Yes, your life is anxiety-filled. Indeed, we live in an age of anxiety. Happily, we know how to solve the problem. Our approach? We teach you how to acquire the critical ability to resolve the difficulty that accompanies an oversized ego. With an ego appropriately sized, you’ll find yourself able to measure your life realistically, to motivate yourself responsibly and to stay the course when it comes to your goals.
So, what typically gets in the way of our managing our anxiety is our ego. We have assimilated the underlying cultural model widely popularized by advertising and celebrities or others skilled at image management. This model suggests that an upgrade to car, home or mate is the key to security and social position. And what of the rest—the confidence, character, peace of mind, responsibility and causal efficacy needed to underpin our way in the world? Well, according to the cultural ideal, they are the natural everyday no-sweat entitlement that accompanies the right purchases.
As a result, we expect ourselves, or egoistically believe ourselves, to be knowledgeable, instinctively cool or hip—our taste, resources and nerve a matter of an innate ease. And, of course, we experience anxiety when others (or we ourselves) don’t seem to think we’ve matched the ideal model.
But, let’s get real. We’re born with the natural instincts of a wild animal designed to respond to the challenges of survival circumstances in the jungle or on the plains. Everything that happens after that—how these instincts are directed toward the construction of our humanity, the fulfillment of our unique aptitudes and our desire not only to survive but to contribute to a better world—has to be learned.
Sure, the world is not fair. Some people actually have opportunities to succeed handed to them. As such, they have a leg up, an advantage, when it comes to finding security and that proverbial place in the sun.
Realistically, though, most of us have to learn a discipline to acquire the success we envision for ourselves. This discipline accounts for and explains how the animal now living in a highly complex world adapts to what is required of it, as well as to the anxiety that accompanies the whole process. And the process isn’t really optional. All of us are pressured (and expected) to put together a life of our own design—one for which we are competently and emotionally fitted.
What else gets in the way of managing our anxiety? Inside of us is a bundle of impulses, sensations and discontents, some of them at odds with one another. Alternately and unpredictably we’re excited, pessimistic, vain, moody, expansive or unapproachable—well, you know what I’m talking about. Make the list as long as you like. Don’t forget blame and shame; arrogance or ineptitude; the desire to be admired and belong; and too much, or too little, attraction, affinity and affection.
Yes, sometimes this felt bundle of nerves motivates you. Sometimes, though, disappointment, or blows to your dignity, or goals thwarted by obstacles, may stymie you. Disheartened, you just can’t, or won’t because you don’t feel like it, summon the energy to proceed with what you know you should be doing.
On the other hand, you know that you want to flourish, to contribute, to take the measure of your life by what you make of your humanity. The discipline of autonomy and life teaches you how to use your inventive ability to think freely, see clearly and act responsibly. The acquisition of this ability enables you to manage the tension between the impulse to give in to your very real primal fears, lethargies and anxieties and your also-very-real concern with yourself, with your past and present and, critically, with your future present.
As you acquire this critical ability, a significant piece of the anxiety that accompanies the jungle-bred animal who finds itself in a concrete world disappears. In sum, over time, you can expect to find yourself with a new spontaneity and emotional resource that is a resilient match for the demands of a modern world.
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Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and the leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.