Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up
(Antonio Machado)
A man I work with was telling me about how he spent the Christmas holidays with his family. He went back home to the big city to spend time with them. Before he arrived, he decided to try something new: he followed the impulses and desires of his heart, his authentic being, instead of going along with conventional expectations and traditions. While he was there, the connections he had with his family and friends were intimate, surprising, and deeply fulfilling. One morning he had a spontaneous and life-changing conversation with his mother.
I was feeling a lot of joy as I listened to him speak. Then he said this:
“It was wonderful, to be so present and open with these people I love. And there was a lot of anxiety. It wasn’t overwhelming, but I could feel my heart fluttering a lot. And it was not easy to sleep at night.”
The kind of anxiety that was arising for him is what I call sacred anxiety. I used to experience it when I was engaged in a lot of public speaking. I learned, after struggling with it for a while, to welcome that anxiety, to open to it and let it move through my body. During that time I discovered that the best talks I gave were when that anxiety was present at the beginning, not the talks where I was calm and sure of myself at the start.
This was very surprising to me, but the evidence was in my face. It happened again and again-when I was trembling, tender and vulnerable, I was able to connect with the audience and myself in a way that was palpable. I realized that the anxiety penetrated through the facade I was hoping to present to the audience-that there was actually something about it that was awakening and enlivening for me.
In my work as a coach and teacher, I’ve seen more and more people trying to deal with anxiety over the last few years. They speak to me of sleeplessness, sweating hands, churning stomachs, fluttering hearts, feelings of dread and helplessness. I also have more and more people coming to me and saying, “I want to do something different. I want to break out of my old life, contribute something, give of myself. But I don’t know what to do, and I am afraid.”
I really wonder how we can support each other, at this stage in our collective evolution, when this kind of anxiety appears in the middle of our lives. A student said to me recently, “Life seems so different now. It feels wild and unpredictable. I feel nervous and uncertain a great deal of the time. Has life really always been this way, and we just didn’t want to see?” What a great question!
Whenever we take a risk, when we come out of our little cozy cocoon and allow ourselves to do something new, or spontaneous, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to let go of an old way of being, anxiety can arise. And the nature of our conditioning tells us that this anxiety means something is wrong. It’s not so easy to question this assumption. We go right along with it, a great deal of the time. We try to avoid the anxiety, change it, fix it, transcend it. We treat it as an enemy. We know how we want to be: strong, confident, self-assured, someone who knows what they are doing! Then our anxiety becomes toxic, an obstacle, something we need to eliminate so we can get on with our lives and our fixed agendas.
When I am willing to meet life as it is, not as I want it to be, I begin to see how unpredictable and out of control it truly is. I think I know what’s going to happen, and I don’t. I think I know who you are, how you will behave, and I don’t--I am clinging to images and ideas that live in the past, that have nothing to do with right now. The truth is-- anything can happen. How unsettling and disturbing it can be to face right into this. And my attempts to create a life that is safe and calm and free from anything wild or chaotic do not result in the peace I am looking for. What I get, when I retreat into my cocoon, is deadness, numbness and claustrophobia.
Terry Dobson, the great akido master, was speaking about his practice in an interview. “Don’t you get afraid, even now, when you step onto the mat and face your opponent?” he was asked.
“Of course, “ he said. “Of course I feel fear. I am a human being. But I am very accustomed to my fear.”
How easy it is to get locked into an idea of how we want to be, of how life should be. And then anything that threatens these ideas is something we need to avoid: the fluttering heart, the trembling in the knees. Instead of recognizing the sacred nature of what is arising, we turn against it and it becomes toxic. It’s the very same thing, but our whole experience of it depends on how we relate to it. If we open to it, welcome it, our anxiety becomes a doorway, an awakening, a sign that we are right at the edge of something new, alive and creative. If we push it away, it becomes a wolf at our door, something we keep running from, even in our dreams.
Candice Pert talks about the nature of our physical heart in her book, ‘The Molecules of Emotion.’ Many people suffer from anxiety when they notice their heart-beat becoming erratic and irregular. ‘The fluttering heart’ feels like a bad sign. She confronts all of our assumptions about a healthy heart: that it functions in a way that is always calm, predictable, steady and reliable. If the nature of life is chaotic and totally unpredictable, then our heart, which is intimately connected with our aliveness, functions in the same way. She wonders how it could be otherwise. A healthy heart skips beats, slows down, speeds up and jumps around, because it is pulsating with the flow of life.
Laurie Knox, a remarkably gifted healer that I work with, has helped me a great deal in opening to my own anxiety. She spoke to me one day about our conditioned reactions in the face of a crisis or emergency. “When something happens to our child, or our partner, or a parent, we think we need to be strong for them, a source of stability and comfort. We push our anxiety away, so that we can be more solid and present. But how can we really be present for them, if we are not willing to be present for our own experience?”
I remember when she asked me that question. It was one of those blessed moments when everything stopped. I lay there, on her table, thinking about how many times I had tried to hide from my daughter the intense anxiety I was feeling about her. I realized that it had never worked, and that I needed to try something radically different.
My whole life has changed since I made that decision. And it wasn’t really a decision, it was simply something that became so totally clear I could no longer avoid or deny it.
That’s my prayer right now, that we can learn to open and welcome this anxiety, and in welcoming it, discover that no part of us needs to be left out.
