In prayer I asked to understand anxiety. What was it that flowed through me in the middle of the night? What was it trying to show me? Was it just a personal anxiety or connected to something larger?
It was uncomfortable. But I knew – I remembered – how anxiety can cut us off from the healing that comes from the Sacred source. How it can cover over our connection to grace.
I then had dreams showing me how to work with it. Through the dreams I began to piece together an understanding. I write about it here because I know that many women are working, each in our own way, to live from a deeper place. And this requires tending to denser energies such as anxiety, worry or despondency, that sometimes overwhelm us even as we dedicate ourself to service.
During this time I recalled an experience from several years ago. Inwardly I had asked, ‘How can I help the earth?’ And in the night came an inner response: Just love more.
So I was willing to open to the anxiety rather than turn away from it. And then, through another dream, I realized a link between anxiety and surrender. I had no idea, until this dream, that I had been resisting the flow of life. In the dream I was told that the answer to anxiety lies in the Yes, in the surrender.
One night, with this awareness of surrender, I got up instead of lying down when I felt the anxiety. My mind didn’t know what to do next, but something deeper in me knew how to be on this sleepless night. I began to walk quietly, just as a woman knows to walk when in labor. And then I felt to stand still, barely moving. I had a sense that I could breathe with the earth, even if I didn’t know how. In a brief time, the anxiety fell away. In its place came stillness. And then joy, like sunlight.
It was a simple experience, but one that I cannot forget. For it has to with trust of the inner knowing, the greening wisdom that is inside each of us.