Do what you're afraid of doing...over and over and over

This is the advice from my therapist.  I've tried to wrap my head around what that means to me.  In many ways friends and family consider me fearless.  Physically, I feel like nothing is out of reach, and there's nothing to fear.  Last year I delivered my baby girl into this world with my own hands, in my own home.  Six months later I ran my first full marathon.

Despite that confidence, I find myself disabled periodically by anxiety and depression.  It's strange.  When you write things like that, the words seem BIG.  So heady.  But when you live it, the feelings just seem like old friends.  Your life.  The only way you've ever lived.  I never considered myself an anxious person, or a depressed one, until recently.  Sometimes you have no idea how low you've set the bar.

So tonight it struck me across the mind.  What I'm afraid of.  What I avoid at all costs, and thus should do over and over and over.

Feel.  

Of course I'm not alone.  Our society specializes in enabling us to avoid feelings we find intolerable.  Everyone has their preferred method, or several.  Be it TV or alcohol, drugs or church.  We continue to hope, once we come back to consciousness, the feelings will have vanished as quickly as they appeared.  The uninvited guests in our brain and body.

But contrary to popular opinion (mine), emotions are not terrorists of the soul.  They are messengers.  Trying to inform us what works, what doesn't, when something is amiss within us, or outside us.  Ultimately emotions tell us what assumptions and beliefs we hold about ourselves, and the world.  Because of course, each emotion is only a by-product of an assumption, interpretation, or belief (conscious or unconscious).

The TV is off.  Facebook is closed.  My glass of wine has lost its affect.

So I practice feeling.  Allowing these guests to wash over me like waves.  Completely immersed one moment, and receding the next.  Observing, but not judging.  Somehow the feelings are no longer intolerable.  In fact, they never were.  I was intolerant, judgmental.  There is peace in acceptance.

Few people excel at this feeling business.  Most of us confuse one emotion for another, or won't admit to any feeling whatsoever.  We excel at avoidance.  Maybe we should all practice.  Stop avoiding us.  You stop avoiding you.  I stop avoiding me.


Maybe if we tolerate ourselves, we will prove more tolerant of one another.