The Tamarack, Naugatuck Valley Community College - March 2019
There is an extraordinary journey being offered to you, an invitation down a quieter, less-traveled, yet all the more scenic path.
It's the journey into your own authenticity, but to get there requires the courage to cross through more treacherous terrain: the crags of fear and the bogs of doubt.
At points along the way you'll reach clearings that will stop your breath with their beauty, their aliveness. You may not believe it to be a real place, but after time you'll realize that it's true and it's there, a place inside yourself where a distant voice whispers to you that you are enough, where the rain calms your soul and the sun warms you through - all this at once. In those places you begin to learn how to not only coexist with fear, but how to thrive in its presence and how to nurture the part of yourself that can stand up in your truth to comfort that fear.
The journey is an inward pilgrimage, and it begins by releasing our unhealthy attachments.
We slowly start to turn down the volume on other people's influence on our thoughts and actions;
we create more quiet
and more stillness for our authentic self to step in and guide us.
And then, finally, we learn what it means to experiment with no longer playing the roles we conjure for ourselves:
parent,
or child,
or sibling,
or spouse,
or boss,
or employee.
And it's in that beautiful, foreign space of contentment that we begin to know our authentic selves for the first time. It's there that we meet Grace. From that place, we find compassion enough to calm our fear, to trust our authentic self, and to hope and believe in the very best.
But it starts with letting go of the role, letting go of the search for validation to be found by being something else for everyone else.
It starts with choosing the stranger: yourself.
Photo: Natalie Collins
Sometimes, I write love letters to myself.
They're healing, they're powerful; they're necessary. I'll scribble them from time to time into my journal and fold down the page in dog-eared fashion so I can quickly go back to find a compassionate pep talk when I feel like I need one. I don't remember how I got started on this practice or what motivated me to stick with it through the initial awkwardness. (Because it was awkward; and how!)
Like first beginning a journaling practice, writing letters to yourself can seem positively painstaking - even when you have no intention of sharing this writing with an audience, you still feel ever so much like a fool. Maybe this is because self-compassion is still a radical idea for many of us. But the more you do it, the more powerful the practice becomes, and the more in touch you become with your own capacity for kindness, patience, and love.
For me, the process has helped me grow more compassionate toward myself as well as others, but it has also caused me to see messages to myself hidden within different perspectives - a happy accident that comes as a result. It's most true for poetry and music, and I was reminded of it again in this piece from Tyler Knott Gregson's Wildly into the Dark:
I have a few promises to offer you,
the believing is up to you, the
proof will emerge, but I cannot
say the when. Here is what I have,
my sincere offering, scar earned and
burned into me:
when you think you can't, you positively
can, when you think it's over,
it may be beginning. There is always more
to find, always something left in you
when you would swear on your soul
you've been emptied out. Finally,
and most exquisitely important,
I promise you it is worth it,
it is always worth it, every drop of
ache and sorrow, every perfect pinch
of joy, it is worth it. Promise me you
will keep waking up, keep finding it,
and finding the strength in you
to believe me.
"I promise you it is worth it." I've written those words to myself many times, a reminder that there is a strong, hopeful self within me who not only believes that I can achieve my dreams - but that I deserve to. And this helps.
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash (blog)
Somewhere on the journey of learning to live fully as someone with social anxiety, there's a new hurdle: learning to keep up emotionally with the newly active social part of yourself. As you grow more comfortable in the situations that previously provoked fear or avoidance a surprising thing can happen: you can find yourself becoming more social, more outgoing than your emotional self is prepared for. This is especially true of socially anxious folks who lean toward the introverted end of the spectrum. Suddenly there's a new, rather bombastic voice in the mix that wants to go on all those fabulous adventures the fearful self had been so good at talking you out of. And before you know it, you're burned out with trying to keep up with this newly-freed sense of creative living.
As I started driving again - contentedly, for the first time in my life - I found myself at a stopping point at my therapist's office, the farthest I'd yet driven. I didn't have an appointment, or any commitments; it was just for practice. Yet, as I sat in the parking lot, exuberant at the achievement and my comfort level with it, my adrenaline started to kick in, and I found myself antsy to go to the next destination - whatever whim might make it to be. I asked myself: can I just rest in this space for a minute? The answer, frankly, proved to be no. I couldn't.
Sometimes rest doesn't happen on command, and sometimes the treasured tools become obsolete. The affirmations are simply words once again, the resonance of your truth is frail, and your experience is imperfectly uncomfortable. But the achievement in that moment is that you can sit amid rising anxiety and just observe it. In moments like these it's frustrating, truly, because this big life outside of the comfort zone isn't as flawless or peaceful as you'd hoped. The illusion of living without anxiety fizzles into the reality of living with anxiety. But there's the living, and that's cause for a celebration even if it doesn't feel as comfortable as you expected.
There's a place between rest and action. I call it allowing. In our best-is-better world it's hard to be content with something so mediocre as acceptance, but mediocrity is the result of comparison, and comparison is, as they say, the thief of joy; comparison is an act of aggression against presence.
