As a follow up to
yesterday's post about pairing anxiety with kindness, I'm re-posting an earlier
reflection (below). In The Happiness
Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt writes, "Blessed are the
sense-makers!" He says this because research has shown that people who are
able to 'make sense' of their lives, particularly who are able to integrate trauma
and adversity, are happier than those who are not able to make sense of their
lives. He notes that in various experiments, religious people, in general, test
“happier” than non-religious people--more than likely because religious people
have major paradigms for making sense of life.
James Pennebaker, in his
book, Opening Up, tells us that people who journal (or dialogue with trusted
friends) openly about traumas are healthier than people who don't--at least
they don't go to doctors or hospitals as often.
It makes sense to 'make
sense' of our lives. Mindful practices help by allowing us to see more and more
precisely what’s really going on with us and in us. Contemplative practices in
all spiritual traditions are full of wise, time-tested counsel for becoming
whole.
God bless us—and keep us
on paths of sense-making.
---
Anxiety as
the Abuse of Imagination
Do you remember the scene in the
Lord of the Rings movie where the signal fires get lit? One after another,
across those glorious mountain peaks, the carefully stacked fire wood, soaked
in oil, is ignited and the flames leap up! And the proclamation goes out: “The
Beacons are lit! The Beacons of Gondor are lit!”
The Beacons of Gondor were a sign
that great danger was at hand and help was desperately needed.
Deep anxiety was my mother’s great
wound. When she was 11, her young father, who loved to hunt and who kept 2
dozen dogs, was bitten by one of them and died a horrible death 3 weeks later
from rabies.
It happened in the middle of the
Great Depression. Her mom was forced to take her two girls, leave their home in
the country to take a job as a seamstress 15 miles away in ‘town.’
This upheaval left my mother with a
festering wound, a pervasive terror that no matter how stable life might seem,
something horrible was always looming.
Though she always tried to put a
bold face it, each of her 3 sons inherited this same certainty, a gnawing
unease that somehow something bad is always lurking.
I’ve always known this isn’t really
true. I’ve worked hard to infuse this fear with reason and outward confidence.
But…
I can’t tell you how often I’ve
waked up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning thinking, “The Beacons are lit! The
Beacons are lit! The Beacons of Gondor are lit!” All juiced up with adrenalin,
I brace my half-awake self and anticipate the worst, wrestling with the demon
Dread for the next hour or two.
Of course, my family ‘Beacons’ don’t
work right, they’re dysfunctional. I know that. But part of me wants to stride
out and find the idiot who keeps lighting that first beacon and throw him off
the mountain!
Yet as I’ve sat with my irrational
anxiety, tracing the string of beacons back to their source, I’ve realized it’s
my mother who lit the first one. She’d be the one I’d have to throw off the
mountain.
Somebody said that anxiety is the
abuse of imagination. Sounds about right to me. It’s certainly the misuse of
imagination. Inventing all kinds of nasty future scenarios.
On the other hand, it’s been
imagination, put to better use, that has helped me follow my family’s beacons
back to find my grieving, terrified eleven-year-old mom with matches in her
hand. It's a scene that lights a different kind of fire in the heart.
All wise spiritual traditions and
practices cultivate love. As we meditate, we work on meeting each thought, each
feeling, each image, each story with love. And when love meets pain it morphs
into compassion. That’s just what it does. And when anxiety or any other
unhealthy mental or emotional process is held in compassion it is transformed.
Maybe very slowly and maybe over a long time, but it is transformed.
Healthy imagination and mindfulness
has allowed me to follow this deep trauma to the very place of its birth. Who
knew it could turn out to be a sacred place?
