The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  I guided this client through the steps of breaking free from intrusive thoughts (see “Practice: Four Steps for Dismantling Intrusive Thoughts” in chapter 9):

  “The first step is to name that thought as intrusive. Once you name it, you’ve created a space between you and the thought. You need to say something like, ‘This is my escape-hatch fantasy. It’s not my truth even though it feels like my truth in this moment. I am addicted to this escape fantasy because I don’t want to feel the messiness of being human.’ And remind yourself over and over again that we can’t escape the messiness of being human.”

  “What am I trying to escape?” my client asked.

  “Your feelings. Not the feelings that are attached to your intrusive thought and that you project onto your husband, but your core, fundamental feelings of being human: loneliness, boredom, emptiness.” (We had discussed earlier in the session how she was feeling bored and empty in her life lately.)

  “So all the mental torture is because I don’t want to let myself feel that one moment of boredom?” she asked, with more than a little skepticism in her voice.

  “Amazingly, yes. It’s harder than we think to let ourselves feel that moment of boredom or emptiness without wanting to escape. When we really let ourselves feel it, it’s a death moment. It doesn’t last, of course, and the more we practice breathing into our painful moments, the easier they become. But we really have to train ourselves to do that, because it’s human habit and cultural conditioning to run from those moments. And there are a million ways to run these days. So the question really is: Am I willing to experience the messiness of being human?”

  The practice is to name, over and over again, the anxious thoughts, then slow down and rewind until you arrive at the original emotion you were trying to escape from. As my client said, it’s hard to believe that a micromoment of boredom could lead to a hamster wheel of intrusive thoughts. But when you remember how deeply conditioned we are to run from emotional pain, it makes sense. The wound of anxiety leads us into the realm of the heart, where we have an opportunity to evolve our emotional consciousness, not only for ourselves but for the culture at large. Every moment you can meet your difficult feelings with kindness is a moment of peace.

  Loneliness

  Loneliness is another fundamental human emotion that tends to get sidelined by our various addictions (including mental addictions like intrusive thoughts). Because we don’t learn that we can tolerate loneliness, we develop a habit in our neural pathway system that hijacks the discomfort the moment it arrives. In fact, we’re so averse to loneliness that most people don’t even know when they’re feeling it or that it’s normal to feel it. As a blog reader once commented on one of my posts about loneliness: “This is a bit of an aha post for me. I’ve always thought of loneliness, boredom, and emptiness as pathologies. Maybe because I have felt them more than most people. My heart always sinks when people say: ‘Well, I’ve not really felt that lonely.’ So I think: It is only me?”

  It’s not only you. In fact, it isn’t possible to live in this culture without feeling lonely, yet because of our cultural obsession with putting on a happy face, this is yet another taboo topic that nobody discusses. Let’s sink into it now.

  There’s a fundamental loneliness that is part of the fabric of being human. It arrives in the corners of night, when shadows form from curtain folds and the backs of chairs. It seeps in just before twilight, when afternoon exhales its last breath, and evening hasn’t yet inhaled. It lives on the edges of exaltation, in the space between the golden hour when the gods breathe their jeweled breath over meadows, and in the splintered crack just before night’s multicolored ink begins to sink into dreams.

  There are acute times when loneliness appears. Holidays, transitional ebbs in the day or week, birthdays. This is often when the shame stories bleed into loneliness and tell you things like “Everyone else is having fun right now. Everyone else has a family and is off on an adventure, and I’m alone.” Or, “I’m not alone — I’m with my family or my partner — and I still feel lonely.” Loneliness is the twin sister to grief, and they often arrive at your doorstep, holding hands. When you breathe deeply enough into the loneliness, the dam that has been holding back your grief breaks, and the water comes pouring out on the rivers of memory. First heartbreak. Parents’ divorce long ago. A friendship that came to the end of a road.

  But loneliness often arrives first, standing with a bouquet of wilted flowers, asking only one thing: to be invited inside. Loneliness arrives like a hollow place in the tree of body, the empty space where diaphragm and stomach meet. Loneliness is the space without breath. Loneliness is the time you cried alone on your bed, and nobody came to comfort you.

  There was a time when you were as close to oneness as you could be with another human being, when you grew inside your mother’s belly, eating what she ate, smelling what she smelled, moving as she moved. But even then, there was an amniotic sac that surrounded you and created a definable boundary between baby and mother. There is still a sac. We can no longer see it, but this white slippery sac of separateness surrounds us still. We are meant to feel lonely. It’s part of the definition of being human.

  It’s important to know this so that we don’t fall into traps of thinking it should be otherwise. The culture sends us both overt and covert messages that it should be otherwise; that if you lose weight or live in this house or have this baby with this partner, you will be immunized against loneliness. It isn’t so.

  There isn’t a partner in the world that can protect you against loneliness. That’s not the function of love.

  There isn’t a friend in the world that can protect you against loneliness. That’s not the reason for friendship.

