QA188 QUESTION: Some time ago I’ve had these feelings inside of me which I always thought of as being feelings of anxiety. Recently, I realized that this feeling wasn’t anxiety, but a new form of energy. This is making me feel anxious, and I wonder if you could explain?
ANSWER: Yes, right, that is very, very important. Here you have a living example of what I have elucidated on in the past – that when the person fears the feeling, he makes it an anxiety; he believes it is anxiety; he believes it is something that shouldn’t be there, because most human beings do not even know what feelings really are. And when they feel them, they become anxious and make the feelings into more anxiety.
So when you feel anxiety, ever so often relax into it and ask yourself, “Is this really anxiety? Maybe it is another feeling that I deny. It may be a very positive, beautiful feeling. It may be a negative feeling. It may be anger.” But again, if the anger is fully accepted, it will very soon turn into pleasure. And the denial of the pleasure, then, creates this block of anxiety.
Let yourself flow, even if you do not get an immediate relief. The relief is not necessary. It’s only so urgent because you think you cannot stand the feeling. It is a beautiful way of being, once you allow the flow to be and do not turn it into anxiety. Welcome it!
Realize it is the most creative, powerful energy with which you can create your life. You can create beautiful feelings which, in turn, create mutuality, attract the right people toward you. With this you can create new expanding circumstances in your life. Be aware of this energy that you contract into anxiety by denying the feeling. This is exactly what I always say.
QA192 QUESTION: I used to have these anxiety spells in which I experience tension and heart palpitations. I haven’t had this for a long time, but I have tensions from joy. This is quite a new thing. I have started to work on the lectures, and this gives me so much joy that I get so excited about it and I feel as if my body would not be able to contain joy, just as much as it is not able to contain negative feelings. What should I do about this?
ANSWER: You’re becoming conscious now of one of the ego existence’s peculiarities and that is the rejection of joy, pleasure, bliss, which is in direct relationship to the rejection of any other feeling – pleasant or unpleasant. Whenever you want to avoid one set, the apparent opposite set must also be avoided and must appear equally unbearable.
Now, I would suggest this to you here. You start off by acknowledging the fact, “I reject happiness, which was always true only I did not know it. And since I did it, this is what I reaped, and only did not know that I sowed it.” Now, if you can connect the cause and effect lying within yourself, and connect with how you did it and that you did it and that you still do it, then you can come to the next step where you can actively and directly meditate in the following way.
First of all, you envisage that your inner real person is indeed capable of sustaining and dealing with all feelings, no matter what they are. And you call upon your inner, real being to help you do this. Entrust the limited, outer, finite being into the unlimited, inner, infinite being by expressing this wish, by allowing it to happen, by committing yourself totally to this and by overcoming the barrier of resistance you may encounter to surrender to the divine spirit in you and entrusting yourself to it. And if you feel you cannot make that step, that is then what has to be taken into scrutiny in your personal Pathwork. This is my suggestion.
Say to yourself the truth: “There is something in me that is infinitely capable of feeling feelings, of not manipulating them, of not resisting them, of not denying them, of letting them be, of swinging with them, whether they be pain or pleasure, whether they be hurt or joy, whether they be hate or love. This capacity exists in me, and I am capable of experiencing my own capacity. And the true wisdom and guidance within me will help that I express this reality and thereby find the core of my being that is eternal and that needs no longer to fear.” Do you understand?
QUESTION: Yes. Thank you. This ties with a question from my sister who is feeling terribly anxious. She has symptoms that might indicate that she has a fatal disease. She doesn’t know yet what it is, but she is in a very great state of anxiety, and she asked me to bring this to you.
ANSWER: I cannot make predictions, of course, as to the physical state, because that is not my task, nor is it relevant from our point of view. For the fear of the disease or the disease itself, there is not such a tremendous difference from our vantage point. What matters here is that there is a condition in which such manifestations can arise. This condition is due to avoidance of the truth in spite of some efforts to the contrary.
If crisis arises, it should serve for the precise point of view of commitment and recommitment to the inner truth, so that the good feelings, the joyous experience, no longer need be rejected, no longer need to be felt as undeserving – as is also your case in relation to your question of before.
The greater the commitment to this truth – and to encountering the inner truth – is, the more the anxiety will vanish. This particular kind of anxiety is very much due to an insistence that anxiety as well as all other kinds of unpleasantness vanish, while at the same time not making the commitment to inner truth, to play fair with life.
I very seriously advise here, that she ascertain in herself in what way there is an insistence not to experience the result of negative, stale or unfair reactions toward life itself, in feelings of “I want more than I am willing to give.”
