A huge THANK YOU to all who prayed for or sent positive wishes to my Wilbur. He came through surgery fine, though he now has NO canine teeth left, poor guy. He sometimes looks like the Night Fury dragon, Toothless, in How to Train Your Dragon, so we had called him that in play for some time. Now his nickname fits him all too well!

I am hoping his pain levels will now decrease as he had seemed sluggish lately, even for him. (It can be hard to tell with him as he could take the Olympic Gold medal in napping.)

They did find some elevated blood glucose in his presurgery blood work, so they want to retest in a week. They said it might be because he did not eat before surgery, as they instructed, but I found out that cat blood sugar can spike to 300-400 when they are under stress. Considering what my husband said about the shape he showed up to the vet in, I’d say stress would be a likely culprit.

Though how in the world they expect us to get him BACK to the vet in a week for retesting without him being under stress then, too, is a mystery I have not yet solved.

THANK YOU again, for your prayers and wishes. This is such a special space in caring for one another and for the animals we love so dearly, too.

I am so very thankful that nothing more alarming showed up on his blood work.

In case any of you animal lovers visit this morning, please pray/send positive wishes to my cat, Wilbur, whose cuddly mush you have occasionally seen in here. He has dental extraction surgery today.

That is not a huge deal, but he also developed a limp. I am concerned and hoping the vet is right and it is, “just a little arthritis.”

From the first that he wandered up and into our lives, he has been, and is, a healing presence for me. I am so grateful for his gift of sharing life with us!

As he is just ten, I hope to have him a good few years yet. At the rate he conserves energy, he ought to come close to outliving God, if I may be flip.

Thank you to all who remember my kitty today — and his concerned owners.

Announcement! I would like to let you all know about a free course being offered by The Greater Good Science Center at Berkley through edX classes. It is available as a certificate course for those in the field, but for people like me, free is fine!

I joined yesterday, and the class just started Monday. Joining now would be fine! It looks like a great course.

One thing you can do is to form Happiness Groups which will allow for more interaction in a smaller setting during the course, so if any of you join, please speak up so we can make a group together.

The data from the weekly course check-ins is stripped of identifiers and used to help the Center with their ongoing studies of happiness and what that means to the greater society. It does however, move along with you in the course so you can chart how your happiness score improves over the duration of the course.

I hope some of you will join. It looks like it is going to be good!

Thank you so much, THenry. Much appreciated! He is a special cat. He even cured me of being allergic to cats, but that is another story.

I am hoping my husband remembers to ask whether we are to switch him to all wet food, as it sounds like the poor guy has hardly any teeth left! It has to be genetics as he has always had good food. I swear, with his dental issues, he MUST have a secret stash of Snickers hidden in the basement!

I will do an update post for all in a moment. Thank you again!

Dear Erich,

What I am going to write is coming from someone who has been dealing with anxiety issues since late 2016 as well. I do not know if any of this will resonate with you as your experience may be quite different. Take what fits, and pitch the rest. 😉 Here goes:

I, too, went through a numer of major life stressor events over a span of years that could objectively produce an anxious condition. Sometimes life stuff just happens that way. I say that so as not to diminish the reality of the fearful things in any way. This is not all in your head, so to speak,.

However, the brain’s fear producing mechanism is one sneaky little booger. When we manage to get past one fear, it pulls out another like a rabbit from a magician’s hat. Thus, job loss and mortgage is replaced by wildfires which is supplanted by climate change…and so on.

It might be something quite legitimate, something smaller that is catastrophized, or maybe even something off the wall. There are times it seems it does not matter much. It is as if the brain WANTS to stay afraid for some reason.

There can be many reasons for this happening. Here are two that I have seen in operation in my own life over the years:

One is distraction. When my system wanted to distract me from the truth of my life (for me this was regarding a very dysfunctional and abusive family that I kept right on trying to please) it produced pain and lots of it. Then it added on anxiety about pain and fear of fear of pain…you get the picture. All of it was quite effective at taking the attention from what was really going on underneath and the fact that changes needed to be made.

Second is the phenomenon that occurs when we finally reach a place in our lives where we are safe enough to allow anything that was repressed or disassociated to be felt. This can come up like a tsunami of emotion until almost anything feels like a trigger.

Without going too far into detail. this was the situation in the end of 2016 for me.

What followed was a plunge into profound depression and anxiety issues. As the depression improved, I got stronger, and I found that, for the first time in my life, I was finally safe enough that the old stuff I had disassociated for years came up to be processed.

There is a Far Side cartoon that really spoke to me about what I was going through. It is a drawing of a man who is tied into an anxious knot, arms and legs all over, eyes wide with fright. He is standing in front of the snake cage at the zoo. The caption says something like, “After twenty years as janitor in the reptile house, Harold has a cumulative attack of the heebie jeebies.” (my paraphrase) That was basically me.

I felt like a complete nutjob a lot of the time as the fear and anxiety I was experiencing had absolutely no basis in the reality of my current situation. I could be sitting quietly in my home surrounded by my dogs, peace abounding, and I would still be a quaking mess, terrified of whatever my brain presented to me.

This was all very hard for me because I have always been a person who was able to hold it all together, controlling myself almost mercilessly. I learned early on that controlling my emotions, making them into what was allowed, and controlling my actions to conform to what was considered acceptable was necessary to keep things on as safe a footing as possible. And yet, suddenly, all of my control barriers broke on me, and anxiety ruled without my being able to reel it back in and hide it anymore.

In the end, this loss of control has been a good thing, for it has taught me that while control was my coping mechanism, it was also my prison. Now I am learning to be just a normal flawed human being, and it is a wonderful relief!

All that to say, my first heartfelt suggestion would be to find yourself a counselor who is trained in doing EMDR. With what you have described, my guess is that there is something deeper, some splinter in your heart, if you will, that is pushing its way to the surface. That is why symptoms keep being produced — something needs compassionate attention. A good counselor with EMDR as a tool will be able to help that come up and out with the least amount of trauma possibilty. EMDR is also relaxing to the system, so it can help your pistons stop hyper firing, thus tamping down anxiety.

If you are not doing meditation practice regularly, that would be my next suggestion. Check out Headspace.com. They may still have a special on. He guides you through the exercises so seemlessly that it really makes the learning and doing much easier. Plus, as a sop to my inner Vice Principal, it tracks how long I have meditated and what my run streak of the moment is. 😉

I know you feel like a churned up compost heap at present, but I will leave you with this. Having this come up is a healing threshold for you, a call to a more peacefilled, less anxious life to come. That is part of how gratitude works into anxiety and pain, because in time we will look back and be thankful for the call to peace and calm.

If your system saw no problem with the way things are, it would not be trying to get your attention. Healing is simply answering our own cry for help.

I don’t know where you stand spiritually, but I will pray for you. I hope that is okay.

Learning how to be self-compassionate and understanding as you navigate your way through this, if you will, wildfire of anxiety will move you towards that miraculous regrowth that happens in the forest after the fire is over. Hang in there. It can get far far better than you might ever imagine possible right now.

Thank you, Anna. Your encouragement, indeed the encouragement of these blessed people in this sacred space has had a potent role in moving me towards this point over the last year. Our sharing here, the depth of the friendships despite the miles between us all, is a potent blessing to me on multiple levels. I am very grateful for you all and this wonderful place!

What I do know is that this is the next step that I had been asking to be shown. My frequent prayer is, “God, please show me the next step and give me the courage to take it.” Sometimes the answer is small, and sometimes a bit larger, like this. 🙂