Anxiety in Service to Avoidance
La Ansiedad al Servicio de la Evitación
A question about long-standing anxiety, insomnia, and the fear of having done permanent damage, and how the mind creates a comfortable struggle to avoid feeling more deeply.
Anxiety in Service to Avoidance
A question about long-standing anxiety, insomnia, and the fear of having done permanent damage, and how the mind creates a comfortable struggle to avoid feeling more deeply.
I'm hoping to continue this antidote we've been exploring, except that instead of pain or self, I want to look at my problem. What gets me more than anything is that when things aren't feeling free, I feel trapped in anxiety. There's a sense of doom, of being a lost cause, because I've been living with so much anxiety for so long. It isn't as bad as it sounds. I can be fine. But at four o'clock in the morning, when I can't sleep, I'm just starting to get some distance from my thoughts. I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm starting to see some gap, some light in there, and it's a huge relief. Still, the thought that gets me most is: you've done damage to your nervous system for so long that you can't get free. I know this is just a thought. But it doesn't feel like just a thought, because the anxiety is so locked into my body.
I'll blame my profession, honestly. Nursing and insomnia. I sleep eight hours maybe four times a year.
Oh, wow.
It's getting better. Everything seems to be slowly getting better, but this is the hook I keep finding myself stuck on. And I do break through it. That's the part that bothers me. I know what it means to be free of all of this. Then when it comes up, it's almost like a nervous-system seizure. So I just wanted to bring that to the table. All I need is a little more confidence that I'm not a lost cause when I'm there.
I know it's all thought. In fact, what you said this morning, that anything which feels familiar is a layer of thought, really helped me. Because if there's anything that feels familiar, it's the sense that I forgot how to relax and breathe.
And what is anxiety without memory?
A seemingly unpleasant sensation that feels like it's pressing down on you from somewhere else.
What is it in service to?
What is it doing? What's it in service to? What if it's in service to you? What if you're creating it, and it's in service to you?
That would change everything.
So let's explore, for a few minutes, dropping any understanding or belief about what anxiety is. What is it right now, in your experience? You went into the root of it: this is happening to me, I'm a victim of this, it's something built through years of conditioning, a consequence of my profession, it's created some permanent nervous damage, and so on. That's okay. That's there. Now, putting that aside, what if it's something else entirely, where you are creating it, and it's at your service in any moment? Then what is it in service to? How is it helping you?
I guess it makes a painful life seem real. Do you mean in service to me, to my benefit?
Yes, to your benefit.
To the benefit of which me? That's the question.
Exactly. We'll get there. That's where I'm going.
It's hard to call it a benefit. It's hard to believe I actually enjoy any of it. But I know, according to this way of thinking, some part of me is loving it.
Don't consider the benefit to be enjoyment. It's not enjoyable, but it's still a benefit. What could it be, then? Let's play with this. Your mind is going to start screaming: of course this is not something I want, there's no benefit, this is all rubbish. So I'm going in exactly the opposite direction, because that screaming is an interpretation, a belief system. And it's a belief system you've practiced for a long time. It's potentially a foundational aspect of your identification. It's who you are. What are you without anxiety?
The funny thing is, a lot of what gets called me isn't particularly identifying as anxious. But the anxiety also feels like the baseline things rest on when everyone else isn't around. It's not as catastrophic as it sounds, but when it's bad, this is what it feels like.
What I'm pointing to is that state of rest when nothing's happening. That's the tone.
When I'm in thought. Because I'm also capable of identifying with something that isn't affected by any of this. So it's hard to say which one is my baseline. I want it to be the latter. But plowing through my life, the baseline seems to be the anxiety.
The crutch and the weak leg
Let's say the anxiety is a mechanism you chose to create to help you with something. It might be a crutch that is no longer needed. But in order to drop the crutch, one might need to put weight on legs that are a bit weak. And putting weight on a weak leg might be a little painful.
It's complicated by the fact that I'm looking at a year or two of a big transition I'm scared about. Leaving this town, retiring from my job, moving somewhere, feeling overwhelmed. All of that's real. I don't want to.
