In Julia Cameron's lovely book Walking in This World, I recently re-read something about worry and negative imagination that stood out to me. If you are a sensitive person who worries a lot and finds themselves tripping over unruly fears, then this might resonate with you too.
Julia begins by telling us that we need working definitions for the mishmash of fears, anxieties and doubts that ail us. Only when we know what exactly we are dealing with can we start to work through it.
This is what Julia says about worry:
"Worry has an anxious and unfocused quality. It skitters subject to subject, fixating first on one thing, then on another. Like a noisy vacuum cleaner, its chief function is to distract us from what we really are afraid of. "
Its chief function is to distract us from what we are really afraid of. Even though it leaches all the fluidity and joy out of our lives, worry serves as a distraction. It leads our eyes away from our spaces of deep discomfort.
How is worry different from fear?
"Fear is not obsessive like worry and not escalating like panic. Fear is more reality based. It asks us to check something out. Unpleasant as it is, fear is our ally. Ignore it and the fear escalates. A sense of loneliness joins its clamor. At its root, fear is based in a sense of isolation. We feel like David facing Goliath with no help from his cronies and a concern that this time, his trusty slingshot might not work."
Fear is healthy when it points to something that needs to be turned over, needs to be double-checked. But fear is also amorphous. We add to the drama when we let the fear fester. We don't pay attention to the kernel of true concern, and our fear becomes the monster that scares us.
Unlike fear, worry is obsessive. It's a thought we pick up and smoke at. Today, we are worried about this one thing. Tomorrow, it is something else. We are hooked into this way of behaving. We might have little trust in the world around us. Maybe, we suffered from trauma at an earlier time and now worrying is our way of projecting into the future, trying to control it from hurting us.
When we worry, what are are effectively doing is channel our creative energies into something that is not constructive. This is what Julia has to stay about an imagination that has gone haywire.
"The more active--and even more negative--your imagination is, the more it is a sign of creative energy. Think of yourself as a racehorse--all that agitated animation as you prance from paddock to track bodes well for your ability to actually run.
In both my teaching and collaborative experience, I have often found that the most "fearful" and "neurotic" people are actually those with the best imaginations. They have simply channeled their imaginations down the routes of their cultural conditioning."
Culturally, we are trained to worry about certain things. We are trained to prepare for any negative possibility. And we might have had experiences that cause us to always be on the defensive, that cause us to worry. But worrying about what can't be controlled obviously doesn't help us. It just casts a film on our experience. It muddies our world today.
As someone who is prone to worrying, I know how insidious worry is, how it curls and hisses around you. It comes cloaked in reasonableness. It takes our energy and warps it into something that doesn't serve us.
We could take that energy and start doing something with it actively. We could start channeling it by moving it from our bodies. We could distract ourselves by gardening or going for a walk or making something. We can see that the same imagination that brings us our gloom and doom predictions can be channeled so it becomes full and free.
We can start seeing that worry really is, as Julia calls it, "imagination's negative stepsister." If that is the case, we are just a few steps away from dealing with it. We can have our arsenal of tools ready - our paints or our walking shoes or our camera. We can choose what we do with our attention and our imagination.
What do you think? What are your tools for dealing with negative imagination? How can you step away from worry and into the expansive possibilities on the other side?
As a recovering perfectionist and also as an HSP, I don't like making mistakes. Deciding is a long-winded, arduous process. Like everyone, I have my share of regrets about paths not taken, about all the times when I made decisions that caused my life to contract.
And so, decision-making feels like a process fraught with challenges. It feels heavy.
There are so many options that I often spend my frenetic energy trying to make the "best" decision.
Today, while driving to the library, I heard a conversation that puts this dilemma into perspective. The program that was on talked about whether parents should send their child to a private school that was expensive or whether they should opt for public school.
The private school might or might not contribute to the child's future. Should the parents try to get the best that money can buy for their child? Should they stretch and go for the private school? Should they consider the cost and opt for the public school?
This is the kind of decision that involves many factors. There are no simple answers.
How do we make such decisions?
The financial adviser said something that struck me as approaching decision-making from a different psychological space. Don't decide based on what might happen in the future, he said. Decide based on what the situation is right now. Then, you will have the assurance that you made the best decision that you could.
Don't decide based on what might happen in the future.
What an interesting way of approaching this process. As someone who splits hair while making decisions, trying to factor in each and every thing that might happen (which in reality might or might not), this approach seemed so honoring of the present truth to me.
The future is unpredictable. If we try to reach too far into the future, and try to factor in what really is ambiguous right now, we can paralyze ourselves. Accepting that the future is unpredictable and deciding based on our situation now means that we make the best decision that we can right now.
What is the best thing to do based on the situation right now. This idea struck me as so different from what I normally do, and it gives me a different way of deciding. I want to experiment with this.
What do you think? Is this something that makes sense to you?
