by Sheryl Paul
When you attend to the four realms, you will notice something fascinating: the more you release and refill in healthy ways, the more a space opens up inside. If you don’t understand the process of healing, you can easily become alarmed by this space, which can then activate a new round of anxiety. On the other hand, when you understand that healing, like nature, follows a cycle, you can make room for the rebirth that invariably arises on the other side of loss. But first you have to walk through the empty space, the liminal zone that occupies the second stage of all transitions.
Anxiety and Emptiness
There’s a natural and predictable pattern that people experience when healing from anxiety. The following comment on one of my blog posts is a sentiment I often hear:
Sheryl, could you please blog about the “space” that anxiety occupies? This is exactly what I’m feeling right now. There’s nothing wrong; I have nothing to be anxious about. Yet there’s this sadness and empty feeling. I know it needs my attention, but I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.
Anxiety, like all emotions, is energy. Energy takes up space in your mind and body. When you attend to the anxiety, and it begins to fall away, the space that anxiety previously occupied opens up. What’s often left is emptiness, and if you don’t fill the emptiness with the next obsessive thought or action, you will notice one or both of the following.
•You’ll open a space for clarity and spiritual direction to enter, and/or
•the underlying feelings that you’ve been covering up your entire life will emerge.
Guided by a culture that encourages them to stay busy and fill up empty time and space, when most people encounter emptiness, they rush to try to figure out what’s wrong, and then they usually fill it back up again with the endless chatter of thoughts. Instead of pouring thought into the empty space, I encourage you to simply sit with it, to make a place for the emptiness; instead of resisting the quiet space, resist the cultural belief that says that there’s something wrong with emptiness.
Remember that in the three-stage process of transitions — letting go, liminal, rebirth — emptiness is the defining quality of the liminal zone. So it often happens for people who find my work that after they’ve worked through the initial layers of anxiety and learn that they’re not alone, the space opens up for wisdom and pain to enter. And, yes, those two experiences — wisdom and pain — are cousins in the inner world of psyche.
The truth is that it’s only when we work through the static creating layers of anxiety and arrive at emptiness that we can begin to find our clarity. The emptiness is an essential stage. As Rabbi Tirzah Firestone writes in With Roots in Heaven:
Sometimes the more powerful response is disengagement, to simply stop trying to appease this dark angel, to stop wrestling — reacting, proving, defending our worth — and sit still. By not reacting to our inner beasts, neither fighting nor trying to disprove them, we create an empty space in ourselves. This empty space of nonaction is critical on the spiritual path. Just as water requires an empty container in which to be collected, so the Self requires an empty space in us in to which to pour its guidance.
When you find yourself on this threshold where the anxiety has quieted and you’re left with the emptiness, allow it to be there. If you stop moving and stop searching and find stillness, you’ll touch into what wants to be known. You’ll grieve, yes. You’ll cry out in old pain. You’ll find yourself raw and vulnerable. You’ll open to wisdom. You’ll find clarity. You’ll feel joy. It begins with the willingness to keep your heart open and experience whatever has been living beneath the anxiety.
Real life isn’t a Hollywood movie; it isn’t a two-hour, Technicolor, larger-than-life adventure where every edited moment is alive and exciting. Real life isn’t People magazine; it isn’t a glossy paper anthology with airbrushed photographs adorning the pages. Real life isn’t Facebook, a newsreel of snapshots like a window into the highlights of someone else’s life. There are moments — seasons even — of emptiness. We don’t capture those on film, because they’re not very interesting to look at from the outside. But from the inside, if you stop and stay still, you’ll find your own inner world, which has been waiting to be known and which is more exciting, real, and interesting than any Hollywood adventure. And if you stay still long enough and continue with your inner work, you’ll discover the fruits of your labor.
The Fruits of the Labor
From the emptiness we move toward the next stage of growth, which is the new birth that arises from mining the gems of healing and bringing them into the world in some way. By “into the world” I don’t mean in a grand way. I mean in any way that calls you: bringing more compassion to your children (because you’ve learned to be compassionate with yourself first), bringing more kindness to the earth (because you’ve learned that you deserve kindness), or following a lifelong dream.
We heal not only for ourselves. It’s a starting point, yes, and a very important one, but ultimately, this inner healing naturally ripples outward. The world needs you to do this work. Sometimes when resistance is high and the ego insists on not budging (for example, when a client is having trouble committing to the daily tools required to lead to change), I’ll say, “If you can’t do it for you, can you do it for your children or your future children?” Extending ourselves for the benefit of another and to stop intergenerational patterns can often inspire people to find the courage to commit to their inner work.
Healing is not navel-gazing. It’s not selfish, luxurious, or something “extra” that we do. It’s central and essential. It’s what our world needs, and it needs it now. It needs each and every one of you to reach into the depths of your soul and find the strength, courage, and commitment to take full responsibility for your pain, learn to work with your thoughts and tend to your feelings, stop waiting for someone else to do it for you or rescue you, and instead step into the power of your path. It’s not your mother’s job or your father’s job to fix your pain. It’s not your partner’s job to fan the fire of your soul and make you feel alive. It’s not your friend’s job to hold your pain for you. It’s your job and yours alone. And the time is now.
