Meet the gatekeeper

Recently, Barbara Aul and I have been delving into how creativity works. Related to creativity, we notice a lot of anxiety.

As we were speaking today on anxiety in particular, what came up between us is the following metaphor:

“Anxiety is a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper keeps the gate, right? If you meet the gatekeeper, it means you found the gate. And that ís cool. That makes anxiety cool. And in the meantime, it is so hard to bear. That’s the paradox.”

To us, this threshold is both enticing ánd very uncomfortable. And yet if we stay with this paradox some longer together, right here on the edge, we might discover something worthwhile behind the gate. It is pointing to something very meaningful and transformative. It’s a great example of why we love this deep work.

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Barbara Aul and I met in Spain, where we learned to be facilitators in depth work, which is a style of depth psychology, based on an integrated body-mind approach to deepening process work. We have our weekly online calls as she lives in Münich and I live in Rotterdam.