Can you make a home for yourself in acceptance, in allowing yourself to be valiantly imperfect? Can you stop comparing your experience with what could have been, even just for a moment? And can you finally, amid the noise and even the sorrow of this flawed place, give yourself permission to rest in the knowledge that this, too, is an achievement? That this, too, is a manifestation of peace? As the luminous Sue Monk Kidd once said, "Just to be is holy, and just to live is a gift."
In my work with my therapist and my personal self-care practice I most often refer to my anxious self as my “inner child.” The reasoning stems from my experiences growing up and the moments when I felt scared and powerless, which ultimately shaped the way anxiety would manifest within me as an adult. In an Instagram post earlier in the year I elaborated on my fearful younger self and the compassion I’ve developed for her.
Looking at anxiety in this way, as something to comfort and nurture into calmness and confident action, has been one of the most significant cornerstones of my journey. Because anxiety no longer becomes a bully or an enemy I need to beat; my life no longer feels like a battle, but a journey down an awkwardly bumpy and sometimes innocently treacherous road. Anxiety is no longer the villain tormenting me into submission, but a scared childhood me hiding in her closet and longing for someone to tell her she’s alright, she’s enough. I’ve been charged with keeping her safe and growing her confidence; in many ways, I am the mother of this inner child, and it’s my responsibility to encourage her out of hiding and into the world.
I remember once reading an article about making friends with anxiety and it seemed like the farthest-fetched idea I’d ever heard. Yet now, a few years and experiences and insights down the road, it makes all the sense in the world to me. Anxiety isn’t the thing hammering us into seclusion – that’s the reaction to the anxiety. Instead, anxiety is the shoulder a little bird sits on when it compassionately tells us to drop the storyline.
Adopting this perspective has been one of my greatest challenges, yet the result has been one of my greatest sources of strength. To become compassionate toward your anxious self is to become compassionate toward your imperfect self, and that’s the basis of a truly workable relationship between mind, body, and soul.
A favorite piece of wisdom I’ve gathered from American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron is the idea of, as she says it, learning to “stay with the raw feelings.” It sounds scary, and at some levels it is, but at the easiest level for me to get to this practice of staying with the raw feelings is natural, human, basic.
Photo by Benny Jackson (website)
In her book, Start Where You Are, Pema also talks about the two things we often do when we’re met with a negative feeling: the things we do often rather than staying with the raw feelings: we act out, or we repress. We either search blindly for an outlet – anger, blame – or we bury those feelings deep inside the caverns of ourselves where we promise never to venture again. And when we view it through that light, the process of staying with the raw feelings is actually the process of staying still, and we’re already physically equipped to do that; we’re already there, we just have to stay.
The fact is, so often these feelings that we’re experiencing – namely fear – are natural, healthy components of ourselves. Vigilance is what moves us in the direction of goodness and honesty. Fear helps us make smart choices and avoid everyday dangers. Rather, it’s our reactions to these feelings that ultimately breeds suffering – things like shame and disconnect with ourselves.
Oddly, as much as the visual of staying with the raw feelings seems like the most human, common thing to do…it isn’t. Acting out or repressing – letting ourselves be moved by these feelings in one direction or the other – is, for some reason, the thing we do instantly. We learn it somewhere along the way, and it’s almost as though we never learn the process of standing still. We learn how to run and how to fight, yet not, it would seem, how to simply plant our feet and be. That’s a process worth learning, no matter how late we come to it.
Ultimately, my goal – and, I think, one many people have – is to coexist compassionately with fear. It’s much more sensible than trying to eliminate it because that would mean to eliminate all aspects of it, including the ones that keep us safe. The really effective work, I’ve learned, is to eliminate the behaviors that aren’t serving you, the ones that involve acting our or repressing, the ones that keep us blind to the small cause at the base of them that could just use some reassurance.
Photo by Roman Kraft (instagram)
I’m learning that we are vastly layered beings, complex in our imperfections, which we are so quick to scorn and which we so quickly try to hide, avoid, or fix. But every imperfection is just as much a method of communicating with ourselves. Fear, I’ve learned, may seem like a basic inconvenience, but underneath it – as with so many things – there is a part of ourselves that is just trying to be seen, that just wants to communicate our struggle. Listening, I’ve learned, is most certainly not a weakness. Listening does not mean giving in. Listening means bearing witness. Listening means gathering wisdom and gently correcting what is inaccurate. But mostly, the act of listening is the act of being open-hearted. Listening is being curious. Can you imagine being curious without opening your heart? If you were to ask me what I love about myself or how I would describe myself, that would be it: I have an open heart and a curious mind.
And those are my greatest tools, the only things I really need because they can create moments of bravery and they can cultivate an attitude of kindness. It’s the opposite – a closed mind and a closed heart – that breed fear and intolerance and that absolutely stunt our growth. It’s not what I need, and the world certainly needs no more of it. But what makes openness such a brave, impossible thing is the vulnerability behind it. And vulnerability is often something we have to relearn. We mistakenly believe vulnerability is the opposite of strength when in reality vulnerability is the threshold we all must cross in order to be truly strong, truly brave.
Open hearts, curious minds – not just with others, but with ourselves.