Category Archives: Anxiety

Embracing the Hanged Man: Lessons in Stillness

“The highest virtue does nothing; yet nothing needs to be done. The lowest virtue does everything; yet much remains to be done.”
—Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 38)

The Hanged Man tarot is an image of an archetype embodied throughout time. He hangs not by punishment, but by choice; note the ease his face embodies. One foot bound, the other free, his head illuminated in a quiet radiance of inversion. The Hanged Man does not fight the ropes, nor the cross he is upon. Seemingly, he yields, seeing that illumination only comes when perspective breaks. In the stillness of that surrender, the noise of the world falls away, and what remains is unbearable silence – the kind that reveals truth.

Our age, too, dangles upside down, though few may wholly comprehend or admit this. We call it progress, yet everything familiar feels inverted. Conviction, shame, and guilt have replaced curiosity; outrage masquerades as moral vision, and stillness is mistaken for weakness. We so often seek power over strength, forgetting that one conquers while the other endures. The collective ego writhes, demanding movement even though motion only tightens the noose upon our brittle necks. We have confused suspension with stagnation (or perhaps innovation and progress), forgetting that pause is the only doorway through which transformation enters.

One interpretation of the Hanged Man is that he symbolizes the alchemy of perspective. To hang is to see differently…not from the lofty gaze of superiority, but from the humility of inversion. When the world turns on its head, the false becomes obvious: the illusions of fear, the idols of certainty, the addictions to control, the misguided notion that perpetual ascent equals evolution. It is in falling, or rather being hanged, that we are invited to encounter reality without the masks we built merely to survive it.

Yet this surrender terrifies the modern psyche. We are taught to act, to fix, to do for others until the day we die. The incongruence of it all killing us long before we are even dead. When confronted with paradox, we reach for labels rather than silence. We want answers before any sincere question has ripened. We want redemption without crucifixion. To hang is to endure the unbearable middle: between death and rebirth, knowing and unknowing. It is a paramount stage that our culture has forgotten how to inhabit, yet one the soul requires to remain whole.

There is wisdom in reversal. The suspended figure reminds us that consciousness matures not by addition but by subtraction. Meaning is not created by collecting truths, but by letting false ones fall away. Yet our collective religion is productivity. We measure worth by movement and confuse noise with vitality. In such a climate, the act of hanging, of not participating in the frenzy, of stillness, becomes rebellion itself.

Jung wrote that “…there is no coming to consciousness without pain” (CW 17, Para 331). The Hanged Man embodies that axiom in image form: consciousness requires the unconscious ego’s crucifixion. The man who hangs is not destroyed; he is inverted, stripped of his illusions of mastery. He is humbled. His suffering is not passive; it is willful, a kind of offering to the deeper Self, because something must always be sacrificed in order to gain. What looks like helplessness from the outside is sacred discipline within.

Perhaps this is what our world fears most: stillness that exposes what the noise conceals. We fill the void with commentary and consumption, terrified that silence will show us what we have become. Yet silence is the only thing that can restore vision. The Hanged Man reminds us that salvation is not found in the clamor of certainty but in the humility to hang, to wait, and to eventually see again.

We keep banging our heads against what feels like a brick wall, until one day, we realize it was only drywall all along.

Suspension is not defeat; it is initiation. It is the psyche’s descent into the womb of transformation. The world hangs, as we all do on individual levels, in the liminal space between collapse and renewal. Whether we awaken or asphyxiate depends on whether we can stay in the tension long enough for meaning to emerge. To stay within the building that we hear creaking all around us, water pouring out from its crevasses, aware of its impending fall, is the ultimate test of the skill of stillness.

To hang willingly is to trust that the rope is not strangulation but tethering: a thin line between the false and the true. Perhaps, like the Hanged Man, we must surrender our obsession with being upright, good, and correct before we remember what it means to stand at all.

What, dear reader, might you see differently if you stopped struggling to stay upright?

“Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.”
—James Hollis (What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life)

The Myth of Janus

“Paradox…reflects a higher level of intellect and, by not forcibly representing the unknowable as known, gives a more faithful picture of the real state of affairs.”
—Carl G. Jung (Collected Works, vol. 11, para. 417)

Every breath is both a birth and a death. The myth of Janus embodies this concept: life is never one thing, but two faces staring in opposite directions. We are living, and we are dying, in the same breath. The Western mind often wants purity and finality. It wants ‘good’ without ‘evil’, healing without wounding, certainty without ambiguity. That fantasy collapses the human psyche into split halves. Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, refuses that split. He faces both directions at once, holding the key to wholeness. He is the patron of paradox.

