell this story, my clients will often say something like, “I would have been shamed if I had expressed pain about roadkill. Even if it wasn’t explicit shame, the covert message was to get over it, and that there was something wrong with me for feeling so deeply. I can see how I still give myself this same message: that my pain is too much or too big, which causes me to shame myself, and then I don’t make time to listen to it and feel it.”

  I then talk about guiding our kids through their grief, to which my clients often respond with, “I didn’t have anyone to guide me through my grief.” Nobody did. We are an emotionally illiterate culture. We focus on facts and left-brained information, on achievement and outcome, and completely ignore the value of feeling our feelings. The guidance isn’t difficult, but it would have required having parents who weren’t afraid of their own pain, and parents before them who weren’t afraid of their pain. And so on, back through the generations, following the ancestral line of well-meaning people who were taught to deny their softest, most vulnerable selves. We, in this generation, are experiencing a rise in emotional consciousness, which allows us to raise more emotionally intelligent kids. And the shift must begin with you and your willingness to soften into your grief places where you can meet your pain with love.

  Early and Ancient Pain

  There is a room in your heart where sadness dwells. Each story of sadness lives there like a stagnant, frozen particle of light waiting for you to see it, to hold it, to wrap it in a blanket, and bring it tea. When you visit your grief place with love, the particles of light start to shimmer and move — dance, even — for all things, even our pain, especially our pain, want to be seen and loved.

  This pain has been with you for a long time. There may be pain from a time before you had words or clear memories: the pain of the newborn being ripped from the womb; the pain of a baby trying to latch on to the breast taken away too early; the pain of a three-year-old being left before she was ready to be left; the pain of not being held when you needed to be held, or being held too much or in the wrong way; the pain of teasing and taunting and bullying; the pain of first love; the pain of a broken heart.

  There may likely be sadness in your grief place that is yours but isn’t yours: the intergenerational, unlived pain of those who came before you and who didn’t bring warm blankets and cups of tea to their grief. Carl Jung wrote that we live the unlived lives of our parents and grandparents, that their pain and fear and anxiety that didn’t receive attention funnels down through the generations and lands in the heart of the most sensitive child. That child is probably you. You can receive this as a burden, or you can hear it as the gift of being able to bring consciousness to pain and witness the miracles and openings that result from that loving attention. If every dancing particle of pain can be transformed into poetry or art or tears or a growing spot of compassion for others, then every particle is a gift.

  How we fear grief. But there is really nothing to fear. When my sons cry so hard they lose their breath, and I can see them trying to get away from their pain, I hold them close and whisper in their ear, “It’s okay to feel sad. It’s only energy. It will pass through you. I’ve got you. I’m here.” When rewiring the inner pathways from avoiding pain to moving toward it, I often invite my clients to place a hand on their heart and say out loud, “I want to feel my feelings. I’m ready to feel my feelings. It’s safe to feel my feelings.” This sends the message that you’re ready to reverse the lifetime habit of avoiding pain. You can then speak to yourself the way you might speak to a child: “I’m here. I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

  When you do stop and make time to open to another rhythm, you can enter the grief place. And then particles thaw out and they shimmer with light. And we realize then, when we’ve cried a small river of wordless tears, when we wake up the next morning and feel a ray of sun in the soul after the storm, when there’s a lightness to our step, that the grief place is also the joy place. We know then that grief and joy live in the same chamber of the heart. We know grief is not something to be feared, but that it is the pathway to the peace we all seek.

  PRACTICEMEMORIES AND BELIEFS ABOUT PAIN

  The first, and most essential, step to feeling the difficult feelings that live in the heart is to make time for them. Grief is like an animal that has been encroached upon by human domination: vulnerable, shy, afraid of the pace and sound of our fast and loud life. In order to make contact, we need to approach slowly and gently with a true desire to listen and learn.

