Anxiety: emotional and spiritual meaning

What anxiety is

Anxiety is fear of the unknown, close to anguish. In the body it often shows as headaches, heat, cramps, nervous palpitations, heavy sweating, tension, a voice that speeds up, sobs, and insomnia. A short burst before something difficult is ordinary. When it is there most days, or arrives as panic, it is worth seeing a doctor. Treatment can help.

The reading below does not replace that. It listens to where the attention is pointed.

The emotional meaning of anxiety

The source describes a shiver of anguish that comes from cold and reminds you that you are afraid. It calls anxiety something that grips the throat, so that you lose mastery of yourself and control of the events of your life. Good sense and discernment go. There can be a disconnection between the physical world, which you can partly control, and perceptions of an immaterial world you cannot always explain.

The sky might fall

You no longer have control. The sky could fall at any moment. There is a constant feeling of imminent danger, and the danger is undefined. You can be anxious in any situation, because, as the source puts it, you become what you place your attention on. If attention stays on the fear of this or of that, anxiety follows. It may sit close to the fear of death, or of anything that recalls death: what you do not know, what you do not see, but what might exist. You do not trust life.

On this site, that picture is why anxiety is linked with the head, the throat and the heart. Headaches, a gripped throat and palpitations are the signs the entry names. They are also reasons to be examined, not only interpreted.

Moving the attention

Even while you fear the unknown, the healing direction is to place attention somewhere else: trust, and the conviction that what happens is the best for you, in this instant and in the future. The source says the symptoms, and the fear of dying, can then recede. That is an inner practice. It is not a promise that a medical problem will vanish.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself for being anxious. The emotional perspective invites you to notice what your attention is feeding.

• Name the unknown. An unnamed danger grows faster than a named one.
• Feel where it grips. Head, throat and heart are the places this reading points to. Pain there still deserves a doctor.
• Shift the attention on purpose. One trusted fact, repeated, is the practice the source offers.
• Trust is a direction, not a mood you must force. It can be small. It does not have to cover your whole life today.