"The School of Anxiety is The School of Greatness" - article and video.

Deleted Account · May 10, 2021

To anyone with anxiety issues, I found very powerful and altering view on anxiety as a fuel for change and growth.
https://academyofideas.com/2020/02/school-of-anxiety-school-of-greatness/

Part of the text, all available in link above

“The capacity to bear anxiety is important for the individual’s self-realization and for his conquest of his environment. Every person experiences continual shocks and threats to his existence; indeed, self-actualization occurs only at the price of moving ahead despite such shocks. This indicates the constructive use of anxiety”

Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
Unfortunately most people do not use anxiety in this constructive manner. Instead many of us do all we can to flee from our anxiety. Some of us will go as far as to delude ourselves with the claim that we don’t even desire a greater life and that comfort and security are best in these uncertain times. But what is overlooked at the moment of such a decision is the totality of what has been chosen – for in refusing to move into the possibilities that make us anxious, we have made a Faustian bargain. We gain some temporary comfort in avoiding the challenge and we remove the chance for failure that comes with each step on the path of self-realization, but we do so at a great cost. For these trivial gains pale in comparison to the suffering we set ourselves up for when we refuse a whole-hearted participation in the process of our creation:

“When a person sacrifices his right to self-expression [i.e., self-realization] for the sake of survival, his very survival is endangered, not from without but from within. With the surrender of the right to self-expression the meaning of life is lost. This is not a psychological phenomenon only. Self-expression is the direct and immediate manifestation of the life force in an individual. Self-expression is equivalent to life expression and a life that isn’t expressed, isn’t being lived. That leads to a slow death.”

Alexander Lowen, The Voice of the Body
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"The School of Anxiety is The School of Greatness" - article and video.

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