The Janus Myth in Brief

Janus is Rome’s keeper of beginnings and passages. Doors, gates, city boundaries, marriages, births, departures, returns. January takes its name from him because a new year is a doorway. Ancient Rome pictured him with two faces: one looking back, one looking forward. He carries keys in many depictions, a reminder that he presides over the opening and the closing. The Temple of Janus stood in the Forum with doors that were kept open in times of war and closed in times of peace. Even Rome knew that the state of the doors told the truth about the soul of the city.

Janus is not a warrior, nor a lover, or trickster. He is a custodian of transitions. Where other gods dramatize a single domain, Janus embodies a relation. He is the god of ‘between’. And this ‘between’ is precisely what we as humans, fear most. We would rather be hot or cold, married or sworn off, saint or sinner, than endure the ambiguity of paradox. The in-between is a liminal space where our categories collapse. It is a space as terrifying as death itself.

To live here is to accept the entirety of the past with all its pain, and to accept the absolute unknown of the future. It is to admit that wars are often fought in the name of religions that promise heaven while wounding the innocent deemed ‘other’. It is to face the paradox that in the same breath we may long to heal everyone and secretly hope for absolute destruction. The paradox is that we want to simultaneously, help and to hurt. Janus holds this mirror up to us and refuses to let us look away.

The Logic of Thresholds

A threshold is not a neutral hallway. It is charged. To cross a door is to accept the risk of what lies beyond it. You leave what you know, and you step toward what you cannot guarantee. This is why transitions feel spiritual, even to the nonreligious. Weddings, funerals, births, diagnoses, reconciliations. A threshold shakes the illusion that life can be arranged into a straight line. In truth, it is a spiral: dizzily dancing upwards and downwards. Janus teaches that every entrance is also an exit. Every gain has a cost. Every yes is also a farewell.

Thresholds within human existence are also archetypal. Life is not a fixed role, but a series of evolving ones. The warrior was once the innocent. The sage, once the fool. Archetypes are not replaced but transformed through experience, through rituals that demand mourning and rebirth. Consider the transition into parenthood. As a woman, the maiden transforms into the mother. The archetype of the mother was always latent, but it is the embodied passage of giving birth that brings it fully into form. And yet, the maiden does not vanish; she remains as the youthful feminine within, though she can be eclipsed if the shadow takes over and the mother becomes devouring…consumed by regrets of an unlived life.

For a man, the threshold may look like the puer aeternus (the embodiment of the eternal boy) confronted by fatherhood. A child coming into existence always demands evolution on behalf of the parent(s). Thus, either he matures into the archetype of the father, growing also into the mentor, and perhaps king, or he clings to the fantasy of what might have been; in this clinging, he remains trapped in nostalgia and refusal…dominated by thoughts of an unlived life that then get passed down to his child as complex inheritance.

When thresholds are rejected and one is dominated by their shadow (i.e., the hidden reservoir of all that is denied or suppressed), archetypes twist into distorted caricatures. The innocent becomes a puer aeternus or a puella aeterna: where the man-child clinging to fantasy and the maiden becomes the devouring mother consumed by regret. What should have been a passage instead hardens into a prison. A threshold refused, and therefore never crossed.

We are always in transition, even when we imagine ourselves to be standing in solidity. Nothing is fixed. Archetypes cycle through us, demanding death and rebirth again and again. To embody Janus is to embody this liminal space, to accept that our roles are thresholds rather than permanent abodes. To truly become a king or queen within one’s own being is not to claim absolute sovereignty over life, but to hold the doorway open – to face both the past that shaped us and the unknown future calling us forward.

Note that thresholds also require consent. Nobody can choose for you. You can stand at the door for years, angry that the hallway is not a home…or you can find the key that has been in your pocket the whole time. The door opens from the inside.