At the beginning of this year, I slipped through the fissures of my changing life and into my dream world. I have always had vivid dreams, especially at times of major changes. When I shifted from India to the States a few years back, my dreams were filled with symbolic images. One of them was of weddings taking place. While I was newly-married myself, these images continued to appear over the next three years. This was a time of change for me, a time when different parts of my psyche were coming together and something new was coming into being.
Then, in the course of the last year and a half, I stumbled upon Dream Work, the process of paying attention to our dreams and working to understand their deeper meaning. An essay that I was writing at that time led me deeper into Carl Jung's work. There they were again -- dreams and their meanings.
Dreams are extremely important in Jungian psychology. They are the gateway to the unconscious, a space that contains not just our repressed aspects but also the underlying matrix of what it means to be human. It is from this space that sparks of creativity shoot up. The image that comes to my mind is of a deep, dark well. You can't see what's down below. But when you draw the rope and send a bucket down its depths, you can hear the splash of water. When you pull the bucket up, you have something that nourishes you. You still can't map out the depths that lie below, but you have an idea of what they contain.
One of the dream images that has appeared in my dreams are houses. They look like they are either breaking down or are in the process of being constructed. We could all hazard a guess at what this means. The metaphor is clear. Something new is being built in the psyche. Some new change is afoot.
Recently, I came across an article by Thomas Moore in the July/Aug issue of Spirituality & Health magazine that instantly interested me because Moore was talking about houses in dreams. Moore is a psychotherapist who is best know for his wonderful book Care of the Soul, and he practices depth psychotherapy that is largely centered on dreams. This means that he knows a lot about them!
Moore talks of the symbolic meaning of houses under construction in both his own dreams and those of his clients.
"I remember a dream I had in my late thirties. I was walking through a house in the early stages of construction. I had to be careful because it was so unfinished and fragile. I remember walking on a bouncy two-by-four and knew I could easily fall and get hurt. This was an intense period in my life. I had just been denied tenure at the university where I had hoped to spend my life teaching. I wasn't sure where to go from there and was trying to become a good psychotherapist. I had had considerable training for this work, but it's the kind of profession where the necessary skills are personal. You may have to go through several emotional trials and deep changes to be good at it. It was at this point that I had my house-under-construction dream."
He tells us that it is helpful to know when something in us is being built.
"You can then better understand the unusual feelings of being incomplete and going through unintended changes. You may feel your world shifting and not yet ready for projects and developments in your life. You may need to prepare for the arrival of a relatively new self."
He talks of the specific meaning inherent in images of houses as compared to other images that depict change.
"In similar situations you may have dreams that have general feeling of change: waiting for a train to depart or a plane to take off. But these images are quite different. Construction is the specific condition of something being built. You're not on a journey; you're being remodeled or fabricated."
Moore talks of how writers on the soul often quote John Keats who said: "Call the world, if you please, "the vale of soul-making."
"The word is "make," rather than "journey" or "discover." It's in the spirit of Keats to say that our souls are constructed, like a house being built. Piece by piece, nail by nail, the structure of our being goes up and makes a space in which our lives can play out and find meaning."
We need to have patience during this process. We are under construction. We have to wait to see what's being built. In Moore's dream of the two-by-four, that construction was ongoing. Some things were ending, while a new structure was being created from the ground up. He says that naturally, like any other person, he was more aware of the endings than the beginnings.
What getting intimate with the inner recesses of our psyches gives us is an understanding of where we are in the process. We realize that these are tender times. These are times when we have to let the forces that are working in us build us. We can be idle for a while "so the crew can do its work." The creative force is moving through us and creating a shape and a form.
We might feel fragile during these times, but as Moore tells us, this is also a period full of promise and hope. The new is opening up like petals. We are alive, humming with life. We might feel incomplete, but our full possibilities are being drawn out.
Engaging with our dreams can give us this awareness of our psyches. We are starting to listen to the language of symbols and images, and in turn, it is giving us signs and guideposts to tell us where we are and where we are headed.
Does working with dreams interest you? You can start engaging with your dreams by keeping a diary beside your bedside and writing down the dreams as soon as you wake up. Even minutes after waking up, dreams tend to disappear into thin air, so writing them down as soon as possible is essential.
I read Elizabeth Gilbert's book on the creative process, Big Magic, yesterday. She writes simply and directly, but sparks shoot up at certain points. There is a lightning-quick energy in the book, the energy that belongs to the author and that magically dissolves in the gooey innards of the book.
The book is like a shaking-up of all the used, rusted beliefs that we might be carrying as creative people. It asks us to lighten up. It talks about how "creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred." It tells us that "what we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all." It tells us to lighten up and to ride the magical steed of creativity, to surrender to its will, to understand that starting a conversation with our creativity has no guarantees except the full aliveness it brings to our lives.
Gilbert tells us her own unique perspective on that age-old struggle of the artiste: feeling that he or she is just making the same things that have always been made.