Now, of course, all of you, my friends, and all other human beings, can, to varying degrees, ascertain such an attitude. And the more you become conscious of it, of course, the more desirable it is. I advise here for all of you, as a specific task, maybe after this gathering – since you planned this new way of meeting here and you are all together in this beautiful Pathwork – you can discuss and express individually to what degree each one of you or some of you are aware that you wish to receive more from life than you are willing to give.
In what particular area of life does this hold true, as opposed to other areas where this may not hold true. If you can compare this, you will make very remarkable and significant discoveries, not only about yourself but also about the beauty and justice of life. For you will see that where you give as much as you wish to receive, you must be happy; you must be fulfilled; you must have abundance in your life; you must have peace and joy.
And wherever this is not so, wherever you are teetering on the brink of anxiety and guilt and resentment and a spirit of undeservingness – and therefore rejecting your own happiness and then blaming life or others for not having it – there you can be quite sure that you withhold from life.
As long as you are not aware of this, you are deeply in darkness and in suffering, because you’re disconnected from the key to your life that makes your life meaningful and where you find the way out. When you do become aware of it – and once you overcome that little shame that this is so and the resistance that you have to eventually give up this unfair exchange you wish to institute – once you truly look at it with dispassionate, objective insight, you will find the great liberation in this. For you will then see there always is a way out of confinement, constriction, and fearful, empty existence.
The minute you make the step in wanting to give as much as you want to receive, all anxiety will vanish. This is my message for her, and also for many, many other people – for all people.
QA229 QUESTION: What am I doing in my student teaching that is a delusion, or where I could break through? I get totally confused in front of the class, and I can’t clarify. I don’t think clearly in front of the class.
ANSWER: To what extent are you aware of a very specific anxiety in you?
QUESTION: Just that being in front of a class is very difficult.
ANSWER: What does this anxiety mean, do you think? [Long pause]. Well, I will give you a hint that you might explore. On a more superficial level, your anxiety clearly states, “I may be inadequate.” However, there is a lot behind this. Behind that fear of inadequacy lies anger, frustration and rage, perhaps against those whom you are to teach.
It is a vicious circle. Because they make you anxious, you are angry at them, and because you are angry at them, you are anxious. And since this vicious circle exists, there is much more of a concern with how you will come out from the point of view of the ego personality, rather than a true commitment to help and really give to the young ones under your care.
I venture to say that if you follow your path and you truly experience and accept and deal with the feelings as I show them to you here, and simultaneously commit yourself to wanting to be a channel for divine truth and help and giving, then your anxiety will totally disappear – not immediately, but gradually.
However, there is one other aspect here. The goodwill to give must not be superimposed over the voice in you that clearly states, “I do not want to give.” You need to have the courage to meet that voice that says “I do not want to give” before you can really change your mind. And that is the origin of your anxiety. Can you connect with any of what I said? [Pause] No?
QUESTION: Yeah.
ANSWER: Well, that is good. Maybe you can go deeper and have others help you to do this, and it will become possible to really know it and be quite connected with that level, and then purify and transform it.
QA232 QUESTION: I keep fluctuating today from confidence to anxiety. Both of them are acute about my sentencing, and I wonder if you can help me in that respect, perhaps give me a meditation.
ANSWER: In every human being’s life, death must be overcome through acceptance, through accepting the uncertainty and the fear and the dark groping in front of it so that the light that is there waiting can come. Your anxiety as well as certain types of confidence are very much still, many times, a result of rejecting that opening to what is in its own way a dying process – the dying of the old self, giving birth to the new self.
The new self is already in the process of being born even while the old self is still in the process of dying. But every type of dying goes through that darkness – as long as the ego is in its blindness and as long as the darkness is rejected rather than accepted, rather than trusted. But it can only be genuinely trusted by accepting the distrust. So as long as that struggle is going on, anxiety and confidence will hold sway.
Now, when your confidence comes through as “I will not have to go through this,” then it is still the same kind of rejection as the fear. The concern should be perhaps not so much of what will be – what is now still in your future – but rather with your ability to accept your dying process – the fear of it, the darkness of it, the anger against it, the protest against it, and the guilts that have created it.
And then, do not confuse giving up with giving in, resignation with acceptance! Resignation is yet another form of hostility. Acceptance is something very different, that rises from the new realm.
Let this period of waiting be the intense period of learning it is and can be in a very dynamic way, by not rejecting the anxiety but by embracing it and thus transcending it. For that is what every human being must go through many, many times in one lifetime and in many lifetimes, in one form or in another form, to one degree or another. Do you understand?
QUESTION: Yes, thank you.
ANSWER: And I want to also say you are blessed, you are helped, and that whatever happens has a deep and blissful meaning.