Trust your Feelings!

I've realised in the last few days that this anxiety I've been whingeing about is actually something of a gift.

I've learnt a lot from it in the time since I started writing this blog.

I was told some time about the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, a method of discernment in which anxiety is used as an indicator that something is not right or true for the person doing the work. I've come to see my own anxiety in a similar light. I think it is intuition / wisdom / the higher self / God guiding me away from ideas or practices which are not healthy for me, or are not 'my truth,' to risk sounding like a flake!!

Much of the time I think the anxiety acts to prevent me from 'going over the top,' from getting too fundamental or extreme or overly zealous. But then I think my natural 'zeal' and spiritual hunger is a gift as well. It's as though I need both, working in tandem, balancing one another out. Too much spiritual zeal and I get anxious; too little and I lose touch with my spirituality altogether and experience a deadened, empty feeling - which is another indication given to me by my feelings and intuition.

'Trust your feelings, Luke!'

Mystery

No answer, no teacher, no paradigm...

Three more things I've realised frighten me:

1. Trying to simplify spiritual matters (usually by agreeing with someone else).

2. Believing there is any authority outside of myself, any tradition, that knows what is true or how I should live more than my own intuition knows.

3. Believing there is any kind of 'answer', either to my anxiety problem, or more generally. Every time I think, 'Alchemy's the answer', 'Buddhism's the answer', even 'There is no answer' (when I know deep down I am using that AS an answer), anxiety follows.

I've read a little bit about paradigm shifts: how we view the world through a certain frame, and when we learn, we either need to stretch that frame to allow the new information in, or, if the learning is radical, revolutionary, we need to find a new frame. I've read that one of the primary ways we obtain information or learning from beyond our current paradigm is through meditation. In my mind's eye, I've always pictured these paradigms as white squares, and the realm beyond them, where revolutionary learning comes from, as black, open space. Recently I've been wondering whether in a spiritual sense, an old paradigm was displaced, and I never really replaced it with another. I feel as though I am living in that black, open space.

And would that be such a bad thing? Artists and writers need to be so open. They need to create from a space where they can describe 'whatever arises' rather than prescribe based on their own paradigms. And I believe the best way to express spiritual 'truths' (whatever that means) for me now, when I feel I'm floating in space, is through art (in my case, fiction writing).

So, no answer, no teacher, no paradigm... Only openness, intuition and mystery...

'Space collision 1', downloaded 12th January, 2010, from:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-collision.htm.