I'm sorry, but all of life is always challenges and uncertainty and fears and pains. I'm talking about something unnecessary. There's the normal dance of living through big changes, and there's the opportunity to live through that without unnecessary struggle, without unnecessary anxiety. That's possible. It just requires looking at it differently and directly. Really be willing to contemplate what happens if your annoying best friend, anxiety, goes away. Because there will be an attachment to it as well. It's the familiar, the comfortable struggle.
When we talk about really moving into the unknown and the unknowable of what this is and what we are, I bet the reflex will be to give back your anxiety.
Can you repeat that?
Once you come close to the reality of the unknowableness of this, and the unknowableness of what you are, there will be a reflex. Something along the lines of: give me back my anxiety.
It's not "give it back." It's more like: how long until it shows up?
No. The freedom that is possible is life without that anxiety, but it requires living in the reality where this is unknowable and you are unknowable. This is what we mean by non-duality, spirituality, and so on. Given that reality, if you step into it, there might be a sense of: I don't want this, give me back my anxiety. That's the choice I'm pointing to. From that place, anxiety might be created and chosen in service to living in the knowable, the controllable, the understandable, the familiar. In the numbing of certain pains that seem unbearable, the managing of pains that go untouched.
So it's a choice. Life as it is, with the anxiety and the struggle exactly as you know it, very familiar. Or life without that, but with no ability to avoid any pain. No ability to not feel very deeply everything that comes up, in a way so overwhelming you have not yet tasted it, where your heart might be breaking every day. Then it's no longer about whether you can do it, whether there's some stuckness in your body and mind. All of that is just the story of the struggle that is the anxiety. Beneath it is the deeper choice, because it's always at a deepening level now. The next step is the vast, unknowable world and space of the heart, of feeling so deeply. That's the antidote to the anxiety.
The heart opens, it does not break
There's no limit to what the heart can feel. "Heartbreak" is not an accurate expression. It conveys the experience beautifully, but the heart does not break. It opens. It grows the very capacity for feeling and loving and caring, the infinite colors and energies of feeling, of sensations we've not been able or willing to touch. So we develop strategies to run around them, and those strategies must be mental ruminations. That's the only way to veil and cover and manage what's happening right here, right now: a deeper feeling, a childlike joy for being alive.
That's the thing most terrifying to see: I'm actually happy, I'm actually in love with life. That can be terrifying. Or it could be a level of pain and grief we've not been able to touch. Often they come together. Deep feeling, deep grieving, and the joy and celebration of being alive. It sounds like two extremes. Then the mind reduces it to something knowable, a familiar struggle that is restless and contracted. The vulnerability of the heart is such a beautiful doorway. Everything aligns when that's open.
In my life, I'm sixty now, and I feel like only in the last few years have I started to let go of a lifetime of telling myself I didn't know how to feel this or that, that I was somehow defective. I actually don't know whether the bigger problem is the anxiety trying to hold it all together, or this self-incrimination I've carried about letting it get this bad, when I'm supposedly on a spiritual path for decades. There's probably no real difference between those two.
Self-incrimination as another cover
That's all part of the known. You being defective is known. It's a mind belief. It's exactly the thing that keeps the illusion going. This is how the illusion of self, the mechanism of covering up and avoiding what is, has all of these sophisticated little tricks. When it appears and says, "no, but that's actually the truth, that's the reality, what I'm really stuck with is the sense that I'm defective, and that's what I need to get free from," it's precisely the thing helping you avoid what is happening. It's just another belief system proving why there's no way out, in service of avoidance.
Notice I'm talking about this in a way that empathizes with the struggle. Yes, that thought comes up, it's very tricky, it seems very real, and off you go down that train. But there's another perspective: you created that thought, you chose it, you believed it, so that you could avoid, again, something going deeper.
What about the one thought that says this has been such an incredibly effective device for so long, keeping me in pain and safe from the unknown? That's frightening. It is frightening how good it's been at keeping me from feeling like I'm living life naturally.
That's what I was telling you. It's totally in service to you.
It's like when someone has a really fearsome weapon and you think, wow, I don't want to get near that.
It is. The power of the mind is unfathomable. It can create illusion for us to live in as much as we want, for as many lives as we want. The bottom line is just the choice. Step into the freedom, the unknowable, face the fear, or not.
