"What is right with you?" Pt. 21: What are we afraid of anyway?...

It seems that we are faced with a few choices when it comes to anxiety, at least the kind of anxiety that doesn't seem to go away.  We can medicate it either through our physician with medications, or some other substance.  Or we can try to ignore or distract ourselves with other activities, etc.,  But another option is to can endure it, perhaps even learn from it. In its most positive sense, we might ask what is my anxiety telling me?  What are the "gifts of the anxiety?" as Thomas Moore the author of "Care of the Soul" might say.  This idea becomes more possible if we realize that anxiety is not usually what it seems at a distance, or that actually, if we can have the courage to unmask it, we might find something there that was unexpected, different, or perhaps even smaller than we thought that it was from a distance.  This is somewhat like the childhood experience of turning on the light in our room when we were sure that the coat rack or other foreign seeming object in the room was this frightfully ominous and menacing thing. Shining a light on it reveals.  In this way, we find we have this part of ourselves that is afraid of our own shadow.  The shadow, in this regard, includes our fears, our inner conceptions of what we already have feared from before, not what is being feared right now.  Its like we hold back from finding out because our mind is made up that it must be bad! But another thing is happening beside what can be learned:  we are developing courage, strength and endurance to bear some difficult feelings that we have been afraid to approach.  More later. MY WEBSITE