RECESSION, ANXIETY, AND SPIRIT

-a letter from Gary Zukov

As the unemployment rate climbs, layoffs continue, and the economy contracts psychologists report an increase in calls for help with anxiety, stress, and sleepless nights. Naturally. When livelihood is threatened or lost, fear appears. When health is threatened or lost, fear appears. When a relationship dissolves, a business fails, or a parent dies, fear appears. Fear comes in many forms – such as anger, despair, jealousy, resentment, grief, superiority, and inferiority as well as anxiety. Sometimes it takes awareness by storm and at other times insidiously pervades thoughts and perceptions, like a sunny day imperceptibly becoming overcast..

Much less than a recession can activate fear, such as a rude stranger in passing and much more can trigger it, such as the death of a child or your own impending death. No single circumstance activates it. From birth to death strangers, friends, school mates, co-workers, and family trigger it. As many fears as you have, that many will be activated frequently in the course of your life.

An unprecedented transformation in human consciousness is reshaping human experience, expanding human awareness, and revealing new human potential, including the ability to recognize fear as internally generated and to locate and heal the internal causes of it. From the new perspective, fear is not caused by a recession, death, illness, or job loss. It appears in your awareness when fear-based parts of your personality (the parts that are angry, jealous, resentful, etc.) become active. External circumstances do not create fear. They activate frightened parts of your personality. Those parts (not people or circumstance) bring with them your experiences of fear.

Spiritual growth requires healing the frightened parts of your personality and cultivating the loving parts. That is the creation of authentic power. A good time to create it is when a frightened part of your personality is active (for example, when you are anxious, depressed, angry, jealous, etc.). What sensations do you feel in your chest, solar plexus, and throat areas; what thoughts does this part of your personality think (they will be judgmental, critical, and take you into the past or the future); what intention does it hold (it will never be an intention to create intimacy, support others without hidden agendas, or contribute love to the human experience).

You can use your experiences of anxiety, regardless of what appears to cause them (such as the recession), to learn about frightened parts of your personality. The more familiar you become with them, the more you will be able to challenge and heal them. I suggest that you begin today.

Don’t waste a moment...

Love,

Gary