  The minute you consider slowing down, a litany of reasons may arise about why that’s impossible. This is resistance at work, and it must be named and called to the mat if you’re going to move forward with your healing. Notice if any of the following sound familiar.

  •I don’t have time.

  •I should be there for others first.

  •Feelings aren’t important enough (I’m not important enough).

  •It’s self-centered to take time for myself and for inner work.

  •I should be able to handle everything; I shouldn’t need downtime or “being” time.

  Remember: if you refuse to make time for your deepest self to emerge, the self makes itself known in other ways. This is when you find yourself trapped by intrusive thoughts, anxiety, or burnout. You go and do and achieve and burn the candle at both ends, and eventually you collapse. It’s not a sustainable model. And then you’re no good to anyone.

  When you’re ready to slow down, find a quiet space when you have a wide swath of time, and reflect on your first memory of shutting down your pain. This might be when someone shamed you for crying, with words like, “Get over it.” It might be when you were left alone to cry. It might be when your parents divorced and nobody made time for your grief. Allow yourself to time travel back to that experience with your loving inner parent traveling with you. Describe the experience in detail in your journal. Identify the messages that you received about pain.

  Now see your loving inner parent holding that young you and listen to what she says. What did you want a grown-up to say or do in that moment of deep pain? Whatever it is, see your loving inner parent doing and saying that now. This is how we re-parent our scared, sad selves. This is how we heal anxiety at the root.

  How Unshed Grief Morphs into Anxiety

  For years, I dreamed every spring that I was with my grandparents or grieving the loss of them, and I would wake up with the weight of unshed and unarticulated grief sinking my bones. If I didn’t have a spacious morning, I couldn’t drop into the dream, and would instead jump into the tasks of the day: snuggling my little ones, washing the cat bowl and filling it with fresh food as I noticed the snow or sun on our yard, making breakfast. The sounds and movements of the day began, and the dream was lost in the ether of that other realm.

  But the dream wasn’t lost at all. It lived beneath the surface, swimming in the current of psyche that had no words, in a slow, quiet world of grief and heartache, loss and longing. But the dream didn’t disappear simply because I chose not to carve out time for it. Instead, it created a pane of glass between me and my loved ones. It closed the petals of my heart. It sat, waiting like a child that needed attention. If I failed to notice, it would make itself known in other ways, like morphing into anxiety.

  On one of these mornings several years ago, I found myself overfocusing on the fact that Asher, then five, had been tugging on his ear a lot. We knew that he had a buildup of wax, but my grief-laden heart turned anxious mind created a story that morning that he had a swollen lymph node that was the precursor to child leukemia. I had enough presence of mind to resist the dreaded Googling, but I left for my yoga class with the anxious thought that something was terribly wrong. Before I walked out the door, I whispered my worries to my husband, who looked at me like I was crazy. We had just had Asher’s well-visit checkup, and we knew everything was fine. But my anxious mind didn’t agree.

  Once at yoga, I stepped onto my mat and breathed. I scanned my bo
dy and became aware of the anxiety, aware of my closed heart, aware of the lack of clarity and joy that normally resided in my soul when the channels were unimpeded by unshed feelings. “Is something awry with work? My marriage? My kids? Am I feeling the challenge of Asher’s frequent emotional outbursts? That must be it. No. Doesn’t fit; it came from my head.” I kept breathing, kept moving, kept sweating.

  And then I see her: my grandmother, pruning her prized roses, standing in the dirt on the rise in the backyard of their Santa Monica home, which my grandfather built. The majority of the garden is my grandfather’s domain and comes alive with dozens of fruits and vegetables year-round, but the roses are hers. I’m twenty-one. I’ve just graduated from college. She’s teaching me about the roses, showing me where to cut. “Just below the third thorn,” she says. She picks a yellow one and two baby pink ones. She gives one to me. We’re happy.

