The Wisdom of Anxiety

GLORIA STEINEM

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.