“And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”
—T. S. Eliot (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets, ll. 145–147)

Time, Memory, and Forethought

Janus’ two faces are a type of discipline. One face contemplates what has been, the other attends to what is about to be; in other words, one looks to memory, the other to possibility. Human wellbeing requires both. If we cannot face the past, we are condemned to repeat it; we become the personification of the ouroboros (the snake devouring its own tail), endlessly circling the same patterns. If we cannot face the future, we cannot choose. The paradox is that both faces must look from the same head.

To live well is to stand where memory and possibility touch…holding both without collapse. The past demands mourning, the future demands courage, and the present demands that we accept both at once. Every beginning costs an ending. Marriage buries the single self. Parenthood buries the maiden or puer. Healing buries the version of us that needed the wound. This is not cruelty but rather metabolism: cells die so the body lives, seasons turn so the world renews.

When either face is denied, archetypes twist – refusing responsibility for tomorrow and consumed by yesterday. To embody what Janus represents is to accept that memory and forethought are thresholds and not escape routes. The work of being human is to carry both with conscious strength.

Enduring the Paradox

Carl Jung reminded us that “…one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” (Alchemical Studies, Collected Works 13, para. 335). This is precisely the wisdom Janus demonstrates. His being is a commandment for the human condition. To live fully is to face the light and the dark together, to know that we are both at once.

The Taoists expressed this through yin and yang. Each pole containing a seed of its opposite. There is no light without shadow, no birth without death, no joy without suffering. Janus, like the yin–yang symbol, insists on integration. The Western fantasy of purity – life without death, good without evil, happiness without struggle – is a delusion that flattens existence.

Our culture has trained us to perform certainty. We brand, we declare, we signal purity to our chosen tribe. This is not moral strength but rather, developmental anxiety.

Comfort, particularly in the West, has become king. We imagine a life free of conflict as the highest good. Films and cultural narratives reinforce this: the happily-ever-after, the story that ends with bliss without acknowledging what must be sacrificed to get there. This saccharine delusion is not authentic. It is not soul, not real. It ignores the necessity of struggle, of death, and of sacrifice. Something must always be given for something else to grow.

In archetypal terms, the innocent cannot remain the innocent forever. To mature is to evolve, like the Fool in the tarot journey who stumbles forward, passing through the Major Arcana, through trials, suffering, and paradox, until wholeness begins to take form. Naïve bliss must be shed, and comfort left behind. Colin A. Low’s book, Playing the Fool, embodies this maturation of the self perfectly.

Though, if we refuse this calling to evolve and do not hold the dualities of existence with reverence, the shadow becomes king…but a grotesque king. The monster within rules our being, and we project it outward, forever seeing the fleck in another’s eye while ignoring the needle lodged in our own. The myth of Janus reminds us that to truly cross the threshold into wholeness, we must hold both faces together. We must endure the paradox.

“Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on earth can keep it down. A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth…”
–Carl G. Jung (Collected Works, vol. 12, para. 18-20)

The Work of the Psyche

Depth psychology names this work directly: the task is to consciously hold the tension. Joy and grief. Fury and tenderness. Fear and longing. Strength and vulnerability. The goal is never to amputate the ‘unwanted’ pole. The goal is integration. When we split, the disowned side does not vanish. It sinks underground and rules us from there. A person who disavows hatred becomes passive aggressive. A culture that rejects mortality becomes obsessed with youth. A clinician who cannot bear ambiguity becomes a technician, not a healer.

Janus invites a different stance. Stand in the doorway. Feel the pull of each side. Do not rush to resolve it prematurely. Wait until a third element begins to appear…not a compromise, but transformation. A new form born from the pressure of the two. This is the alchemical secret, the union of the opposites. This is how the psyche matures.

Paradox in the Therapy Room

I had often heard from clients: “I want to change right now” and “I am terrified of losing who I am.” Both are true. Another client once said, “I love my child more than life” but also, “I miss the person I was before I became a parent.” Both are true. Someone else confessed, “I despise him for what he did,” and “I still love him, and it’s killing me.” Again, both are true.

The task of therapy is not to pick a side. It is to help a person remain at the doorway long enough for a deeper truth to emerge. Janus is present here as well with one face holding the grief of what has been lost and the other gazing toward the possibility of what might yet be born. In that in-between space, where both truths coexist, something new begins to take form.

Thus, the work was not about erasure or resolution, but about reverence for paradox. To sit with a client, soul to soul, was to resist the urge to simplify, to bear witness while the psyche strains against contradiction. Transformation does not come from choosing one limb and amputating the other. As noted in the previous section, it comes from allowing the tension itself to reshape us. The paradox that once felt unbearable brings us to the beginning of a new life.

