Anxiety is an appropriate response to a lot of what's happening.

And at the same time, we all need tools for how to navigate, for how to come back into our most centered self to sit at the head of that table, primarily so that we can fight whatever fight and bring whatever light into the world that we are called to bring.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Cheryl Lisa Finn.

Cheryl is an author, educator and counselor informed by Jungian Depth Psychology.

She's guided thousands of people worldwide through the tricky terrain of anxiety through her

courses, blog, books, and private sessions. She herself became intimately familiar with anxiety

when she had her first panic attack at the age of 21.

And since then, she's devoted herself to her own inner growth and development

and also helping people navigate conscious transitions

and other challenging situations of all kinds that bring forth anxiety.

With Sounds True, she's the author of the book The Wisdom of Anxiety and also a new workbook.

It's called The Healing Anxiety Workbook,

a guide to calm worry and intrusive thoughts at the root. Cheryl, welcome.

Thank you so much, Tammy. We call these inner work books doing the inner work, something that I think is a very good fit for you. And when I opened your new inner workbook, the healing anxiety workbook, to be honest

with you, I kind of almost fell off my chair during the introductory chapter. I was so surprised because, you know,

at this point, I've interviewed north of a dozen people on the topic of anxiety. And yet, you have a

framing that I found tremendously helpful and simple at the same time. And I was like, oh, my God, that's brilliant,

really, to be so helpful and simple. Simple doesn't mean easy, but just easy to understand. So I want to

start with this framing. You offer at the beginning of the workbook a nutshell definition.

Anxiety in a nutshell is a lack of safety. Tell me how you got to that working definition.

So we can think of anxiety in a lot of different ways. And I think it's one of those terms that we throw around a lot, but we don't often know exactly what it means. We know what it feels like when we're anxious. Everybody has had the experience of feeling anxious, but not necessarily why and what's at the core.

So to pare it down in that way, to say anxiety is at the core, a lack of safety, gives the reader, gives whoever's in this conversation a very direct inroad.

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