There must be something wrong with me–I know, because of this anxiety.
Have you ever had that thought?
Whether a moment when you dropped a dish and it smashed to pieces, or someone broke up with you, or you weighed yourself (we’re looking at this in Eating Peace program) or you lost your temper, or you lost your house because of difficult financial circumstances….
….so many times we’ve reacted.
“Yikes! Oh no!”
I did it wrong.
Because I did it wrong, I’ll die without succeeding. I’ll fail. I’ll suffer. I’ll be alone forever. I won’t get “there”.
Some of us take so much responsibility for problems, we’re anxious, then we’re depressed and incredibly full of despair.
But can you be sure there’s something wrong with you because you’re anxious?
Think of just one situation.
For example, two different inquirers brought this to the pot in the past couple of weeks:
They were anxiously thinking about the future.
They were against feeling so anxious. Their minds were out of control.
Unchangeable.
“I’ve been working on this for soooooo long. Why don’t I stop obsessing? Why do I continue to be like this?!”
So if you’ve experience anxiety, and then berated yourself for being anxious….this inquiry is for you.
My situation. Two years ago (ish) in February on a very dark wintry rainy weekend in the northwest. I’m out of town with my husband for a long weekend.
In the hotel room, we receive an email saying they’ll be moving ahead with the building project in our back yard. A new small house with a ground floor apartment for my mother in her elder years, and a studio/office space up above for groups and inquiry work.
They would need $52,000 to begin on Tuesday.
I begin to sweat.
Holy Mother of God, what have we done? This is going to cost so much more than that. If this is only what they need to get started, how will this unfold? What if we don’t have enough? How did we ever think we could do something so massive? Why didn’t we just pay off our house instead of refinancing and building?
How could I have imagined I would even be eligible to do such a grand, gigantic thing?
People are starving in Africa.
As my husband began to breathe heavily later, in a deep and restful sleep, I began to think.
Maybe we should back out of this.
And by the way, why are we in a hotel? We should be saving any extra money for this ginormous project.
We should probably leave in the morning. I don’t like it here.
Now, you might think….she probably started doing The Work in the middle of the night, right?
Oh no.
I was having a full on epileptic thinking seizure. I stared at airplane lights far in the distance out the dark window, wondering how I picked a hotel this close to the airport.
I’m honestly still not sure why or how that all rose up to such a heightened sense of speeding thought, and how it happened that all sense of safety was sucked out of the room. (That’s dramatic–the room was entirely safe. The future, in my head, was unsafe).
I’m not sure why I did not meet the anxious mind with four questions as I always find liberating.
Maybe the fire needed to burn very brightly, so I could see how much I feared not having enough in the future.
I had images of boarded-up unfinished houses seen in neighborhoods sometimes. People who started a big project, and couldn’t finish it.
I had images of stocks plunging to zero and everything tanking.
“What is wrong with you?”, I thought.
“Don’t you want a simple life?”
People who come into the programs I facilitate often come with this core belief running in the background, this terrible doubt about themselves; Relationship Hell to Heaven (which just ended last Sunday, such a beautiful healing group), Year of Inquiry (gathering all year for self-inquiry together), Eating Peace (people feeling horrible about their eating issues).
Everyone is upset with how life has gone, and especially how they’ve responded to it.
Is it true there’s something wrong with you, if you’ve been full of emotions, like anxiety?
Are you absolutely sure it’s wrong to feel anxious?
No.
What’s the reality? Anxiety exists.
What happens when you’re upset with anxiety, with thinking, with a circumstance or a condition that sends you into fear?
I see flashes of terrible failure in the future.
Suffering. Sorrow. Regret.
I have to make the right decision NOW. I panic and run. Or I jump in when not quite ready.
Everything on the topic is an emergency.
In my mind that night during the news that our plans were really happening, I was unexpectedly thrown off by my panic about the unknown future…and money.
Who would I be without the belief that something was wrong? With me? With the circumstance?
Aware that nothing WAS actually wrong in that moment.
Even with this mind.
It was doing its job, reminding (re-mind-ing) me that only ten years earlier I almost lost the very same property to foreclosure and debt. Reminding me I should be very careful (which can be questioned). Reminding me I’ve suffered in the past, so suffering may happen again in the future.
But it was just mental images and thoughts and imagination and stored memory presenting itself.
I could question it all.
Who are we without our thoughts about the thing causing anxiety, and the anxiety itself?
I love we can turn the mind towards using the imagination for support and loving kindness, rather than drama and chaos.
Without my beliefs running, I’d notice the stillness and the powerful support of the present moment.
Turning the thought around: there’s something wrong with my thinking.
Yes, I can see my thinking, left unto itself, runs rampant when believing there’s a threat.
Turning the thought around: there’s something RIGHT with me (as I gaze at anxiety).
Could this be just as true, or truer?
Anxious images in a slide show, anxious feelings in the body.
And still, woman listening to husband’s sleeping breath. Looking through a glass at the night sky. Listening to the quiet room.
Stillness present.
Safety present.
Secure in gravity, warmth, resting, oxygen.
Mind busy, doing what it was born to do.
Nothing wrong.
“It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering.” ~ Byron Katie
Body lying on a bed, feeling what the mind is thinking.
Failing to notice the joy of the space, the support, the slowness. Failing to notice no check needs to be written in the middle of the night, right at that moment.
All else, perfectly in order, perfectly on time.
Life, offering something. Person reacting to it and believing. Person believing the thought that believing a thought was wrong.
A lovely inquirer in Year of Inquiry said in passing in our call last Saturday “that Rumi poem about staring at the wound, that one…”
It’s one of my favorites, and I read it at retreats quite often.
I opened it up later to re-read it, and bring it to this memory of an imagined anxious sleepless night, noticing the intensity and beauty of that weekend and the turning within, the awareness. The invitation.
Look.
Look again.
Who are you, without your thoughts, even in that past memory of anxiety?
Who are you without your thoughts that having anxious thoughts is terrible, or wrong or unenlightened?
Healing the past, in the present moment of inquiry.
Calling back the past “see, it’s OK, it always was. Relax, relax.”
Kind to the anxious one. Willing to question.
“Trust your wound to a teacher’s surgery.
Flies collect on a wound.
They cover it, those flies of your self-protecting feelings,
your love for what you think is yours.
Let a Teacher wave away the flies and put a plaster on the wound.
Don’t turn your head.
Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That’s where
the Light enters you.
And don’t believe for a moment that you’re healing yourself.”
~ Rumi
If you have a past memory that surfaces, an experience of something “wrong” with you, with others, with life….
….you can believe your thoughts (how brilliant that you have done so) and you can also answer four questions and find turnarounds and un-believe your thoughts.
We can keep looking at the wounds, and not turn our heads.
Letting the light enter us.
If you want to, join me and the wonderful Tom Compton as we support you in healing the anxious mind with The Work.
Everyone, experienced to beginner, is welcome.
We meet Dec 1-6, 2020 with two sessions a day (Pacific Time) and 4 hours in between for partner pairing and digesting and silence. Every session recorded for those who need to miss and listen later because of timezone.
We have wonderful things planned and the unplanned will present itself, as it always does, to hold us in steady joy and silence in the background of it all.
We can’t wait to be in the adventure.
Still room for a few more. Read more and sign up here. Sliding scale $375 – $895 for six days.
We prepare for winter, on the inside, on the outside.
The immense gift of inquiry: noticing reality is kind. Noticing reality is a teacher. Noticing reality can be trusted.
Astonishing.
Much love,
Grace