Janus and the Modern Self

We live in a time of chronic thresholds. Careers shifts. Evolving identities. Communities fracture and reform. Technology remakes our mirrors daily. The temptation is to manage all of this with a rigid self or a formless one. Either way, we are lost. This myth counsels a third way: to stand in a doorway without collapsing. Keep both faces open. Learn from what has been. Choose what must be. Move with the grief and with the joy. Everything flows and is not in an absolute state. Thus, refuse to be torn apart.

To be human is not a curse, nor a crown. It is to stand at the breakpoint of the unconscious and find the strength to face what we would rather deny so we can evolve. This strength is not for power or conquest, but for courage – the courage to simply be. To endure paradox, to integrate the shadow, and to carry both light and dark as our truth. Wholeness is not triumph, but the strength to live as we are, alongside nature as it is.

In closing, are we – are you – brave enough to hold the tension of paradox? To meet the monster within and let it teach us – or will we keep blaming the world as we rot within our own unbroken cycles?

“In my end is my beginning.”
—T. S. Eliot (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets, l. 208)

How Belief Shapes Reality: The Science of the Placebo Effect

“We do not possess a body; rather, the psyche inhabits the body and makes it live.”
— Carl G. Jung (Psychological Aspects of the Persona (Collected Works, Vol. 7, para. 389))

I want to preface this piece by saying I am not a religious person. I do not believe that there is some magic daddy in the sky – quite the contrary actually. However, I do believe in the religious experience that draws so many to religion. I have felt it for myself. I also understand that there is more to this world than what we can measure. To assume there is no higher power at all would be, in my view, painfully naïve.

So, I ask you, dear reader, to enter with open eyes and an open heart, because we are about to go into territory that may (or may not) rub you the wrong way. Regardless of the emotions that may arise, my hope is that this will provoke thought and inner reflection.

Let us now dig in.

The Placebo Effect: Proof That the Divine Lives Within

What if the most powerful medicine you could ever take wasn’t locked away in a pharmacy with an ungodly price tag? Not prescribed by a white coat. Not manufactured in a lab. What if it was already inside of you, quietly waiting for your permission to work?

Science calls it the placebo effect, and as a forever-student of the human mind and this strange, beautiful existence we call life, I find it extraordinary. Philosophy calls it the power of the mind. Mystics have called it the divine spark within. Hermeticism recognizes it as the principle of “As within, so without” – the idea that your inner state shapes your outer reality.

Think about that for a moment: your inner state may be shaping the very reality you not only perceive but experience. That’s not just a nice idea to let swim by your mind…that is a holy-shit moment. No matter the label, the knowledge is the same: your perception can transform reality – not just in your thoughts, but within your body. Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal’s notable TED Talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend, touches this same notion: how we perceive our realities is the manner in which our life takes shape.

Belief That Heals

What the placebo effect is not about is “fake pills fooling gullible people.” That is the tired, cynical take from those who are not yet wholly able to see that belief itself is an active force.

For what the notion is about is something far more extraordinary: the measurable, biological changes that happen when you decide something will help you. The mind sets an intention; the body fulfills it.

Let me be clear here: this is not referring to the watered-down notion of the “Law of Attraction,” which reduces the complexities of existence to little more than wishful thinking. The laws that govern mind, matter, and meaning are far more intricate. Life does not bend itself to our desires because we pasted affirmations onto a bathroom mirror or onto the white board next to our desk. It responds when we are aligned. When the conscious and unconscious are in active dialogue, when our inner architecture supports the reality we are building.

Consider a 2015 study on participants with Parkinson’s disease. After more than twelve hours without their medication – symptoms raw and unmasked – participants were given a treatment they were told was either worth $100 or $1,500. The twist? Both treatments were identical placebos. MRI scans revealed improvement in symptoms with both “drugs,” but the expensive one worked better. How could this be? Because the mind had already decided it was more powerful. The body simply obeyed. It was not the drug. It was the mind.

From a Jungian lens, this is the psyche creating meaning and the body responding to that meaning. Symbolically, the “expensive drug” functioned as a talisman: an object imbued with the authority of healing and thus, carrying the weight of transformation. But this is not magic in the sense of bypassing reality; it is the psyche in its proper role as the architect of lived experience.

