I Don't Believe in Any of This, But I Have Anxiety All the Time
You don't need a worldview to start. You need the anxiety to make sense.
I get some version of this sentence often, usually from someone who has already tried the things that are supposed to work. Therapy, maybe. Meditation apps. A good psychiatrist and a prescription that helps some of it, but not all of it. They are not looking for a belief system. They are looking for the anxiety to stop running the show, and they've heard I might be able to help, and they are deeply unconvinced that I can.
I want to say clearly: that skepticism is not a problem here. You do not need to believe in shamanic work for it to be worth one conversation.
Belief was never the requirement
A lot of people assume this work asks something of them up front, some leap of faith before the first session even starts. It doesn't. I'm not asking you to adopt a cosmology. I'm asking you to describe what the anxiety actually does. When it shows up. What it feels like in your body. What it seems to be protecting you from because anxiety almost always started out protecting you from something, even if it's long since stopped being useful.
Anxiety is often a signal that's stopped pointing anywhere
In philosophy of mind, there's a useful distinction between a signal and the thing it originally signaled. A smoke alarm that keeps going off in an empty kitchen isn't wrong to exist. It's just misfiring, responding to something that isn't there anymore. A lot of chronic anxiety works the same way. It began as a real and accurate response to something, and it kept firing long after the original thing stopped being true. Talk therapy is very good at examining the wiring of the alarm. What I do is closer to going and looking at what set it off in the first place, especially when that source sits underneath the reach of ordinary conversation.
What a session with me actually involves, for the skeptical
We start with plain conversation, same as you'd have with anyone you were trying to get help from. Then I move into a different kind of attention, listening for what's underneath the story you already know how to tell about your own anxiety. You don't have to participate in anything mystical for this part to happen. You can stay exactly as skeptical as when you decided to try this healing. What matters is what I find, and whether it's useful to you once I hand it back in plain language.
Some people leave a first session and it changes how the anxiety feels immediately. For others, it's slower, a loosening rather than a resolution. I won't promise you which one you'll get. I can tell you that not believing in the framework has never once stopped it from working for someone who was willing to sit down and find out.
If you're tired of managing the anxiety and curious whether there's something underneath it worth looking at directly, a short conversation costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. You're welcome to reach out.
Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a researcher of philosophy of mind and physics, and seventh-level shaman. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.
Comments