"Maybe you fear that you are not original enough. Maybe that's the problem--you're worried that your ideas are commonplace and pedestrian, and therefore unworthy of creation. Aspiring writers will often tell me, "I have an idea, but I'm afraid it's already been done."
She goes on to say: "Well, yes, it probably has already been done. Most things have already been done--but they have not yet been done by you.
By the time Shakespeare was finished with his run on life, he'd pretty much covered every story line there is, but that hasn't stopped nearly five centuries of writers from exploring the same story lines all over again. (And remember, many of those stories were already cliches long before even Shakespeare got his hands on them.) When Picasso saw the ancient cave paintings at Lascaux, he reportedly said, "We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years"--which is probably true, but so what?"
I remember reading this quote by Picasso a long time back, and at that time it had struck me as sad and as if there was nothing left in the world to do. I was a child then who had barely started a conversation with her creativity, and something in the quote had shut me down. Over the years, I think I have often made this excuse to stop myself from wading in the mud to get to the lotus.
Yes, everything has been done before. Most things, in countless fields, have been done already. But what does that mean if you are a creative person? Elizabeth gives us her answer:
"So what if we repeat the same themes? So what if we circle around the same ideas, again and again, generation after generation? So what if every new generation feels the same urges and asks the same questions that human beings have been feeling and asking for years? We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours."
She goes on to say that authenticity impresses her much more than originality as she gets older.
"Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share. If it's authentic enough, believe me--it will feel original."
So, if you want to make something, make it. If you want to try your hand at something new, whether it is creative with a capital C or a creative expression that feeds the rest of your life, do it. Maybe you want to do something silly or something that others might consider silly. A silly thing I did some months ago was buy an adult coloring book and color away. Someone made an off-hand comment about it when I shared it. Well actually it was more like an off-hand, non-understanding "I don't get this" look and complete non-interest. Although I continued coloring after that for some time, something in me seemed to curl around this look and loosened its grip on this creative, playful activity.
I dropped it. I abandoned it. It looked silly, but it was far from silly. It was one of the most heart-nourishing activities I have ever done. In the months previously, my heart had felt curdled. I think it was the creative child in me that was out of sorts. It had checked out. But with the coloring book, I had tools that this little child could play in. It delighted in the choosing of the colors. It knew there was nothing to achieve, just an engagement with the colors blooming on the page. My mind slowed down. In fact, it retreated to the back and stopped its incessant chatter almost as soon as I started coloring.
For those few weeks, I had a tool to quiet my automatic mind, to drop down from it into my heart. I felt like I was pouring the colors back into my own heart. And yet, I gave it up because of a look.
We give up such important things because someone else doesn't understand. But I will pick up my coloring book again and color in my lovely mandalas. I have found something, however small, that nourishes my being. It bypasses my mind and goes to my essence, the artiste who loves to play with colors, who likes making lines on the page, who feels like this little task is stringing up the pieces of disjointed time and making it flow smoothly again.
Why would I give up something that makes me feel alive? Why would you?
Sometime last year, I was lucky enough to attend a concert by Steven Halpern, a Grammy-nominated musician who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of New Age music. It was the first time that I was introduced to brainwave entrainment music - music that alters brainwave frequencies, which results in an altered state of consciousness.
The state of consciousness that this music induced was the Alpha State.
So, what exactly is this state, and why is it helpful? Specific brain waves occur for specific states of consciousness and specific activities. For example: Beta brain waves are associated with normal waking consciousness and a state of high alertness, logic and critical reasoning. Beta brainwaves are associated with processes that help us function in our day-to-day lives. But on the flip side, always being in the Beta state means stress and anxiety.
Alpha brain waves are the waves associated with a state of deep relaxation. Think back to a time when you were daydreaming. How did you feel then? When we are in the Alpha state, we are in a state of deep relaxation. Our imagination, creative abilities and ability to visualize are heightened. This is the state in which intuition becomes accessible. Instead of the constant churning of the mind, we have access to a deeper state of being. We feel connected to ourselves. We feel connected to a well of deep wisdom that is inaccessible to our automatic mind.
The wonderful news is that just listening to certain sounds and music can put you in the Alpha state. You have an escape hatch from your overactive mind, into a space that you probably remember from an earlier time in your life when daydreaming and the imagination were your friends. Now, you might be caught in the Beta state, like many of us.
In Beta, we are cut off from our intuition. We are cut off from the flow that gives us a sense of connection to something that is bigger than us.
I have started listening to brainwave entrainment music again. It is the best part of my week. I feel images swirling, coming up. I feel like my tightfisted mind relaxing its grip. There is imagination in Alpha. There is a space that feels part of the whole, connected and not fragmented.
If you would like to try this, and I hope you do, then Steven Halpern's Deep Alpha is a lovely album to start with. I hope it connects you to the stars and the moon and the many colors that live beneath the rubble of our conscious minds.
