Daniel Smith

I get excited about what the Holy Spirit is doing now through all the people he is refining and raising up all over this planet. I love connections and relationship and networking but it must be led by the Spirit.

Yet I also felt, for the first time, truly and sincerely pissed. It was enough already. Enough! I__ reached that point that comes in the life of most anxiety sufferers when, fed up by the constant waking torture, dejected and buckled but not yet crushed, they at last turn to their anxiety, to themselves, and say, __isten here: Fuck you. Fuck you! I am sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. I refuse to let you win. I am not going to take it anymore. You are ruining my fucking life and you MUST FUCKING DIE!_ Unfortunately, this approach rarely solves the problem. Anxiety doesn__ bend to absolutism. You have to take a subtler, more reasoned approach. But that doesn__ mean anger is totally unhelpful. Being pissed off is a strong cocktail for the will. It stiffens the spine. It strengthens resolve. It makes a person less willing to run away from the anxiety and more willing to walk into it, which you__e going to have to do, ultimately, if you don__ want to end up a complete agoraphobic. Anger breeds defiance, and defiance is inspiriting. It__ good to refuse to give in to anxiety. You just have to know how much you can take.

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn__ a bad metaphor for anxiety__s a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It__ just you and your mind, which has fists and is using them. It may be dualistic and logically untenable to posit the situation as You v. Head; it may not make sense philosophically. But in the throes of anxiety? In the cognitive shit? There__ really no other way to think about what__ going on.

...Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.

Equally as therapeutic was the fact that disaster did not come.

If you're afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you're afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid?

The problem of anxiety isn't that the organism responds to threats by near-instantly powering up. That's clearly a good thing, species-survival-wise. It's that sometimes the organism starts seeing threats too readily.

My mother took the measure of what could be built with the material she'd been given, and she built it.

But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can't blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mod your child's temperament as surely as water wear at rock.

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard!

This is the trouble with origin hunting. There are so many origins.

First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That__ often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of __onkey mind._ A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth__o pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area?

Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, "Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly." Freedom says, "Even not to choose is to choose." Freedom says, "So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings." Freedom says, "You're on your own. Deal with it.

There is no such thing as a good decision and a bad decision. There are only decisions. Make them, fuck up, enjoy, repeat.