Anxiety is where intuition fails man, be it below or above the clinical threshold. Not only is anxiety a result of our gut impressions gone astray, but our intuitive responses towards it prove highly counterproductive. Rather, these intuitive responses are notorious for exacerbating anxiety and often blowing it beyond the point where it becomes a clinically significant syndrome, by feeding the infamous “fear of fear” cycle. These intuitive responses can be classified under one umbrella term: trying to fight off anxiety.
How exactly it operates is a topic for another day. For now, suffice to know that the mantra for countering anxiety, that around which psychotherapeutic interventions like exposure therapy revolve, is to do precisely what seems counter-intuitive—to not try to fight anxiety off, and instead, letting it be, growing comfortable with it, and facing it under the right set of circumstances. In other words, one does precisely what anxiety doesn’t wish you would have done: you refuse to be anxious about your anxiety, decline its nudges to fear the anxiety inducer, take it head on and douse your burning desire that it is gone.
Here, anxiety’s not-so-apparent linkages with spiritual advancement start coming to light. The objective of spirituality is no different from the obligatory and universal human objective (and that of all conscient beings)— that of attaining what you desire.
And desire, with its moorings in evolution, is ultimately predicated upon improving reproductive fitness for the survival of the species. The essential corollary of this, since not everything we can do is supportive of the survival of our species, is that all desire is differential and conditional by nature. And it is this differential and conditional character that renders desire, at bottom, the antithesis of spirituality.
For some, it is here that the sublimity of the great Eastern traditions is most felicitously reflected. As Huston Smith identifies in his famous book The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, “If we were to take Hinduism as a whole… and compress it into a single affirmation, we would find it saying: You can have what you want.” Desire, identified as the most primordial element of human existence, is allowed to unfold instead of being repressed (of course under certain necessary restrictions) until the soul realises the futility of conditional desire. This, put simply, is what comprises Moksha, the holy grail of Vedanta
And this is not exclusive to Hinduism or Buddhism. Across world religions and traditions, the final destination of one’s spiritual journey is more or less consistent but has variously been termed as nirvana, surrender, salvation and unattached living. At bottom, they entail a cessation of opposition, of resistance, of a preference for certain conditional states of existence over others—and espousing unreserved acceptance of situations, of how things are, how we feel, and what is to inevitably happen. These, by extension, are the very principles underlying anxiety management. Psychological states such as anxiety are predicated on the unacceptability of the anxiety inducer, and all of therapy ultimately revolves around making the individual increasingly more comfortable with and unbothered by the inducer’s presence. It must also be noted that anxiety and its allied conditions are often aggressively self-perpetuating, and in common practice, it is helpful to think of anxiety as the villain whose commands one must not obey. Here, anxiety may be likened to the concept of maya. Maya, which, simply put, is the manifold world surrounding us, is the seat of all differential preferences, and therefore, of all desire.
Without due spiritual discipline, maya is rapaciously self-reinforcing, which explains why it takes immense labour to sustain spiritual gains. The acme of spiritual evolution is where the mind learns not to obey the commands of maya. When talking of spirituality, references to terms like freedom and detachment are commonplace, but what very often remains understated is that fear is the biggest nemesis of spirituality, for fear symbolises attachment. And what is anxiety other than fear of things or states that haven’t even yet manifested?
The most straightforward corollary of the relationship between spirituality and anxiety is that tackling anxiety through the correct approaches can contribute towards scaling spiritual heights. And no wonder that the first steps of spiritual advancement for an uninitiated mind are often characterised by potent existential angst, and often frank anxiety and despair. Here, anxiety becomes an insignia of spiritual progression—the fact that one has started seeing the world as never before and the edifices of ignorance have begun to crumble—until the new, spiritual worldview becomes firmly established.
But this is just one side of the coin. Seen carefully, anxious states brim with excesses of energy that can be channelled for one’s spiritual upliftment. In my own experience, I’ve come across individuals whose perfectionist nature (often strongly correlated with anxiety) has simultaneously implied a keen receptiveness to the subtlest of spiritual insights. When suitably managed, the hyper-observance characterising anxiety and allied conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorders can transform into keen awareness and mindfulness which are central to spiritual practice. Such transformation, in turn, ensures that no or little free energy remains to be wastefully invested into anxious hyperobservance.
The writer is a public health physician, Vedic astrologer and inner change coach