The issue of worry and anxiety is a major problem in our society. According to one set of researchers, ”anxiety has become the number one mental health issue in North America. It's estimated that one third of the North American adult population experiences anxiety unwellness issues” (1). There have been many theories about the source of this anxiety. In this blog, I want to explore a spiritual cause of this anxiety, namely that anxiety naturally arises when we become identified with the cage of our constructed self rather than our essential self or divine nature. When we are born as infants, we have no constructed self. We experience ourselves as one with mother, father, and everything else within our experience. There is no me and other, just a sense of one undivided experience that flows from one moment to the next. This unstructured nature of the child within the Diamond Approach is seen as the essential nature of the human being, albeit in an immature undeveloped state. However, throughout our human development years, we begin to develop a self and a supporting narrative that is based on our experience in all of our relationships--- how we experience others treating us and how we experienced ourselves. Positive and especially negative experiences really shape how we come to see others and ourselves. By the time we enter our adult years, we have a constructed self made up of many ego structures including thinking patterns, beliefs, coping strategies, emotional states, unresolved memories, self images, relationship patterns, etc. This constructed self is really a conditioned self based on all our historical conditioning from our childhood. When we become identified with our conditional structured self, we take this to be who we are; this is our identity. I see this identity as our “fallen” identity because this constructed self is very different than our free-flowing experiential nature of our younger self. This constructed self has a very limited view of who we each are based on our history. Our constructed self has a whole bunch of rules that our ego follows to keep us safe and out of harm’s way. It often has rules that determine if and when we cry; rules about how we express our anger, if we do; rules that determine what will bring us joy and make us happy; rules that cause us to please others so that we will feel valuable or lovable; rules about relationships, who are safe people and not safe people. The rules are endless within our constructed self. Our constructed self can make us feel very safe, but we can also feel very constricted. We can feel very alone for we have few friends or people we can talk to---because our internal rules may say we can’t trust people. We feel tears and compassion welling up inside us, but our egoic rules say that it is dangerous to be vulnerable, so we shut them down. We sense anger and strength arising and a desire to speak up and share our truth, but our rules say that speaking out is risky and so we hush up. These many rules of the constructed self that make us feel safe, if we follow them, also make us feel constricted and trapped. In fact, we are trapped for when we follow the rules of our constructed self, we are living in a psychological cage, the cage of our constructed self. What do you experience when you try to break these internal rules, when you try to step out through the door from your egoic cage? You will experience anxiety and fear. In fact, these anxieties can become quite intense for we often have an internal voice demanding us to get back asap into the safe cage of our constructed self. That voice is the voice of our “superego” or “internal critic.” When our internal critic speaks, our feeling of anxiety often escalates causing us to return quickly to the cage of safety. I am very suspicious that one major cause of anxiety in our North American culture is related to this constructed self that I have just described. Everybody has a constructed self to some extent due to our childhood holding environment. With this constructed self comes a pervasive anxiety that emerges every time we seek to, by choice for personal growth reasons, or are forced to, like doing a speech in school, move beyond the safe confines of our constructed self. In our current times, when a child’s holding environment seems less supportive, loving, attuned, and consistent due to both parents often working, I have wondered if we are now raising children with more pronounced structured selves thus leading to more serious anxiety issues. This anxiety that I am describing is actually a spiritual anxiety, an anxiety that arises when we become identified to our constructed self, our egoic cage. When we spend most of our lives within the egoic cage, we are trapped by the rules of this cage. There is little space or freedom for us to experience God's spirit or Being within our lives where we trust the Divine to move and interact with our being. This lack of experience of Being within the egoic cage is why many people struggle with experiencing the spirit of God in their life and instead wrestle with depression, despair, deadness, anxiety, etc. in their lives. When we follow the rules of our structured self, we are not able to follow and join with the spirit of God and Being within our soul. There is some verses in the Bible that capture this sense of trying to follow two sets of rules or masters. The gospel of Matthew records Jesus teaching, “‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matt 6: 24). Then Jesus continues, “‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?* And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even King Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will God not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your God knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and God's righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matt 4: 25-32) The issue that Jesus is describing in this text is what the Diamond Approach calls Basic Trust, trusting in God/Essence, the dynamic of goodness and love at the core of Reality, others, and ourselves. Because of this lack of Basic Trust, we trust the rules of our structured self more …just like, Jesus says, the Gentiles or non-religious people do. Rather, we are to trust the dynamics of God/Essence at the core of Reality. This is what Jesus means when he says, “strive first for the kingdom of God and God's righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt 6: 33). If we are going to experience the freeing dynamics of God’s spirit in our life, we have to leave our egoic cage and “seek the Kingdom/Presence of God.” In doing so, we will rediscover the goodness and love of God’s Spirit and Essence at the centre of life. This means that we need to face and befriend our anxiety rather than run from it back into our egoic cage of safety. As we are able to be with and inquire into our anxiety in a contemplative prayerful way, God’s spirit can heal the broken trust at the root of it through experiences of insight, understanding, compassion, and other aspects of God’s grace. As this happens, the anxiety breaks and basic trust begins to flow again allowing us to experience aspects of the fullness of life and God’s spirit that can only be experienced outside the cage.
As we experience this transformation process over and over again, we eventually realize that instead of escaping our anxiety by returning to our egoic cage we need to, instead, go in the opposite direction and lean into our anxiety. As we do so, we discover that this anxiety is actually a doorway to our spiritual freedom. Questions to Ponders
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