  There isn’t a child in the world that can protect you from loneliness. That’s not the purpose of being a parent.

  There is only one antidote to loneliness: to befriend it. When we make friends with loneliness — shedding the belief that we’re not supposed to feel it and shattering the fantasy that other people with their families and friends are immune to it — we welcome it in through the front door. We greet loneliness as we would any other feeling state and become curious about its stories. “Loneliness,” we might say, “tell me about yourself. What color are you? What shape are you? What stories from my past live in the strands of yarn that compose your tattered blankets?”

  Once you invite loneliness inside, it changes tenor. This is the paradox of loneliness: when we befriend it, it shape-shifts. It’s still there, in the pocket of your body, but it loses its spike. Once you invite loneliness over the threshold, it softens, like an angry child taken into a mother’s warm arms. Curiosity is the potion that shifts it, and creativity is the medicine that sends it into channels of light.

  On the other side of loneliness is solitude. When you sink into loneliness without fighting it, solitude will reach for your hand and invite you into endless conversation, leading you down the grassy pathways and dimly lit cobblestone streets that make up the labyrinth of your soul. In this place, there is no more loneliness. You no longer long for someone to sit beside you on the bench, because you are in the timeless place where creativity and imagination enrapture you in their ways. Once you have surrendered, you find that you could stay there for a very long time. And you discover that with a full cup, you see your life and your partner and your child and your friends through a very different lens. They are no longer here to fill you up but are vessels into which you can pour your light. The fullness of self leads to the fullness of love. We walk through the doorways that scare us, and we find ourselves waiting with a bouquet of brilliant flowers on the other side.

  11

  LONGING

  Where the lips are silent the heart has a thousand tongues.

  RUMI

  The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

  Longing, like anxiety, is a messenger, and because it’s so often misunderstood and taken at face value, it deserves its own chapter. We ty
pically feel longing like an ache for more — more money, more children, more excitement, more connection — and if we read the “more” at the surface level, we miss the wisdom of the longing. Longing is a signal pointing to unmet needs, unshed grief, and unlived dreams and, as such, is an invitation to deepen our relationship to each of the four realms of self. Longing, like anxiety, pulls us toward wholeness. When we place longing on our radar and stop taking it at face value, we can begin to decipher its messages. In order to do this, we must learn to discern between root longing and secondary longing.

  Root Versus Secondary Longing

  Longing, like anxiety, is rarely talked about and profoundly misunderstood, and when it is discussed it is almost exclusively in the context of sex and unrequited love. Because of our cultural obsession with romantic love (see chapter 15), the moment longing tinges the heart, we assume it has to do with love. Yet the longings that clients bring to sessions tell a very different, and much more interesting, story. They share:

  •I long for a baby.

  •I long for a partner.

  •I long for my mother.

  •I long for my father.

  •I long for the parents I never had.

  •I long for my childhood.

  •I long for a house.

  •I long for community.

  •I long for a best friend.

  •I long for God (or spirit, connection to something higher, whatever term works for you).

  •I long for a different climate.

  •I long for a different city.

  •I long to be single.

  •I long to feel alive.

  •I long to feel in love.

  •I long to feel desire.

  What composes the hymn of longing? What notes make up the sonata that stirs the soul like a great piece of music, rising up from the depths of self, commanding our attention until we listen intently?

  Until we decipher its code and learn its language, how to meet the longing remains a mystery, and we often confuse root longing with secondary longing. Root longing calls our attention to a whole and real need inside that, when met, can point us toward a new direction or experience in life. Secondary longing contains whispers of a root longing that must be deciphered so that we don’t follow signs that point us in a misguided direction.

  For example, the longing for spirit is a root longing. When we feel that longing, there’s nothing to decipher or decode; we must simply listen and learn how to bring more of a connection to spirit into our lives. When my clients sit in church and describe the longing that arises as they listen to the music and gather in community, that’s a healthy, root longing that says, “This feeds my soul. I need more of this. Listen.”

  The longing for father, on the other hand, is primarily a secondary longing. If you didn’t grow up with a healthy, loving father figure, the longing for one often arises during adulthood. This longing, when unexamined, can then lead a woman to seek relationships with older men as a way to try to fulfill the absence. This never works and only leads to more longing. To break apart this secondary longing is to arrive at the core longing, which can contain a longing for spirit, and also a longing for one’s own clear, masculine, inner father — the part of you that can make decisions, set boundaries, and execute plans in the world.

  The same is true with the longing for mother. Many people who were raised by a narcissistic mother suffer from a mother wound, which leads them to seek false mother figures or project their unworked feelings about this primal relationship onto their partner. When we break apart the longing and examine the wound at its core, we find grief at the center: the grief of not having had a mother who knew how to put your needs first. This needs attention. Then there is the invitation to create a sustaining, daily relationship with both the Great Mother, through nature and active imagination, and with one’s own inner mother: the part of you that tends to yourself with compassion and gentleness. If you only follow the original longing, you miss the deeper underpinnings that can guide you toward healing and growth.

