Excerpted with permission
from "Everyday Soul"
by Bradford Keeney, Ph.D.
Chapter Two
Making Grace out of Life's
Disturbances
The value of human life
lies in the fact of suffering, for where there is no suffering ... there can be
no power of attaining spiritual experience ...
Unless we agree to suffer
we cannot be free from suffering.
-D. T. SUZUKI
HILE I WAS a graduate student in clinical psychology my life was interrupted by the disturbing
arrival of anxiety attacks. When the attack would sneak up on me, I would have
to stop whatever I was doing. If I were driving a car, I would have to pull
over to the side of the road and wait until it passed. There were times I would
have to run out of the classroom because of the loss of equilibrium the anxiety
brought. Sometimes these panic episodes were so intense I feared I was having a
heart attack.
No
matter what book I read about anxiety, it didn't help. Whether I read Carl Jung
or Karen Horsey, it kept me more aware of the existence of anxiety in my life,
and this tended to make it more present. Even thinking or talking about it
could make me anxious. My experience with therapists was essentially the same
as reading self-help and professional books. Although they might provide a
moment of relief during the sessions when the therapists took over worrying
about it, they more often than not brought me deeper into the mesmerizing spell
that the disturbance held over my life.
I
was fortunate to come across the work of the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing,
who embraced the disturbances of life as an opportunity for personal
development and growth. In the spirit of his approach I decided to become a
student of my symptom, to learn from it, and be guided by the way it was
opening a new world of consciousness I had never experienced before.
I
readied myself to make a study of this whirling inner experience, observe its
vibrations, the quality of its tingliness and dizziness, assess its duration, tempo,
and rhythms, become aware of how it alters my visual, auditory, and tactile
experiences, pay attention to whether it was localized on any particular parts
of my body, and note how it affected my heart, body temperature, and
gastrointestinal system. I waited to explore the next entry into anxious
consciousness. In this preparation I shifted my relationship with anxiety to
becoming more curious about it rather than fearing it as I had before. I never
had another anxiety attack. In this encounter wish anxiety, I learned one of
the greatest secrets of life. Changing your relationship to a symptom is the
key to transforming it into a graceful outcome. Understanding the cause of your
symptom, distress, problem, confusion, difficulty, discomfort, or disease does
not necessarily change anything. In fact, a deeper plunge into understanding
your symptom often gives it too much attention and
