whoever you are, however grueling and seemingly shaping your experiences of anxiety or depression

or mood disorder or self-consciousness or lack of self-worth, however painful those experiences

are, they are experiences. They are not who you are. We are not going to be free of anxiety in this life.

So that should not be the goal. Let's say that again. We should not be free of anxiety.

Because sometimes those impulses or instincts serve us very well.

I was allowed to go to the very precipice of death, of life and death, and look over the edge.

And I was allowed to behold what was there and allowed to come back.

Most people aren't.

When we talk about being aligned with our self or being aligned with our soul or hearing our higher self,

that's really what we're talking about is being connected to that divine part of ourself,

that light-filled part of us, that is connected to God energy,

that is connected to everybody here and every experience we've ever had.

If more doctors, more professionals can open up to use

intuitive gifts in their work, that's really important. Hi, I'm Dr. Amy Robbins and welcome to life,

death, and the space between. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and medium. And here we explore life, death, mediumship, near-death experiences, consciousness, and what it all means.

Welcome Dr. Stephanie Dowrick to life, Death, and the Space Between.

It's so lovely to be with you, Amy. It's delightful. Thank you.

So let's start with your book. Your name is not anxious, and how you came to kind of understand anxiety.

Like, what is the lens through which you see anxiety in life?

Okay, let me talk about the title first, because unlike quite a lot of writers in this space, I'm actually a literary writer.

And before I was a writer, I was a publisher. I worked in London for many years, and I founded a

feminist publishing house called The Women's Press, where we published many great American writers,

...