True creation is not about summoning wealth or power as a substitute for the work of the soul. The unconscious is not satisfied by material trophies. The real “right path” is revealed in synchronicities that signal alignment between the inner and outer life: moments when the Self (the archetype of wholeness) moves us closer to individuation. That, not the accumulation of external symbols, is the highest aim of life.

“The spirit is the life of the body, seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit — the two being really one.”
— Carl G. Jung (The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man (Collected Works, Vol. 10, para. 195))

When Labels Change the Body

In another study, participants were given identical pills labeled in three different ways: plain generic, enhanced generic, and branded. Every pill was inert. Yet anxiety levels and blood pressure shifted depending on the label affixed to the bottle. It did not matter that there was no active ingredient. What mattered was the story the mind told about what it was receiving. The label was not a superficial detail – it was the carrier of meaning.

This is Hermetic law in action: The All is Mind. Matter follows meaning. The label operated as a symbol, and symbols have power because they bypass the conscious gatekeeper and speak directly to the unconscious, where archetypal associations live. “Branded” signals authority. “Official” signals legitimacy. “Real” signals potency.

From a Jungian standpoint, the label functions like an archetypal mask: an image that shapes expectation, and through expectation, shapes physiological reality. It is not mere packaging; it is the psychological architecture that scaffolds the body’s response. The rhetoric – its authority, legitimacy, and promise – works first upon the mind, and the body answers in kind.

The takeaway is clear: perception is not a passive lens through which we watch life unpredictably unravel itself. It is an active sculptor of our experience…chiseling reality to match the patterns we believe to be true.

The Spiritual Dimension

Placebo research has revealed something many in the scientific community once dismissed outright: spirituality itself can amplify the effect.

A 2011 literature review found that individuals with a spiritual orientation often respond more strongly (both psychologically and physiologically) to placebo treatments. Faith, prayer, ritual…these are not idle gestures. They are deliberate, symbolic acts that anchor belief and direct the psyche’s capacity for self-healing.

In 2021, another study demonstrated that when participants believed they were drinking water from Lourdes (a Catholic pilgrimage site associated with miraculous healing) their brains responded in measurable ways. Functional MRI scans showed increased connectivity in the brain’s salience network and decreased activity in regions linked to cognitive control, suggesting that religious belief can literally reconfigure neural processing to support a healing state.

And in 2024, physician K.R. Sethuraman made the case that belief-based forces (including the placebo effect, the Hawthorne effect, and spiritual conviction) account for more than half of the healing dynamic in many contexts. Modern medicine, he argued, has flattened “evidence-based” into a narrow synonym for pharmaceutical intervention, ignoring the very cultural and psychological mechanisms that have supported healing for millennia. We trust the authority of the prescriber more than we trust the innate intelligence of our own bodies…until we don’t, and then even the “proven” treatment may fail to work.

From a mystical standpoint, none of these findings are surprising. In Hermetic philosophy, ritual is the art of fixing intention into form, impressing the inner state upon the outer world. In Jungian psychology, ritual functions as a symbolic vessel, a structured space where the unconscious is invited to participate in the aims of consciousness. The placebo effect thrives in such vessels because they bridge the psychic and the material, dissolving the false boundary between inner meaning and outer event.

Now, this all does not mean a clinician should impose their beliefs onto a patient – for this goes against our code of ethics. But it does suggest something profound: when an individual engages a belief system that resonates at the deepest level of their being, the body responds as though the directive came from the soul itself.

Open-Label Placebos: Healing Without Deception

One of the most intriguing developments in placebo research is the rise of open-label placebos: treatments openly identified as inert, with participants fully informed, “This is a placebo.”

Common sense would suggest this disclosure would wholly dismantle the effect…and indeed, in some cases it does. But in others, the opposite occurs: merely understanding how the placebo effect works, and consciously consenting to engage with it, can still produce measurable improvement.

This also challenges the assumption that belief requires ignorance to be effective. It suggests that the conscious mind, once aware of the mechanism, can choose to collaborate with the unconscious rather than being tricked by it. In such moments, the placebo becomes less a deception and more a deliberate act of self-participation in healing.