  We can deconstruct the list of longings at the beginning of this chapter in the same manner. Some of the longings — like the longing for a baby — contain both a root longing and a secondary longing. When a woman longs for a baby, we must take it at face value, because becoming a mother is one of the most primal needs for many women. But when conception doesn’t occur quickly, she’s then asked to deconstruct this immense longing into its disparate elements. There, she often finds a longing for her own wholeness and a need to connect to the fertility of being a fully creative woman that extends beyond conception.

  If we are to be love-warriors, we must find the courage to meet all our emotions with tenderness and curiosity, understanding that they originate inside us and, thus, can be resolved inside of us. The culturally conditioned habit is to jump ship when longing arises and fall prey to the belief that the answers lie “out there.” The love-warrior stays the course and turns inward to discover the true source of longing.

  There is wisdom in longing, a message from the underworld of psyche that longs to be known. If we take longing at face value, we often find ourselves on a wild goose chase punctuated by increasing anxiety that culminates in despair. But when we learn to read the impulses from psyche as messages from the underworld and avail ourselves of the archetype of Persephone, the goddess who goes between the worlds of seen and unseen, we become our own wise woman or wise man, our own oracle that can divine our paths without needing to seek answers from other so-called experts. For contained in the messages of longing, like anxiety and intrusive thoughts, are pearls of wisdom that, when deciphered, can lead us onto our own empowered path, where we deeply know what we need to know, and where we uncover the ungrieved loss and unlived lives that need our attention.

  The Lives We Will Never Live

  We only live one life, and we make choices along the way that, by the very definition of making one choice, exclude and shut the door to other choices. The roads not taken and the lives not lived need attention, otherwise they collect layers of dust in the warehouse of psyche and make themselves known through the great sneeze of anxiety and its symptoms.

  This truth was punctuated for me one day, many years ago, when I was leaving my son’s wheel-throwing class and I struck up a conversation with one of the other moms. She had two daughters who attended the class, and I asked the basic questions such as, “How old are they? Where do you live?” The girls went to retrieve their coats from the cubbyholes, and there was something about the way they joked with each other that sent a small, almost imperceptible pang of longing through me. I could have easily brushed it aside. But I didn’t. As soon as we walked into the icy air and crunched our boots into the snow, the thought appeared in my mind, “I’ll never raise sisters.”

  It wasn’t the first time this longing had appeared. When we learned that our second baby was a boy, I celebrated and grieved. I had always imagined that I would have a daughter, so after our first son was born, I still held out hope that our second would be a girl. But he wasn’t, and as I lay in bed that day after receiving the test results that revealed the sex of our unborn baby, I lay also with the awareness that I would never raise a daughter. I don’t remember crying. I do remember rolling around the phrase, “I’m the mother of sons” in my mind and trying to adjust. But I have cried since then, knowing that it’s through the grieving that acceptance arrives.

  Needing to attend to my kids after the pottery class, I filed the longing away under L in the Rolodex of my soul and trusted that, in a slowed-down moment, it would resurface to receive the attention it needed.

  Later that evening, I felt it bubble back up, and my ego-mind stumbled for a moment on a quick and fruitless litany of what-ifs — “What if I had made a different choice here or there?”— as a way to avoid the rawness of the longing. This was my small mind’s obviously futile attempt to control the past and avoid the vulnerable and unpredictable realm of feeling by keeping me trapped in the
thatched pattern of thoughts that dead-ends in a chain-link fence. I stayed there for less than a second before I opened the fence and walked into the field of feelings, letting myself sink down, go in, shift out of my head, and breathe into my heart.

  Then the grief flowed through. In an instant, I knew it wasn’t only the grief of not being able to experience what it’s like to raise a girl or sisters but also the grief about not having a third child. We had decided to close the door at two, and while the choice was loving for our family, there was still a pain that pricked my heart every so often. And there it was, making its way up the riverways of sweet grief that bent and curved from heart to soul to eyes. The surrender to pure pain is always sweet. We fight it, the engrained habits of another era or another stage creating resistance to the pain, but once the fortress falls away, there’s a smile attached to the tears. Sweet release, sweet opening inside, sweet tears clearing out the pain and transforming the longing into gratitude.

  It’s easy to fall prey to the belief that longing necessitates action: If I occasionally long for a third child, it means I have to have a third child. Or if I long for a daughter, it means I have to have a daughter. Part of the growth process involves being able to hold a feeling without immediately resolving it, trusting that resolution occurs with no action other than conscious holding and tending to the feelings. We also mistakenly conclude that every feeling that passes through our field of consciousness is an unarguable and blanket truth. We don’t understand that we can feel longing without it being the final truth. In other words, I can sporadically long for a daughter, but my deeper truth is that two children — these two boys — complete our family.