  Ten years later, I’m standing at those same roses, but she’s no longer with me. I’m at her memorial. The backyard is overflowing with their friends and family. I feel like a part of me has been removed, never to return: a petal of my heart that held our love.

  The pain lives in my hips, in the spaces between my vertebrae, in my breath. It emerges when I slow down enough to release the memories from my body, where they rise up like apparitions waiting to be seen. She had surgery in March 2003, a procedure that we thought would prolong her life for several more years. My first words to her when she woke up were, “You’re going to meet your first great-grandchild!” for nothing would have brought her more joy. She went back into the hospital the night before Passover, and we had the meal without her. It was a quiet meal; my grandfather, normally chatty and jovial at family events, sat slumped in his chair and didn’t utter a word. Three weeks later, on April 22, my husband and I were awakened by the phone call that announced her death. I screamed into the pillow and cried from a pain I had never known.

  The body remembers, which is why the memories begin in dreams every spring. It always takes me a few days to realize what’s happening, and if I don’t bring consciousness to the grief and allow myself to cry through another layer of loss, the grief morphs into anxiety or irritation. But as soon as the floodgates open and I allow the tears to wash my soul clean and connect me to the great love I have for my grandmother, the anxiety and irritation dissipate.

  I returned home from yoga that day and hugged my kids with an open heart. And, with complete clarity, I knew that Asher was fine.

  Turn to Face Your Fear

  Grief and sadness aren’t the only things we avoid. We run from any uncomfortable feeling, including fear, which can also morph into anxiety. In fact, we can spend our entire lives running from fear. We run from the bear chasing us in the dream. We run from the vague sense of discomfort that seems to follow us on a day spent alone, in silence, away from the distractions of crowds and noise. We run from the things that scare us most, be they flying, public speaking, or intimate relationships.

  It’s natural to run from fear. It’s pure instinct to run from the wild animals and places that lurk in the underbrush of consciousness. We could say it’s the most primal instinct of all for species to hide or run in the face of fear. But, interestingly, one of the paths to emotional freedom is facing the inner landscapes that scare us most.

  Several years ago, when I attended a dream workshop with dream worker Jeremy Taylor, one of the most fascinating elements discussed was how our unconscious — through the gift of our dream life — invites us to turn and face our fears. One woman shared an archetypal dream about a bear chasing her. The group, most of whom were well-versed in dream work, encouraged her to engage in an active imagination dialogue with the bear and ask it what it wanted. “What is it that you want to share with me?” or “How can I help you?” are important questions to ask the “scary” figures in our dreams. Although paradoxical to the ego, the theory here is that when we stop running from the figures and instead turn to face them, we realize that they are actually here to help us.

  Jeremy Taylor shares a fascinating dream in his book The Wisdom of Your Dreams that illustrates this point quite poignantly. In a recurring dream, a man is being chased by a fiery dragon, and in a moment of lucidity he turns around and demands to know why the dragon is terrorizing him. The dragon telepathically responds, “I am your smoking addiction!” Taylor shares the dreamer’s description:

  In that moment of lucid realization, the dragon suddenly seems to change. It doesn’t really look any different, but its “expression” seems to change. It begins to look winsome, almost charming —“Puff, the magic dragon” — more like a big, old familiar, friendly family dog than a menacing, deadly fire-breather.

  My lucidity allows me to look even more closely at the “transformed” monster, and I see clearly that there is a nasty, sticky brown slime covering its entire body, and that noxious smoke is oozing and sputtering from every orifice, even from around its eyes, and from under and between its scales. I smell this awful, rancid, repulsive odor coming from it. My revulsion returns, and in the dream, I look at it and say with all my heart, “Get away from me! I no longer want you in my life!”

  When he awakened, Alex was amazed to discover that he no longer craved the sensation of smoke in his lungs. Perhaps even more important, the desire for the instant and reliable “companionship” that smoking had always given him was also gone. He has not smoked since the dream.

