An old friend, anxiety, came to visit this morning, and I've learned that there are two cuts to the downhill skiing that is anxiety: you either take the path which is steep, but manageable and eventually brings you to fireplace at the lodge...or you cut onto that path which looks treeless and powdery, but you never get the momentum to make it home and end up cold and shivering in the middle of nowhere.
I'd like to say I end up at the lodge every time, that I skillfully choose the right course each run, but no, not so. However, I notice that in the last year, I choose more skillfully more frequently, but it takes varying amounts of time. This morning started with some lag time in bed, after playing a new game we bought yesterday (for the xbox 360) until 3am (natch)--that was not the adult decision, by the way--and then sitting for the regular morning meditation. What came out of that wasn't much enlightenment, but was a remembering of the need to focus in front of me (long range thinking is a great place for anxiety to breed, fertilized by all the uncertainties and uncontrollables) and do something active.
The thing about anxiety is that it encourages a management strategy which is exactly opposite of what you need to do to feel safe. The introverted voice of anxiety is, "Be small. Hide. Don't do anything. Wait for the danger to past. For God's sake, don't draw attention to yourself." (There's an extroverted version which involves "counter-phobic" things like adventure sports and bar fights, but I'm not so familiar with that permutation). So what you get from your mind is exactly what your body/heart don't need.
What you need is to be present to the sensations of anxiety in your body, with a recognition that these sensations will release if not opposed, and then activity that reminds your whole system of connectedness and relationship--those are the essential things.
So this morning, I remembered enough to barely overcome the contraction of the anxiety, and got myself suited up for a run. It was a bit like having a small child keep yanking at my pant leg, but I gently put him on a shoulder and stroked his head, and took off on my regular run around the park. And sure enough, as my legs got pumping, I could feel the groundedness come on that accompanies my body recalling that it is not isolated. It's a familiar feeling, that transition, but something that's easy to forget when I'm circling around in anxiety's orbit.
Dan Seigal, the popularizer of neurobiology and what's called "interpersonal neurobiology," states plainly that the definition of health at all levels is integration. So what's happening on the right side of the anxiety mountain is that the belief systems and psycho-somatic looping of anxiety are being exposed to both new physical information (the experience of running) and new cognitive information (experience of the "outside" world, memories of relatedness in city life, and the physical sensations contradicting the isolation fears of anxiety--i.e., the body remembers it's integration into the larger world, and the mind then shifts with this different reality) which ends up in an integration of body and mind and belief systems. Anxiety is about forgetting our inherent relatedness to a supportive, loving reality (maybe family, maybe community, definitely Spirit), forgetting integration. From that perspective of isolation, as a statement of truth about reality, then the contraction and hiding (or ego-projection) makes a lot of sense. So it takes an act of faith to remember and trust that acknowledging anxiety's injunctions but not acting on them is going to, essentially, feel good.
I ran the regular course, and felt much better towards the end, when I went to my favorite coffee shop and got a large coffee. Unfortunately, coffee does often act as a support for my system as an anti-anxiety (I'll write about this some time, as there's a whole history to my relationship to coffee, like any addict's love affair with his drug of choice), and it did help me correct my course for the rest of the day.
It's been a nice afternoon, hanging out in Heather's room, working on the finances and then me writing and doing some email stuff regarding a therapy group I'm planning with a colleague. Now we're having pizza and Heather's playing the new game ("Bioshock," truly about the most gorgeous and smart video game I've seen in my whole 30 year dalliance). Toasting my feet at the lodge's fire...
