That’s a spiritual journey. In this book, we will take a look at what your habits of attention have been in your life, especially on your spiritual path. One will reflect the other, for you know that “As above, so below.” What we experience and create on a spiritual level affects our everyday lives, and the way we approach our ordinary lives also impacts the spiritual.
So we’re going to take a good look at your spiritual approach and then take it deeper, because you may be a bit stuck on a level of spiritual understanding and a way of going about your spiritual practices that is perpetuating your anxiety. These are what I call the mis-takes that spiritual people tend to make. They’re simply mis-takes : a misunderstanding of certain spiritual ideas that, once adjusted, can make a world of difference not only in your awakening process, but in your whole life and certainly in easing the anxiety you’ve been struggling with.
Then, we’ll incorporate some new ways of approaching spirituality that will inform your entire life. You’ll explore and develop new skills that give you power over anxiety—seven keys to a more calm, confident, courageous life. These approaches will shift you out of worry, fear, and stress and give you the confidence that you know how to deal with anxiety when it rears its head. You’ll be able to return to your natural state of ease within: your true essence.
My Story: A Journey of Transformation
“It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
—Wendell Berry
My anxiety started, now that I think about it, back in grade school. I was “shy,” or so I thought. Sure, I had friends, but I had a hard time feeling comfortable in new situations and reaching out to people I didn’t know. The thing I was most afraid of was speaking in front of the class. I was extremely nervous and dreaded the funny faces that the mean boys would make at me. My hands trembled when I spoke, and I’d be anxious for days leading up to it.
I was also a perfectionist. I knew this about myself from a young age, and frankly, I rather liked it. I had a high standard for what I did and for what others did, too. I believed that it pushed me to excel. For a while, it worked. But there was a cost. My self-critical tendencies grew out of that perfectionism and fed into my teen insecurities.
An outgrowth of this was my tendency to worry. It was easier to anticipate the bad stuff that could happen and prepare for it than to envision the good. Part of me believed, superstitiously, that I could avert the tragedy if I thought about it ahead of time and prepared (have you ever believed that, too?). As you can imagine, it may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy: the bad things that I feared never materialized, but I stressed and suffered as if they had.
I realized as I grew into my twenties that the self-critical and worrying characteristics that I had honed so well needed to be transformed. They were causing me to fear new situations and inhibited me from deeper, more meaningful intimate relationships. I wanted to be more courageous and confident. And I wanted to find inner peace.
This initiated my journey into the popular personal and spiritual growth movement of the 1980s and 1990s. I went back to graduate school to study counseling psychology and began feeling more self-assured. For the most part, however, my deeper fears and worries went underground for a while.
I managed to avoid dealing with these fears head-on until I married, and a few years later, we decided to start a family. The pregnancy itself was fine. But through the trauma of the birth process—a long, hard labor that pushed me to the limits of what I thought I could tolerate in pain—the anxiety resurfaced in new ways. It was something about the pain of labor, from which there’s no way out unless you get anesthesia (I eventually did the epidural), that brought the anxiety to the surface. The baby had to be birthed, one way or another. You can’t just change your mind. At one point I was so exhausted and in so much pain that I was afraid I wouldn’t make it.
In the end, my daughter arrived unscathed and healthy, but I was psychologically wounded. Going through the birthing experience and becoming a mother made me feel very anxious about everything, especially when it came to the baby. The pediatrician in attendance thought that my daughter had some difficulties inhaling, known as inspiratory stridor. Although our regular pediatrician disagreed later, that diagnosis put a fear for my daughter’s life in my mind. We planned to have her co-sleep right next to our bed, which was important to us, but the close proximity also had the effect that I ended up waking up often to put my ear next to her chest to make sure she was breathing.
When it came time to move her to the crib in her room down the hall, the second I’d hear her crying about anything, I would fly out of bed like a gunshot and be down the hall within seconds. I knew I was overreacting a bit, but what to do about it?
I tried not to be an overly anxious mother. But I still could feel that I was more nervous about things than a fair number of other mothers.
At a certain point, I had to look at myself and my life. I realized that my fear of the unknown was pushing me to try to control everything. Controlling my daughter’s life made me feel safer, but it was an illusion. It would never stop. There could never be enough control in order for me to feel that she was safe, or that I was safe.
This translated, interestingly, to airplanes. After her birth, I had a tremendous fear of flying. I couldn’t get myself onto a plane until she was a year and a half old—we took a short trip down to San Diego. Every bump and jiggle made my palms break out in a cold sweat. My heart raced, and my muscles gripped in tension. I clenched my husband’s hand but tried to hide it from my daughter, as I didn’t want her to inherit my anxiety. But inside, I was terrified.
It was another manifestation of control, or lack thereof. I felt that if I could be in control of the flight and make it all smooth, it would be fine. But of course that wasn’t possible. So anything that was outside of what I believed was safe was cause for alarm. We took another flight to Chicago later that year, but after that I avoided flying again for a few years. I knew I had to do something about it.
It was when I took the Fear of Flying Course at San Francisco International Airport (www.fofc.com) that I understood my main problem—I had to surrender. I truly had to let go of what was not mine to control. It was time to surrender it to the Divine—to something greater than me—if I was going to release this anxiety. The anxiety was all about insisting that things had to be the way I wanted in order for me to feel OK. I couldn’t continue through life that way. I knew that sometimes things were going to be quite different than what I wanted, and I needed to learn to embrace that.
So my journey has been one of acceptance, presence, and surrender. I’ve had to use all the tools at my disposal, from my psychotherapy training to my spiritual teachers to yoga practice and philosophy. I had to reexamine my spiritual beliefs and explore them on a whole new level—again and again and again.
I practiced these tools on airplanes and as a passenger in the car. I practiced when I was taken to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and when my daughter took her trip to DC and New York at the end of eighth grade. Many situations in life were going to bring unpredictability, and I would have to accept them. Many things could turn out to be uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and I needed a way to accept that with some grace.
Through my own inner work, I found it; not a magic pill or formula, but a continual practice that brings me back from the painful edges of anxiety to recovering my inner essence in the present moment. It is a whole practice, one that brings together every aspect of myself and my life into this simple, precious moment—with gentleness and great trust in the process.
Not surprisingly, more and more clients showed up