  This story leads us to ask the question: Is our fear, like anxiety, actually a helper in disguise? If you’ve ever turned to face your fear, you know that it’s often by riding directly into the middle of the fear-storm that we grow the most; that, in fact, when we walk through fear, we often have a direct, felt sense of the divine. Since we are no longer sent into the middle of the forest alone for a vision quest, I imagine that fear, and especially panic, are the modern spiritual warrior’s training grounds. This means that every moment of fear — especially our greatest fears — provides an opportunity to heighten our capacity to love. This means that every time we can walk through the portal of fear or panic, we discover our true self on the other side.

  Fundamental Human Feelings: Boredom and Loneliness

  Boredom

  Several times a week my kids will say to me, “I’m bored.”

  My response is always the same: “Good.”

  “Why is that good?” they ask.

  “Because boredom is a part of life, like loneliness, sadness, happiness, excitement, frustration, and disappointment. And when you let yourself feel bored, something new will arise.”

  With the proliferation of technology that fills every empty or bored moment with stimulation, our ability to tolerate boredom is a dying skill. Like letter writing and reading actual books (as opposed to digital books), it’s a skill that I seek to impart to my kids so that they grow up without needing to fill the boredom with technology (or the variety of stimulants that will be available to them as adults: food, alcohol, drugs, spending money, sex).

  Without fail, when I don’t rush to cure their boredom and instead let them sit with it for a while, they find something creative to do. I remember one particular time when my younger son was lying on his bed, looking at a fairy house that he had purchased with his birthday money a couple of months before. He said something about how boring it was. It was a lovely, ceramic piece with beautiful colors and interesting designs, but it didn’t “do” anything flashy; that wasn’t the point. The point was to engage with a piece of art and, perhaps, allow it to lead to imaginary play. I didn’t say much in response to his comment. Instead, I quietly engaged in my own activity while peering up occasionally to watch him move from boredom to curiosity about the fairy house. He tapped it and turned it. He held it and touched it. I had no idea what was going through his eight-year-old head; it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was crossing the bridge from boredom to engagement on his own. A piece of learning that he could tolerate boredom was dropping into the puzzle of his psyche. Within twent
y minutes his focus had shifted, and he shared what was going through his mind while he was playing with the fairy house: “Mommy, the fairy house is hollow so they could have made the door open. That would have made it more fun. Why are the windows tinted? I like lying down while I hold it on my chest, because I pretend that I’m tiny and this is my fairy house. Ding-dong. Is anyone home? Hello!”

  It was the stream of consciousness of a mind free enough to wander through the fields of an imaginary world. It was a mind unfettered by technology, and a soul with enough empty space to dream. It was a heart that hadn’t been hardened over by the onslaught of insults and meanness that populate most popular media. His statement showed who we all are underneath the defenses, the intrusive thoughts, the worry, the rumination: our own inner child who is waiting to be set free.

  As we talked about in the previous chapter, because we weren’t taught how to sit with these uncomfortable states, we learned to travel up to the mind. Here’s an example from a client of how the raw feeling of boredom mutates into an intrusive thought: “At least a dozen times a day I have the thought, I want a different life. By different I mean not with my husband but with some fantasy guy that will make me feel alive and worthy.”

  “How do you respond to that thought?”

  “I usually try to douse it with some truth-water and say something like, ‘Yes, that’s your old single self that needs to grieve. And it’s okay to feel jealous and want a different life.’”

  “How’s that response working?”

  “It’s not.”

  At this point, I remind my client that she’s already grieved the single life plenty of times. If this was the first time I was speaking with her, I would say, “Yes, do your grief work. Write the letters to your single self and ritualize them in some way (burn, rip, dissolve).” But this client has gone down that road a hundred times. Now it’s time to go deeper, which means she doesn’t need to meet the thought at the level of thoughts. After we splash the thought with cooling cognitive truth, the problems of our thoughts taking over can’t be met with more thoughts. We must go deeper.