Recommended Listening: Curse by Architects
Anxiety is but a symptom of the discord between the inner and outer worlds.
Anytime one feels anxiety, the first question to ask is, “whose anxiety is this?” Almost all anxiety is an energy that has been absorbed and inherited from others outside of our own inner world at a point where there was no protective barrier between me and you, inside and outside. The lack of the border between selves leads to the experience of being overwhelmed and colonized by the anxious energy of the Other. In the state of primal anxiety and panic, there is no space to remember one’s own sense of self and to see who one has already become in this very moment. Anxiety is a remnant of this foreclosing of the future. Anxiety is always a relic of the past.
No belief about oneself, other people and beings, or the world can ever be fully done way with or destroyed until some other loadbearing belief, a new pillar of reality, is erected in its place. The fundamental error, the fundamental weakness, of any nihilistic position is that it has the courage to destroy belief but insufficient courage to erect new ones in its place. Any position that is stuck in nihilism or pessimism wraps its fear and terror of life in the cowardly guise of philosophical, metaphysical, and moral certainty.
I have dug a hole, a grave, thrown in my mask, and burnt it to ashes while me and my little one have danced around the fire. But this is not the end. In the pit of despair, we have planted in the earth a seed. This seed is the birth of the world tree. In the pit where there was only fear, anxiety, and despair. Out of its void, there shall be strength, courage, honor, integrity, compassion, gentleness, and discipline. There is no need to prove anything to anyone, ever.
Healing can be defined as realizing the maximum congruency between the inner self, outer self, and the universe itself based on one’s capacities in any given moment. When healing is experienced, it is no different than Saturn and its rings silently resting within the gravitational the dance of the cosmos.
When you fall, you are not back at the bottom. You’ve simply gone deeper than you’ve ever gone before. There is no such thing as regression – only a descent upwards into the darkness.
Being a bodhisattva means carving your way into and through the world.
Fear is just energy moving through the body. If there is no story about the fear but just the experiencing of the energy, there will be no anxiety.
When I am mired in my terror and shame, the tasks of living overwhelm and dominate me. I am but a slave to my body and obligations. They are my ruthless, loving masters. There is no respite or escape when existence itself is your punishment. But I am beginning to taste the sweetness of liberation where I am no longer the slave of my own life and reality. The tasks of living become simply actions of the body and mind in harmony with my environment and the burden and punishment of existing simply falls away. There is no me or even existence. There is simply just…
The 4 selves of survival mode: Anger/fight – the betrayed self; anxiety/flight – the fragile self; dissociation/freeze – the hollow self; codependency/fawn – the subservient self (which is to say the most aggrieved and vengeful self).
The most devasting impact of anxiety is the transmutation of elements: it turns all that is liquid into concrete and solid objects distinct from each other. Even more, it attempts to make one of the fundamental truths of reality, the impermanence of all things, into the greatest illusion: that any single thing is permanent and stable which we can understand and control.
When we are connected to our inherent artistry and creativity, we are simultaneously most our truest selves while paradoxically being most absent and transcendent of a self in our experience. Which is to say, we are primally embodied and alive.
Grief is both the entryway and the exit gate of all life.
When I reach out my hand for your help, I am reaching out to the entire universe in admittance of the interdependence of all things. When I clutch my hand to my chest out of fear of rejection and abandonment in the depths of my suffering, I am in truth denying the very nature of the universe itself. I subordinate all of reality to my fear and thereby act as a foolish god. Asking for help is a philosophical and metaphysical act.
When I am most connected is when I am most real and the world itself becomes most real. Things and reality are not real in themselves. It is only through the fundamental interdependence of all things that any particular thing truly exists. Making the self, things, and the world itself unreal is the greatest protection against the nightmare of what it would be to care most fully and be most connected to that which we fear most – ourselves.
The commitment to the liberation of all beings, including oneself, is essentially a commitment to finally come out of hiding once and for all.
Anxiety is my greatest warrior, my most fearless protector. All too often, I have seen my anxiety as a coward, a trembling child in the face of normal, everyday circumstances. When I sit quietly around the fire with it, it tells me its real history: it trembles from facing things that would shatter the minds of most. Relative to the horrors it has encountered, fear and trembling are the signs of its greatest bravery. I hope to always remember this anytime my voice shakes as the snake in my chest coils around my heart.
We sacrifice that which is most precious to us. Because the sacrifice must wound us in the core of our being. It is no sacrifice if it does not. What does one do when pain has defined the core of your being? Then you sacrifice your pain. Give it up to the sky, the earth, the stars, to the sea, to the fires surrounding you at all times. I have found that some kind of discipline, a yoga, is the best altar upon which to sacrifice your pain. Move your body, love another being fully, sit upright with hell burning all around and inside of you, serve those who suffer along with you, sing and cry the names of the gods. Find something to give up your pain to, an act to transmute it. Then perhaps you will intimately see reality face-to-face. I am never more blinded than when I am in pain like an animal with its leg caught in a trap.
Something inspired by a mythical line of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier defending an island in the Philippines 29 years after the end of World War II: I have been fighting this war for as long as you and I have been alive. You want me to trust you, to believe that the war is over? Then hold my rifle. Don’t drop it or turn it against me. Carry it gently and compassionately. Show me how you hold my rifle. This is the only way I know who is and who is not trustworthy. Maybe just like Onoda, I have been waiting for my own Norio Suzuki to find me so I can fully accept that this war is over. How does one ever leave a war until after you have had a compassionate being listen to what hell on earth has been like for the last 29 years? There is no peace without a compassionate listener to witness what are own private war has been. Until then, we just receive garbled messages and broken communication from what we can only assume are our enemies in this war without end. I would like to come home now.
In the end, my karma only dominates me to the degree I refuse to see its ancient twisted roots. But is not the very act of seeing impossible without the roots themselves? Where does this desire to know, to seek the truth against all odds even when it flays my mind and body, arise from? It is from the known beyond the known. When I feel its presence brush against my skin the way the wind shakes the trees, I cry knowing that underneath it all there is only eternity. Endeavor to know yourself as a child of eternity in this moment and what need do you have for those roots to hold you in place? You simply float away and find unknown homes and destinations beyond imagining for the earth-bound. I feel bound and shackled to the ground below me only to the degree I fear the sky.
