Paul - The wisdom of anxiety: how worry & intrusive thoughts are gifts to help you heal

To my family Daev, Everest, and Asher three beautiful, sensitive souls who bring rivers of love, kindness, meaning, and joy into my life every day

Jung observed that most of the neurosis, the feeling of fragmentation, the vacuum of meaning, in modern lives, results from this isolation of the ego-mind from the unconscious.... If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.

ROBERT JOHNSON

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

CONTENTS

PRACTICES

INTRODUCTION

ANXIETY IS A DOORWAY

Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness. For it is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves.... In the evolution of consciousness, our greatest problem is always our richest opportunity.

ROBERT JOHNSON

We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

A nxiety is the wound of our times. According to the World Health Organization, 260 million people are diagnosed with anxiety worldwide and millions more are without a diagnosis. These numbers clearly indicate that we are living in an age of anxiety. This profound psychic wound crosses all boundaries by which we typically classify ourselves, for anxiety, like loss, is one of the great equalizers: it doesnt matter how old you are, where you live, what you look like, how much money you make, your sexual orientation, or your gender eventually everyone will meet anxiety in the dark of night.

While the nature of the wound is clear, what is less clear from a mainstream perspective is how to address it. Guided by a Western mindset that seeks to erase pain in all forms (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual), most people see anxiety and its cohort of symptoms as something to hide, deny, distract from, or eradicate. What we dont realize is that when we regard anxiety only as a problem and seek to eliminate the symptoms, it is pushed underground, where its forced to rise back up with greater intensity, and we also miss the rich opportunity to evolve both individual and cultural consciousness that anxiety invites.

For anxiety is both the wound and the messenger, and at the core of the message is an invitation to wake up. In order to decipher the specifics of its messages, we have to shift from a mindset of shame, which sees anxiety as evidence of brokenness, to a mindset of curiosity, which recognizes that anxiety is evidence of our sensitive heart, our imaginative mind, and our souls desire to grow toward wholeness. Anxiety, when approached from the mindset of learning, directs you to something deep inside that needs to be seen, a call from soul to pay attention, an invitation from the wellsprings of being to turn inward and heal at the next layer of growth.

One element that reduces the shame around anxiety is knowing that youre not alone; normalization causes shame to shrink. From the cross section of my worldwide audience, I hear the same symptoms and thoughts: What if I married the wrong person? What if I have a terminal illness? What if I run out of money? What if something horrible happens to someone I love? What if I hurt my baby? These are all clues that anxiety is the wound of our times and that were in the territory of the collective unconscious. Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to describe the part of the mind that is common to all humans; and these thoughts, emerging from a shared psyche, point to the archetypal themes and stories where anxiety constellates: relationships, health, money, parenthood, the need for safety and security. Over the years, clients have shared these thoughts in hushed tones, but because I write about them weekly on my blog, they know that theyre not alone. One of the blessings of the internet is that the contents of the collective unconscious, formerly only accessible via dreams and myths, are now more widely accessible. You are far from alone with your anxiety, no matter how it manifests.

Anxietys emissaries arrive in many forms: worry, intrusive thoughts, obsessions, compulsions, insomnia, somatic symptoms. If we greet these emissaries with shame and try to sequester them into the far down, hidden recesses of psyche, they will gather in numbers and strength until we are forced to listen. As they scream for attention, the culturally induced, shaming voices take over and say, Youre broken. Youre fundamentally wrong. These thoughts and symptoms are evidence that theres something deeply, pathologically wrong with you. Dont talk about. Dont admit it. Try to get rid of it as quickly and cleanly as possible.

Seeing anxiety and intrusive thoughts as wise manifestations of the unconscious is a vastly different view and a much more hopeful and life-enhancing view of anxiety than the one our culture holds. For what Ive witnessed over the last twenty years of working closely in the underworld of psyche is that when we turn toward our symptoms instead of medicalizing and pathologizing them, we begin to gather our gold. Anxiety is a doorway into a self that longs for wholeness. Our symptoms, when honored, lead the way. When you meet your darkest, most uncomfortable places with a mindset of curiosity and compassion, you transform, and your life expands in untold ways. Ive seen it countless times with my clients, my course members, my friends, my children, and in my own life. The same can be true for you.

Brazil: My Initiation into Anxiety

There were several pivotal events in my life that invited me to realign with my soul, times when my inner self grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me into the underworld. The first, and most powerful, was a panic attack that broke me open when I was twenty-one, a few months before I graduated from college. It was that panic attack and the subsequent years of drowning in daily anxiety that shattered my illusion of my perfect life. It destroyed my glass castle of superiority, the belief that I was beyond suffering, created and confirmed by years of immersion in an education system that rewarded me for being school-smart. It destroyed my conviction that I had the right answers, or any answers. In short, it brought me to my knees in all ways from heart palpitations to a phobia of driving that ensued after that first panic attack to night terrors and nightmares that punctuated my sleep for years. And yet, from the ashes, the pain, and the total destruction of life as I had known it, a new life and a lifes work was born. This is how our unconscious, working through anxiety and its sisterhood of symptoms, invites us toward wholeness: were broken open, brought to our knees, dragged into the underworld not to be tortured or because theres something wrong or disordered with us, but because theres something right and beautiful inside that is longing to be seen and known.

The seeds of my panic attack had been planted a year before and were intimately connected to a trip to Brazil my junior year of college. I never planned to go to Brazil. Having spoken Spanish throughout high school and into college, I had always planned to travel to Spain. But then the Brazil bug bit me: I had taken a Brazilian dance class the summer after my first year of college, and I was hooked by the dance and the culture. I danced all summer. I danced through the next year and immersed myself in Brazilian music. Quite impulsively, I changed my plans and set into motion an experience that would alter the course of my life.

In January 1990, instead of getting on a plane to Spain, I headed for Salvador, Brazil, where I was immediately pummeled when the fantasy I had built up in my mind clashed hard with the reality I encountered. In a single moment, I was yanked from my safe, clean, upper-middle-class life and hammered down into the middle of a life I had never known on any level. I lived in