It's a warm sunny summer day in Edinburgh and the city is buzzing with life. Sitting on the cool grass in St Andrew’s square, I feel the energy of the busy city. Sirens are screaming. people walking around slowly or rushing to be somewhere. Tourists strolling the streets with that awe in their eyes of seeing this majestic city for the first time, stopping from time to time to take a quick photograph.This is one of those rare occasions when I have a break from work and I can feel my self slowing down, enjoying the moment, feeling the sunshine on my skin the heat on my palms and feet. How many moments in this precious life have we got where we can slow down and be? Really be with ourselves. how many moments, really?
Moments in our lives we can be with ourselves. Precious moments, silent moments, connecting with ourselves and with God moments, feeling the sun on our skin, the earth on our feet, the music in our ears, the love in our hearts moments. We dont have many times like that and perhaps we dont create times like that in our day to day lives. Instead we frantically chase the addiction of distraction in any possible way. Social media, work, gaming, alcohol, drugs, sex and the least goes on and on and on.
Today I am thinking of anxiety in terms of connection with ourselves, with our own hearts and a deep sense of who we are. Throughout my years of working with anxiety in a personal and professional level, what has come up and stood out most of the time was the immense disconnection from the self, from a sense of belonging and from a deep feeling of safety in this world.
Anxiety is a symptom. A symptom of a disconnected, hurtful, shameful, judgemental inner and outer world. It is all those small parts of ourselves that were so deeply hurt, traumatised, brutalized judged humiliated and then they were left alone to cry. Anxiety is their cries heard from a dungeon deep in our bodies where they were left alone to bleed for so many years.Those parts are now treated once again like they are bad, crazy, shameful, something we desperately try to get rid of in any way we can. We use medication and drugs to tune down the desperation and helplessness of our human nature. Of who we truly are in our core. And in that way we tone down our colorful, full of imagination and wonder humanity.
In those occasions when we slow down enough to be with our selves, we sometimes find in the most unexpected of ways that anxiety is a pathway. A dark one as such, full of muddy waters ,skulls and dungeons of pain and grief. But it is a pathway. A pathway to emotional, mental, spiritual healing. To who we truly are in our cores as wonderful,perfectly imperfect human beings. A pathway to our vulnerable human hearts.
As a counsellor it's my job and my priviledge to help you find your way back to yourself. And if there is a mantra I could give you today to repeat again and again, that would be, don't abandon yourself. Do- not- abandon- yourself. You are inherently and eternally worthy.
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