QA175 QUESTION: I would like to see the cause of the extreme difficulty I have in asserting myself in the right way. I feel very uneasy and very threatened. The slightest disagreement or expectation makes me flutter. This is something I have not experienced quite so strongly before. I feel a main spring on my activity is broken, in a sense, and I can’t find the right way of following up on what I think I should do.
ANSWER: The fact that you only feel this so strongly now is precisely because you were, in the past, not able and/or not willing to see this tremendous dependency that is still in you. You were completely geared on the level of rebelling, precisely because you resent the people whose agreement you wish and believe you need. And this seesaw is very painful for you.
You have to come from this awareness of your rebellion to the awareness of your dependency. The lack of self-assertion is something you now have to face. All your energies are frozen in this respect. You have taken refuge by an intellectualism, in a sense – going away into the mind and functioning in your mind – that you had adopted in the past as a sort of pseudosolution to this lack of self-assertion. It is a certain arrogance and spiritual pride, intellectual pride.
This covered up the fear of asserting yourself. Now that this cover has diminished and very much dissolved, you are confronted with what is underneath. The aggressive energies must be elicited by moving yourself in many ways – bodily and in the mind and in the spirit and in your emotions – and by taking the risk of disagreement, if that is you.
But you could not take the risk because you rebelled – and rebellion was not you either. You have to really see the issues. Is it you, what you feel, what you believe, what you wish? Or do you say that just in order to either submit or to rebel? So you have to face what you want, what you feel.
And then be true to this even if it costs you disagreement – and simultaneously, elicit your constructive energies that are all in you but not being used. Then the apathy that often envelops you will go away. And you know, behind or below this apathy was exactly this kind of dependency in which you feared disagreement. You thought it could annihilate you.
This is where you were tied, and this is what you can now face – not fighting this anxiety when it comes to you whenever you do something that may elicit censorship from others, criticism from others, judgement. Face this anxiety and see what I said before.