From a depth-psychological perspective, this is a prime example of what Jung called the transcendent function: the meeting point where conscious awareness and unconscious forces interact to create something new. Here, that “something new” is the healing process itself, arising not from external substances but from the psyche’s capacity to mobilize the body in service of meaning.

“The patient will get well if he can be made to see his illness in a light that has meaning for him.”
— Carl G. Jung (The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings (Collected Works, Vol. 18, para. 398))

Belief as Biology

At its core, the placebo effect dismantles the false boundary we have drawn between “mind” and “body.” Your beliefs do not merely color your mood, they reorganize your biology. They alter neurotransmitter levels, modulate immune function, and change pain perception. An inert pill can trigger the release of dopamine. A sham surgery can produce measurable improvement in joint mobility. A sugar pill can lower blood pressure.

If this is so, the placebo effect is not a parlor trick or a failure of reason. It is proof that the body answers to the psyche. Hermetic philosophy would say that spirit impresses itself upon matter. Jung would say that the psyche is the master architect of experience, shaping not only our inner landscapes but the physical realities we inhabit.

Perhaps this is the most unflinching evidence we have that the mechanisms we chase in the external world are already alive within us…awaiting recognition and command.

The Inner Healer

Ancient traditions have always known this. The yogi who slows his heartbeat in meditation until his pulse is nearly imperceptible. The shaman who draws illness out through song and ritual. The mystic who experiences the presence of God in every breath.

These are not romantic embellishments. They are cultural acknowledgments of a force modern neuroscience is only beginning to map: the self as healer.

In Hermetic Kabbalah, the human being is a microcosm of the divine – a living conduit through which higher planes of mind, spirit, and archetype descend into the material. In Jungian psychology, the Self holds the blueprint for balance, and the body responds when we align with it.

Carl Jung wrote, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” The placebo effect is modern medicine’s reluctant concession to a truth it has long sidelined, that the power to heal is not solely delivered from without, but also arises from within. Modernity, in its obsession with external solutions, has buried this understanding beneath the authority of prescription pads and clinical protocols. Yet it quietly remains in every instance where meaning mobilizes the body to restore itself.

“The individual who gains self-mastery gains the whole world.”
— Manly P. Hall (The Secret Teachings of All Ages)

So, What Do We Do With This?

The placebo effect is not a license to reject medicine or replace treatment with naïve optimism. It is an invitation to reclaim the authority you have ceded to external systems. To stop underestimating the role you play in your own healing. In creating your own existence.

It is a reminder that the stories you tell yourself are not incidental; they are the architecture within which your body operates. Faith (whether placed in science, spirit, or self) is not merely a sentiment. It can initiate measurable, biological change.

You do not need to choose between science and soul. In truth, the most enduring forms of healing occur where the two meet…in that space where meaning directs biology, and biology confirms meaning. The placebo effect stands as living proof of what mystics, healers, and depth psychologists have understood for millennia: the source of life is not only above or beyond. It moves through you.

It is you.

“Man’s mind is a mirror of the Universe, and his heart is the throne of the Divine.”
— Manly P. Hall (Lectures on Ancient Philosophy)

Anxiety Decoded: Listening to Your Soul’s Voice

“The anxiety neurosis is very often the first stage of a more thoroughgoing transformation process.”
— Carl G. Jung (Collected Works 18: The Symbolic Life)

Clinicians rarely see anxiety for what it truly is: a symptom. Instead, it is pathologized, labeled, and medicated. “Have you tried breathing?” the professionals often ask, as if oxygen alone could quiet the cry of the soul. We clinicians often sit back, hoping our clients arrive at their own insights and summon the courage to walk through life’s storms. But rarely does one encounter a clinician willing to serve as a true guide…one who dares to walk alongside the client into the symbolic roots of their anxious suffering; for it is within that anxiety where true inner transformation may take place.

And that is what this post will explore: Anxiety and the soul’s forgotten voice.

The Question Beneath the Symptom

We often begin with the wrong question. Rather than asking why we are anxious, we must ask where the anxiety is arising from. What is its source, its root, its whisper? I argue that at its core, anxiety is not a disorder to be medicated or managed, it is a message. A symbolic language spoken by the unconscious, calling us to reckon with something that we have tried to ignore and that our egos have come to try and shield us from.