PART THREE
RELATIONSHIPS
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity — in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Gift from the Sea
14
THE VULNERABILITY OF CONNECTION
We pretend we aren’t vulnerable, but this is an illusion. We are incarnated in a delicate body, intertwined in the community of life. Our senses have evolved to be exquisitely tuned to the ever-changing world of pleasure and pain, sweet and sour, gain and loss. Love and freedom invite us to turn toward the world. They offer the gifts of a flexible heart, wide enough to embrace experience, vulnerable yet centered.
JACK KORNFIELD
Nowhere does anxiety show up with more intensity and confusion than in our intimate relationships: with friends, colleagues, relatives, and most prominently with partners and children. For if anxiety is often a protector against vulnerable feelings — and nowhere are we more vulnerable than in our relationships — it makes sense that anxiety would have a field day where the heart is most at risk for loss. This is when it’s essential to understand the workings of anxiety and decode its message so that we don’t become lost in its top-layer manifestations, closing ourselves off from the one thing we crave, need, and long for more than anything else in this world: love.
The vuln
erability of loving becomes illuminated in those moments when fear falls away and we gain a clear glimpse into the center of our heart. One of these poignant moments occurred one night many years ago when, through a rare turn of events as a mother of two young children, I was able to attend an evening yoga class with my favorite teacher. The class started at 5:30 p.m., so at 5:00 p.m. I gathered my things, kissed everyone good-bye, and drove into the darkening evening. As I parked, then walked to class, I marveled at the novelty of being out at night: the bare-leaved trees on the Twenty Ninth Street mall adorned with winter lights; couples on first dates strolling on the idyllic promenade; the Rocky Mountains jutting up in the dark blue light behind them; young parents toting their baby from a restaurant to the car, beaming at their little treasure. It had been a long time since I was out at night on my own, and I felt like an alien visiting from another planet, thoroughly enjoying earthly sights.
The class was beautiful. My teacher channeled wisdom, and my body half heard him as I breathed into the poses and allowed his words to trickle in and reverberate on a nonverbal level. Sometimes a phrase would catch my breath like, “We must meet our egos with kindness, as it’s not something we can get rid of. The ego is the part of us that must travel on this earth, and because it knows that it cannot accompany us beyond the line of mortality, it holds a sadness. We must meet this sadness with compassion.” His words traveled directly to my heart, where I thought first about my then eight-year-old older son and his unfiltered awareness of death, which brought with it a necessary sadness. I thought about how my husband and I continuously met his sadness and helped him find ways of defining it in his body so that it could move through him without causing stagnation. I then thought about my clients who also struggled with an awareness of death as children, and how alone they felt as they tried to process the existential questions without a guide. I opened my heart to the pain, the tenderness, the rawness of being human.
As the class progressed, and the blue evening darkened into black night, I thought about the walk from the studio to my car, which was parked at the far end of the parking lot, and I noticed a jolt of fear flash through me. In my twenties, I used to go out all the time at night and would park in all kinds of strange places. I had certainly felt fear in the past, but I had never had as much to lose as I did that night: a husband whom I adore beyond words and two magical sons who would be crushed if something happened to me. I had more to lose than that, of course, including a tight-knit circle of friends who are like family, but it was the intimate loved ones, the children of my womb, that flashed into my fear-mind as the class came to a close.
I lay down in Savasana and breathed into the fear. Within moments, I could feel underneath the fear into the vulnerability of loving my husband and two boys more than I ever knew possible. And with the awareness of the vulnerability, came the tears. They weren’t tears of grief; they were tears of rawness, tears that arose from knowing that loving that deeply meant taking an immense risk, and that should anything happen to any one of us, our hearts would be torn apart. Beyond that I could not go, except to hold out a thin strand of faith that should anything occur, somehow, some way, we would mend.
The risk of loving. Oh, it brings me to tears even now as I write these words. The risk of spinning this web of love around the four of us more deeply every day, of opening our hearts wider and wider and wider, until we feel they will break from the loving. But they don’t break; they only expand. The love reaches out into worlds beyond our world and asks us to grow beyond ourselves.
Anyone who commits to this path of healing must unravel into the heart of the fear and, at the very center, touch down into the risk of loving. The fears keep us separate from the raw and vulnerable places in our hearts. There are moments when I see with crystalline clarity that the endless questions that show up in romantic love (“Do I love him/her enough?” “What if I’m settling?”) and the ways the mind ruminates about other meaningful relationships (with friends and family) are all elaborate defense mechanisms. They are designed to avoid the vulnerability of loving, the exquisitely painful knowledge that when we commit our hearts, we take the risk of enduring the most painful of human experiences: loss and heartbreak.