But if I fail to make that choice toward freedom, it makes me a failure.
No. You are succeeding. It's an illusion where you are winning.
I don't want to win that game.
Are you sure?
No. I guess that's a good question. But I have a huge desire not to be in this. So what do you do with the thought that I feel like I want to be free? Is that a lie? How do I make it true?
"At times I want to be free, at times I don't"
Partly, it is a lie. You have to really, really choose freedom. What can happen is you see that partly, at times, you want to be free. And at times, you really don't.
That is my experience.
Then don't pretend you simply want to be free.
But does that mean I can never say the statement "I want to be free," since there are clearly times in life when it's not true?
The honest, authentic expression is: at times I want to be free, at times I really don't.
I can say that.
Because that keeps you seeing your reality honestly. That's exactly how a change of choice can happen: when you start to see how much you're choosing to be in an illusion, consciously choosing it, how much you're consciously avoiding freedom. Then you can look directly at that, and directly at the consequences of those choices. That's very different from pretending you want to be free and can't, because you're a victim of some mechanism keeping you trapped in the illusion, which you are self-creating and self-choosing and then pretending you're not. That's an infinite trap. If I'm creating the illusion, believing I'm a victim of it, and I forget that I chose it, that's the perfect trap.
You stay in there forever.
Exactly. That goes on forever.
There's one question I have to ask. What do I do with the fact that things are actually really scary, even outside of my own life?
What to do with that is: so what? Feel the fear. Why does that matter?
Because it feels like an actual external thing that I have no control over.
You said things are really scary. What is that? At times you will experience fear.
I'm obviously talking about planetary, political things.
Whatever is happening. If there's a comet coming straight to Earth, scary. What are you going to do, shut down, or live with the fear? What is the fear? The fear is an energy, a sensation, and it's really only an attempt at avoiding pain. Once you're able to feel pain, the fear becomes a vague noise in the background, coming occasionally. But the fear is screaming loud because you are very attached to not feeling pain.
The atrophied capacity to feel
How do you suggest people go about feeling the pain, other than pointing out that it's there and letting them figure out where it is?
The human body-mind has a tremendous capacity to feel very deeply. Forms of pain. I always say "fear and pain," but I could write ten pages of all the different flavors of that. It's just easier to say fear and pain, though I know that makes it harder to understand what I'm referring to. Anxiety is fear, but it's an indirect relationship to fear. Pain could be sadness, loneliness, grief.
The first thing is to at least hold as a possibility, in your understanding, that the body and mind have an unfathomable capacity to feel. We just have not practiced it. It becomes a little atrophied. So it's a matter of exploring that. It's like a toddler learning to walk. Very quickly it's all flowing. We just have not explored it, because everything around us, everyone around us, is avoiding, teaching avoidance.
When a child is growing up, the parents are wrought with anxiety. Is it going to fall? Is it going to trip? Will it be okay? Don't do this, don't do that. All of that reaction, meant to keep the child safe, is usually the parent avoiding their own worry and pain around their children. And the children try not to do anything, so that their parents don't feel anything. Then nobody can feel anything. Feeling is not okay. As soon as a child feels something, the parent says, don't feel that, feel this other thing instead. That's the society we're brought up in. Nobody knows how to feel. Nobody's okay with feeling.
Bless.
And we forget that it's totally fine, and actually quite easy when we learn. It's so much better than everything else.
It makes sense that I'm still protecting my dead parents from having to feel their feelings.
Yes. An internalized mechanism that now avoids your own. When we talk about the ending of the illusion of identity, about non-duality, this is what it looks like. Because what the illusion is in service to is not feeling.
If you feel fully, it's like an ego death.
It's the ending of the illusion that you must not be simultaneously present while fully feeling the depth of your heart. It's one or the other. The functioning of ego, of mind, continues, but it's no longer what I am. It's like the body: a functioning that continues, but not a thing I am collapsed and contracted into as a way to avoid feeling. That contraction is what creates all of the struggle, all of this we are so familiar with.
That's a good moment for us to end. Thank you all for joining. A lovely meeting. Have a beautiful day.