So, we must then ask ourselves: Am I living in fear or in love? Not to be mistaken for romantic love, nor infatuation. I am referring to the deep existential love that is, in essence, openness which allows for connection, curiosity, and a surrender to life as it is. Fear narrows the self in ego; love widens it toward wholeness. And anxiety, more often than not, thrives in the spaces where we have closed off access to our soul.

“Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”
— Carl G. Jung (Collected Works 11: Psychology and Religion)

Fear, Rejection, and the Illusion of Control

In a fear-based mindset, our gaze turns inward, but not in a contemplative or meaningful way. Rather, we become consumed with what others see when they look at us. We spiral around questions of rejection: What if they reject me? What if I fail? What if I fall apart in front of them? What if the world crumbles around me and I am utterly defenseless against the weight of its debris?

This inward collapse pulls us into what feels like psychic quicksand. Every moment becomes tight with anticipation…slowly but surely suffocating us. Every word feels like a test. Our thoughts are so filled with what ifs that we fail to experience what is. In this state, the beauty of the present becomes inaccessible. We are no longer participants in life but spectators of our own imagined catastrophes. The focus is on “me,” and not on the simple act of being.

Panic attacks capture this vividly. Sweaty palms. A pounding heart. The sensation that you’re about to fall through your own chest. It mirrors the moment you trip in public and time slows, waiting for the impact…but the impact never comes. Just perpetual suspense in dread.

The Abyss of the Unknown

But what is it that we fear falling into? What is the terror beneath the symptoms? It is this: the unknown. Not just the unknown of circumstance, but the unknowable truth of who we are beneath our curated identities.

At the heart of anxiety lies a fear that we are not enough. That we are not loved, seen, nor welcome in this world. That the self we project is not only incomplete, but also irredeemable. And thus, we grip to control. To image. To narrative. Because losing those things would mean confronting the abyss.

And yet, that abyss is not empty. It is filled with symbols. Myths. Forgotten voices. The parts of ourselves that we abandoned in order to be liked, to be accepted, to survive. This is not mere psychology. It is soul work and when we gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss looks back.

The Ego’s Defenses and the Soul’s Lament

Our unconscious ego is a master craftsman. It manufactures defense mechanisms not out of malice, but out of necessity. It contains a primal need to protect and therefore builds defenses to keep us from falling into the unknown before we are ready to face it. However, when our unconscious ego becomes too strong, its attempts to protect, become obstructions. Judgment then is a means to distance ourselves from the parts of others that mirror our own darkness. Anxiety is a physiological alarm when our soul’s needs have gone unheard for too long.

In Jungian thought, projection is not just a psychological glitch, it is a signpost. What we reject in others is often what we cannot yet accept in ourselves. In this way, anxiety becomes a guide. Not a curse. The symptoms are not the enemy. They are an invitation.

“In the end, the only events in our life worth telling are those when the imperatives of the Self have taken over, and for better or worse, the ego has had to submit. That is what anxiety is: the friction between the Self and the ego.”
— Carl G. Jung (Letters, Vol. 2, Letter to Father Victor White)

Reconnection: From Fragmentation to Wholeness

What brings relief in these moments of fragmentation? Grounding. Breath. Stillness. Not because they are the ultimate of coping techniques, but because they return us to the body. They return us to the act of being. When we slow the breath, we quiet the ego’s shrieking. We make space for the soul to speak.

Love – again, not sentimentality, but openness to existence – emerges in this silence. We begin to remember that we are not the sum of our flaws. That we are not defined by rejection and that life is not a constant test of our worthiness. We begin to live from the inside out rather than the outside in.

The Myth of the Unlived Life

Let us imagine, for a moment, that anxiety is not just a diagnosis, but a myth. A myth of the unlived life. A call from the soul to return to its rightful place in the center of our being…not others. That anxiousness is not here to punish us. It is here to break the illusion that we can live without soul.

When we come to honor anxiety as the soul’s forgotten voice, everything changes. We no longer fight it, we listen. We ask: What am I not living? What am I afraid to feel? What part of me is desperate to be witnessed?

Only then does the panic begin to soften. Because what we resist, persists. But what we turn toward with compassion and symbolic understanding, begins to transform. The gaze of the abyss is terrifying, yes, but it asks not for panic, only for presence. Only for the quiet courage to look back.

“We must make anxiety conscious… Then it will be possible to deal with it.”
— Carl G. Jung (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928–1930)