Worry

My cat is a real night-huntress. And sometimes, when I get up in the morning, I don’t find her in her customary position: curled up, sleeping soundly on her blanket. Immediately, irrational fears pop into my head. Where is she? Did something happen? Usually, she comes running into the house five minutes later, meowing loudly, demanding attention. I didn’t have to worry. And still I do.

Worry is a form of fear, which I wrote about in an earlier blog (Emotions). But it’s not the immediate fear that helps us fight or flee when we’re in danger. It’s a more insidious fear: afraid of what we think might happen. Our mind conjures up possible scenarios, we grab onto the worst possible scenario, and start playing it, like a movie, over and over in our heads.

Remember falling in love? Remember worrying every time your beloved didn’t call, show up, pay you a compliment? I certainly do! Your mind starts saying, maybe he/she no longer loves me, maybe… Fear grabs hold of your mind and keeps you from sleeping.

If there is something you could or should do about the situation, to prevent that which you fear from happening, then at least there is a foundation to act from. Then the fear is a signal to act. However, unfortunately, we all tend to worry about things we can’t do anything about.

Yes, if anything happens to that fierce little huntress of mine, I will be very upset and sad. That doesn’t warrant locking her up in the house, however. It’s her nature to hunt and her life is as vulnerable to harm as mine. Worrying about it will not change that.

And if the person you’re in love with, starts drifting away, there’s also very little you can do about it. Worrying will only eat your energy away and cost you valuable sleep.

These are the moments that it’s invaluable to sit, mindfully, with your turmoil of emotions, observing what is happening, accepting it, breathing through it. Or to go out in nature and tell your worries to a tree or bird. Or to write, paint, or dance your feelings. In all things that happen in life, there’s a lesson to learn.

There is an old Mother Goose rhyme that expresses this very well:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

Distraction

From time to time, I need to retreat into an empty space. Not doing, just being. That’s the place where I receive inspiration for my writing and other creations. My Muse is waiting there, to whisper wisdom, stories, and beautiful images into my ears.

However, I’m very good at doing everything but sitting quietly and being. And this has not only kept me from writing the blog for the past two weeks, it’s also kept me from other creations that are patiently waiting until I finally gather the focus to do them.

In the Wheel of the Four Directions, the South is the place of doing. During these lovely, long summer days I spend a great deal of time with my feet on the ground: working in the garden, organizing my house, giving workshops, etc. And in the evenings, when my body is tired of doing, I find other distractions: the webcam on the osprey nest, the World Championship Football, socializing with friends…

The West is the place of retreating inside oneself and just being. Open to receive whatever is being whispered in the stillness. That really does sound more like a place to be in the autumn, but in the endless cycles of life we do need to be in the West more often than once a year!

The rain we’re having today is a blessing. No temptation to go out and do things, no reason not to sit quietly and write. Yes, I know that writing is also doing but I can only get there through that quiet place.

And so I ask myself, what part of me is so resistant to retreating into the stillness? What inner voice whispers to me, right at this moment, to get up from writing this blog and go do the laundry?
“Just for a few minutes, you can always get back to this later,” the voice insinuates.

There is a part of me that doesn’t like the stillness, doesn’t like to stop doing. And so I sit quietly with that part of me, asking it what it needs. What is its concern, how can I convince it to leave me alone every once in a while? We strike a bargain, my doing voice and I. Once a day I’m allowed take a short break to just sit and be, to retreat inside and listen to the voice of my Muse, to gather inspiration, to write.

My part of the bargain is that I stop thinking negatively about that part of me that lets itself get distracted. It’s not much, but it’s a start… The laundry can wait.

Emotions

I once met a man who told me, “I have no emotions, emotions are a woman thing.” I smiled, knowing that, when someone speaks with this much conviction, it makes no sense to tell him otherwise.

The primary emotions in our lives are Fear, Anger, Grief, Joy, and Compassion. When we deny ourselves the experience of these important emotions, it can make us ill. I have seen this happen over and over again. This time I’d like to talk about it from my own personal experience.

As a child I lived in fear and I had good reason to. As I discussed earlier this spring, fear is the emotion that saves our lives when we meet up with a life-threatening situation. Emotional (and physical) abuse is a life-threatening situation for a small child. There are three possible reactions to fear: fight, flee, or freeze. I froze a lot and sometimes I had the presence of mind to run away and hide. That probably saved me from becoming emotionally crippled.

The act of freezing prevents a person (and especially a child) from totally inhabiting his/her body and space. And so, in later years, I learned to ground myself and be comfortable in my physical reality. In the 5Rhythms dance, the first rhythm, Flowing, is about this very thing: connecting to your breath, grounding with your feet, and being totally present on the dance floor.

As I grew into puberty, and started understanding what was being done to me, my fear turned to anger. I started teaching myself to fight back. Of course, the anger was, at first, misdirected and ineffective. But that isn’t the point, the point is that the anger needs to find a means of expression. When anger gets bottled up, it becomes a black thing inside us that eats us.

Only when we have been able to breathe and move through our fear, are we able to release our anger. The second rhythm of the dance, Staccato, is the rhythm of fire, of the fire of anger and being able to stand our ground.

But life can still wound us and I have been no exception. I have lost loved ones and hopes for the future. I have been forced to see things that I didn’t want to see. I have been hurt by the wounds of others, including the wounding of the earth. And these are the moments to let go of all thoughts of staying calm and rational, to just let the healing power of the tears flow.

Holding back grief will sap you of all your strength, all your energy, and wear you out. In the dance, the rhythm of Chaos helps you let go of control and feel your grief. But only if you have been able to move through your fear and let out your anger.

And so I have learned to let go and express the important emotions of fear, anger, and grief. What happens then, is that life lightens up. Suddenly we are able to see the beauty of sunrise, sunset, and rainbows, no matter what our circumstances are. Suddenly it’s no longer about doing and having but about being. Joy is the ability to be with ourselves and our lives, no matter what is going on. Joy is the Lyrical rhythm of the dance, the rhythm of lightness.

And at this point, we… I… can let go of my preoccupation with myself and my own story and turn my love and understanding to the world around me. To view everything that ever happened to me or through me with compassion. To view the world, with all its craziness, with compassion. Then I… we… enter into the age of wisdom in the rhythm of Stillness.