So If you will bear with another prelude…when I first came to this practice I suffered from extreme, almost crippling anxiety. I was afraid of almost everything, though disease, death, injury and abandonment certainly topped my list. It quickly became clear that without addressing my fear and the views that underlay it, I just wasn’t going to get anywhere. After all…extreme anxiety is not exactly a clear headed place from which to contemplate.

Looking back now however, I can see how much I owe my practice to the paranoia period (which least it seem so neat and buttoned-up now, lasted almost 3 years as a focal point of my practice). First off, extreme and constant  fear is quite painful  and pain has a way of being pretty motivating so I was fairly diligent and steady in my practice.

Addressing the fear also helped me begin to see how permanent my views of the world were; just like in the homeless story, I was so sure that what I imagined, everything connecting imagined A to imagined Z was sure to come true. I also began to see my tendency to try and control, to hedge, to protect myself, and I saw  the limitations and costs of those efforts. Ultimately these two things, my super fixed imaginings of the future and my deep misunderstanding of control,  have been cornerstones of my practice, tendencies of mine that run so deep I can almost use them as a key to begin unlocking every one of my stories..my wrong views. So, the next few posts will be stories from the Paranoid Period: