In Fall: Help with Anxiety & Individuation, 3
As I’ve suggested earlier in this series, needing help with anxiety, and feeling the call of individuation may both be our experiences in the “September rush”.
The busy-ness of this season can make it hard to find time to reflect on very much at all. Yet, there may be some very profound things that we need to consider, as we try to open up the meaning of this time of year for ourselves.
Beginning September: Four Reflections
1. Life is Beckoning
We feel it all around us, as September begins. The surge of renewed life as the Fall season commences.
We see it in our collective life, as kids go back to school, adults go back to university and college, and all manner of Fall activities start up again. Everything urges us to jump into collective life. But what about getting into our own, unique individual lives?
What is real life, for me?
2. The Gift Inside the Anxiety
Real anxiety is often associated with this time. If I do need help with anxiety now, it may be important to ask — what does it mean? What might I not want to face? Is it tied to fear about the future, and possible mistrust of myself, or of life? Or possibly to repressed feelings or yearnings?
Life’s energy often gets tied up in anxiety, rather than poured into those parts of our lives that need to be lived out.
What would it be like to give some unacknowledged part of yourself real, concrete life?
3. “Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?”…
…is the ironic title of Jeannette Winterson’s autobiography. It’s an actual remark made by her adoptive mother, a woman of very narrowly conservative religious views, when Jeanette declared herself on certain key lifestyle issues. It leads all of us ask where we have sacrificed happiness and meaning in our lives for the sake of being “normal”.
Might that need to change, for the sake of our psychological well-being?
4. The Divine Child
At this time, much gets stirred by the changes we experience. We’re powerfully aware of the vulnerability of our children, their seeming fragility. Yet we lose sight of youth’s resilience and adaptability, captured in the symbolism of the divine child. Throughout the world we find the myth of a child born, seemingly fragile and “at risk”, who, despite the terrifying array of opposing forces, prevails. So it is with the new life appearing in our children, and — dare we say it? — striving to appear in the lives of their parents.
Next post in Fall, Anxiety & Individuation Series
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