Distinctions

• Relentless, continuous, worrisome thoughts about the future, i.e. inventing endless threatening “what if?” scenarios and imagining our response to them. These thoughts have superglue stickiness and rapid cycle times. They keep going and going, sometimes even in our sleep, and frequently forming the basis of our conversations with our family, loved ones and close colleagues. Sharing our anxiety frequently substitutes for genuine intimacy.
• Our bodies being in some state of fight or flight with the accompanying stress hormones—we feel jumpy, agitated, off-center. After a short period, we become used to this state and start to feel anxious when it’s not there. Our bodies readily respond with this experiential state to worrisome thoughts, and we then begin to be concerned about that state so more worrisome thoughts are generated. Around and around we go. When anxious we often don’t eat as well as necessary nor sleep as much as we need. Both contribute to our more easily feeling anxious.
• Our emotions keep bringing our attention back to phenomena that our nervous system has identified as potentially dangerous. Anxiety as described fits that criteria. Consequently, even though we don’t like it, or think it would be better to release it, our focus keeps coming back to anxiety.
• Besides what’s above, our nervous system concludes that there must be something wrong because we are feeling anxious. This has us redouble our efforts to scenario-plan our way out of it.

Sound/feel familiar?

When caught in the cycle we feel, in our body and emotions, that it’s very dangerous to let go of anxiety since something terrible might happen (the internal logic is that we must be anxious because something bad is about to happen) if we are not endlessly considering what might occur and preparing ourselves for it. Like I said, it feels intelligent to be anxious.

Worrying and planning only lead to more of the same.

Or you could take up this alternative. Prepare your mind, heart and body for what’s coming—inevitably coming.

For those of you who have done our Professional Coaching Course, you know this list well:

We are going to get old.
We are going to get sick.
We are going to die.
We are going to lose all of our relationships and all our possessions.
(And this is true for everyone we love)

And we know these truths deeply, even as we attempt to mitigate their importance or deny their reality.

We get anxious about smaller matters, being late for a meeting, running out of money, concluding that we are not doing so well compared to others and so on. I propose that these anxieties are subsets, shadow manifestations of the big four listed.

How, then, do we prepare?

We prepare by cultivating a body, mind and heart that can tolerate searing loss. We can intentionally build / generate a deep presence that can abide, can accompany us and others in the midst of these horrible events.

Shifting beliefs alone will not be sufficient for many of us. Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, when in the midst of a world-collapsing loss (often the unexpected, out-of-sequence death of a beloved), some well-meaning person offers a bromide like, “It’s all happening for a reason” or “Something great is going to happen now.”

I am strongly recommending this decades-long path. Here are some of the steps.

First Aid

• Learn, through close observation followed by rigorous experimentation, how to disrupt your own patterns of anxiety.
• What are your patterns of anxiety? Around what relationships? What activities? What events in the world?
• What patterns of stress, neglect of self-care are the seedbeds of anxiety?
• Which somatic interventions disrupt / stop the anxiety in the moment? Slow, deep breathing? Sensing into your body? Focusing your attention closely on an object in your immediate environment? Gazing at the sky? Exercising (aerobically, energetically, stretching)? Getting a massage? Being with someone you love? Being with your pet dog or cat? What works for you?

In The Background

• Attend to your body, relationships, physical environment so that they are supportive.
• Begin keeping track of the difficult experiences that you have been in and deeply registering that you survived, are okay afterwards.
• Find people with whom you can have deep conversations—with whom you feel safe and articulate and from whom you are open to receiving guidance, support, feedback. Such people may already exist in your life; I urge you to take care of your relationship with them. If they don’t, please begin experimenting with the people you know in order to find the ones with whom you can have these types of conversations. Sometimes it will have to be a professional person, someone in your spiritual community, a therapist or coach.
• At a speed that suits your body–mind, be around people in the midst of painful loss—volunteer at a hospice, get trained to work at a suicide hotline, become skillful at working with people with trauma. If this list is too steep for you, find alternatives and slowly—never forcing yourself—discover your wherewithal to be present in difficult situations.

Ongoing

• Take up a spiritual practice that reveals your true nature. Practically, this means being a practitioner in the mystic side of spiritual lineages—the group of people who engage practices that give them the experience of the teaching well beyond doctrinal understanding.
• Grow deep roots—physically connect to nature, join a heartfelt group dedicated to others, experientially explore the depths of your own body-mind, notice and live in the reality that everyone and everything is co-creating each other.

What would you add?

Please do not neglect this in your own life, and please encourage others—family members, friends, colleagues and coaching clients—to take it up.

The poetry, practice and book of the quarter will explore these topics further.

Take care of yourself.

Sending love,

• Did I experience anxiety? In precisely what form?
• How did I respond to the anxiety? What effect did that have on me and the anxiety?
• What could be a more skillful way of responding to it?
• What will I take up, put down or alter from what I observed in this exercise?

Storm Fear

Robert Frost

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lowest chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
‘Come out! Come out!’—
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether ’tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.

A Decade

Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

New Heavens for Old

Amy Lowell

I am useless.
What I do is nothing,
What I think has no savour.
There is an almanac between the windows:
It is of the year when I was born.

My fellows call me to join them,
They shout for me,
Passing the house in a great wind of vermilion banners.
They are fresh and fulminant,
They are indecent and strut with the thought of it,
They laugh, and curse, and brawl,
And cheer a holocaust of “Who comes firsts!” at the iron fronts of the houses at the two edges of the street.
Young men with naked hearts jeering between iron house-fronts,
Young men with naked bodies beneath their clothes
Passionately conscious of them,
Ready to strip off their clothes,
Ready to strip off their customs, their usual routine,
Clamoring for the rawness of life,
In love with appetite,
Proclaiming it as a creed,
Worshipping youth,
Worshipping themselves.
They call for women and the women come,
They bare the whiteness of their lusts to the dead gaze of the old house-fronts,
They roar down the street like flame,
They explode upon the dead houses like new, sharp fire.

But I—
I arrange three roses in a Chinese vase:
A pink one,
A red one,
A yellow one.
I fuss over their arrangement.
Then I sit in a South window
And sip pale wine with a touch of hemlock in it,
And think of Winter nights,
And field-mice crossing and re-crossing
The spot which will be my grave.

Dear friends,

In the last issue of Distinctions we inquired about how you share your experience of the PCC with others. We have since begun looking more deeply into the kinds of folks who end up at NVW, what their motivations are, and what possibilities are opened for them in the PCC.

As our biggest source of new students, we’re deeply curious not just how you talk about this work, but how you express it in the world in a way that inspires others (Justin, Lizzie, and Angela’s projects featured in this issue are great examples of this).

We’d love to know how your unique light is serving as a beacon to others. Please send your news and ideas in writing, voice or video recordings, or any other method (get creative!) to [email protected]. This is for our research and not intended for public viewing; however, if your submission is particularly stellar we may ask your permission to share it.

We’re inspired by your courage for stepping deeper into life every day.

With love,

Sahar Azarabadi & Adam Klein

Graduate updates

Angela King (2014) is the host of Innerforce, a weekly radio show on VoiceAmerica’s business channel. Designed for busy professionals, Innerforce offers wisdom and practices to spark inspiration, vitality, and creativity. Each episode is in-depth exploration of a topic (mindfulness, self-care, body awareness, emotional intelligence, etc.) that features a discussion with someone from the NVW community and provides a weekly practice guide for listeners. This is a great resource for us, our colleagues and our clients. Congratulations, Ange! Get listening here.

Congratulations and welcome to our new graduates!

PCC “Y” finished their year in Washington DC in March. Congratulations, friends!