Sitting at the center of worry and intrusive thoughts is, quite simply, the fear of loss, and if you could peel those thoughts away, you would cry, as I did that night. And through the strength of the tears, you would find the courage to go on, to expose your heart, and take the only risk worth taking: to love and be loved as fully and completely as if it were your last day on earth. To love without restraint. To love with joyous abandon. To set the fear-voices on a fence at the edge of the meadow of your mind and witness them while knowing that they are no longer running the show, allowing them to watch you as you run or dance or stumble into the arms of love.
15
THE ROMANTIC CONNECTION
What my marriage taught me is that real love is only what you give. That’s all. Love is not “out there,” waiting for you. It is in you. In your own heart: in what you are willing to give of it. We are all capable of love, but few of us have the courage to do it properly. . . . You can take a person’s love and waste it. But you are the fool. When you give love, it grows and flowers inside you like a carefully pruned rose. Love is joy. Those who love, no matter what indignities, what burdens they carry, are always full of joy.
KATE KERRIGAN
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage
Not everyone struggles with anxiety in relationships, but for the sensitive, analytical, conscientious people in the world, to experience anxiety and doubt in a committed, loving relationship where there are no red flags (see appendix A) is not only commonplace but predictable. If one of the root causes of anxiety is the need to find certainty and ground in a fundamentally groundless world, and if romantic relationships are the place where we are rendered most vulnerable and, thus, groundless, why would we be surprised when anxiety shows up there? Yet in the absence of accurate information and because of the widespread cultural assumption that doubt means don’t, what begins as normal questioning or healthy fear quickly morphs and balloons into full-blown anxiety and panic. We all lack the basic roadmap that can lead to relationship satisfaction and success.
What you’re about to receive is the roadmap to healthy love that you never received. We’ll extrapolate on one of the basic premises of my work: the often overlooked and misunderstood link between relationships and anxiety. And we will expound upon the following truths: love is not the absence of fear, and it’s not a feeling; it’s an action and a willingness to wrestle with the fear that arises every time we move toward increased intimacy and commitment with a safe and available partner. Because love and fear are wrestling on the mat of the heart, relationships require us to become nothing short of love-warriors.
What Is Relationship Anxiety?
I define “relationship anxiety” as pervasive doubts about a healthy, loving relationship. It usually begins with a thought like, “Do I love my partner enough?” or “What if I’m not in love or attracted enough?” and spirals from there into a level of anxiety that interferes with your ability to be present in your relationship, and often in your life. Even for those who don’t suffer from relationship anxiety, it’s a sad reality that our divorce rates have skyrocketed in recent years and that very few couples experience long-term real love and passion. This is often because most of what we learn about relationships from the mainstream culture is false, which means that many people run at the first sign of “falling out of love.” In fact, one of the most common reasons that people walk away from loving, solid, healthy relationships is because they say they’re not in love anymore: “I love her, but I’m not in love with her,” is considered a valid reason to leave.
Relationship anxiety generally manifests in two ways, either of which can occur at any point in the relationship, from early on or years into marriage. The first type of relationship anxiety occurs in a defining moment when the thought, “Do I
love my partner enough or at all” enters the mind. Prior to this thought, the person describes their relationship as: “Wonderful, loving. Everything I’ve ever wanted. We have an amazing love between us, and it’s pretty much perfect.” The couple often had a long honeymoon period and a very healthy relationship. The early stages of this type of relationship anxiety are characterized by the desperate need to “get back the feelings,” as the loss of in-loveness feels like their hearts have been cut out of their chests.
The second type of relationship anxiety occurs more gradually and may have even been present in the very early stages of the relationship. This type of anxiety is characterized by a pervasive feeling of doubt, lack of attraction, the sense that you’re really “just friends,” and you’re only staying in the relationship because you’re too scared to be alone. Statements like, “We don’t have enough chemistry” and “I’m settling” tend to dominate this type of relationship anxiety. This can be particularly disconcerting because, in a culture that exalts the in-love feelings as the sole indicator that you’re with the “right” partner, the lack of those feelings in the beginning stages can easily spell doubt and doom (until you learn better). I often receive emails from people asking me if my work applies even if they had doubt from the beginning. The answer is yes. Anxiety is anxiety; it doesn’t matter when or where it hits or even how it began. What matters is how you address it once it’s here.
In either case — and if your anxiety falls somewhere between these two examples, this applies to you as well; remember that the ego is perpetually attempting to convince you that you’re an exception — living with relationship anxiety often plummets people into what is referred to as the dark night of the soul. This is when everything familiar falls away, and you’re invited — or dragged — to let go of aspects of yourself that aren’t serving you, die several deaths, and eventually emerge into a new, more compassionate, wiser version of yourself. As with all the ways that anxiety manifests, you can resist the call and numb the pain, or you can walk through the center of the fear-storm and surrender to the most transformational ride of your life.