Does anxiety come from spiritual awakening, or point towards it?
Somewhere tonight, a person with a racing heart will ask Google: can spiritual awakening cause anxiety? The search suggestions show that this question rarely travels alone. Is anxiety a sign of spiritual awakening? Can awakening cause panic attacks? Each one comes from someone who hopes (or fears) that a pounding heart means something.
Together they tell two small stories. In one, awakening is the cause and anxiety is its side effect, like the ache after a long climb. In the other, anxiety runs ahead of an awakening that is on its way, like a messenger.
Both stories are understandable — when something hurts, a meaning makes it easier to bear. My answer to either question is no. I hope to show you why that answer can free you from searching your anxiety for awakening, instead of leaving you alone with your fear.
Awakening is not among your experiences, and causes no anxiety
Anxiety is something you feel. It tightens your chest, churns your stomach and fills a morning with "what if". Like any other experience, anxiety shifts through the day: at some hours it barely stirs, and at others it takes over. Even panic, the most frightening form of anxiety, rises, peaks and fades.
Awakening, however, names something of a different kind. I once wrote that you will never have a spiritual awakening, because you cannot have what you are. The word points to you, the one every experience happens to — whether it is an anxious morning or an easy evening.
One experience may set off another. A shock brings panic, and a sleepless week breeds dread. You, who feel the shock and the dread, are not one more link in that chain. So awakening, which points to you, cannot set off your anxiety.
For someone who longs for awakening, this may sound strange at first, and then come as a relief: your anxiety is not the price of awakening.
Many websites call anxiety a sign of approaching awakening
Most of the pages near the top of these searches say yes to both questions. Anxiety, they explain, is a normal part of awakening, a "wake-up call", or your soul asking for healing as your old identity falls apart. A few of them sell relief kits for the anxiety they describe.
I read those pages carefully, and none of them shows that anxiety announces anything at all. They offer a story, which can feel like evidence when your breath is short and you are frightened.
The story persists for an old and simple reason. A sign promises that your wait for awakening will soon be over.
Yet when I looked closely at the lists of awakening signs, every item on them described the person reading them. Anxiety taken as a sign is no exception — it tells you what you feel, and nothing about what is supposedly on its way.
Your anxiety becomes a messenger you listen to in vain
Believe those pages, and your anxiety takes on a new job. It becomes a messenger, and you start to listen to it closely. Is this tightness in my chest the beginning of my awakening? Does tonight's panic mean the change is near? Was yesterday's quiet a step backwards? You try to read every flutter under your ribs as a message.
Each wave of anxiety now arrives with a question attached, and each one sends you back to your body for an answer. The messenger has no message to deliver — and all that attention keeps your mind on the very feeling you want to lose.
When I wrote about whether awakening is painful, I described the assumption that turns your anxiety into proof that something big is coming. Calling anxiety a messenger is the same mistake in a softer form. Proof makes you endure the pain. A messenger puts you on watch for news. Either way, you wait for something your anxiety cannot give you.
And listening in vain has a cost, which a doctor recognised long before anyone searched online for awakening.
Dr Claire Weekes found that fearing panic prolongs it
Dr Claire Weekes (1903–1990) was an Australian general practitioner who spent years treating people with what she called nervous illness. In 1962 she published Self Help for Your Nerves, which later appeared in America as Hope and Help for Your Nerves. The book has stayed in print long after her death.
In that book she makes a simple observation about panic. A person in panic, she writes, "feels not one fear, as he supposes, but two separate fears." She calls them "the first and second fears".
The first comes by itself, "almost automatically", like a flash. The second is what the person piles on at once — in her words, "He adds fear of the first flash." He thinks, "Oh, my goodness! Here it is again!", and the panic grows.
She also shows why the two are hard to tell apart. The second fear follows so quickly that it "may actually seem to join" the first, and "this is why the two fears so often feel as one."
Her conclusion is blunt. "It is this second fear," she writes, "that is keeping the first fear alive." With understanding and practice, she explains, a person can learn to control the second fear.
Asking if anxiety is awakening adds another fear
Weekes described panic in restaurants, at school meetings and in church. If you are searching for awakening, your second fear sounds different, yet it works in exactly the same way.
The first fear arrives — your pulse quickens, and dread rises in your throat. Then your questions come, one after another. What if this is awakening, and I am doing it wrong? Or am I simply losing my mind? What if this goes on for ever? You cannot answer any of them while the fear is mounting, and that is why they frighten you.
Writing of the person in panic, Weekes had a phrase for this kind of thinking: "all those What ifs that build up into what he calls a spell, a crisis." A spiritual what if is no gentler than any other. Asking whether your anxiety is awakening adds a second fear to the first, and that second fear, as Weekes found, is what keeps the first one going.
You may not be able to choose the first fear. The second, the frightening question, you can notice as it comes, and in time leave it unasked.
Let a doctor examine what your body is going through
Whatever your anxiety means to you, it is more than a mood. It shows up physically, as a racing heart, sweating, trembling, a churning stomach, or the odd sense of not being connected to your own body. These are real symptoms, and they deserve a proper examination.
Please see your doctor about what you are going through, even if it seems small. Describe what your body does, and when, as clearly as you can. Talking therapy may help as well, and your doctor can point you to it.
If you ever find yourself thinking about ending your life, please speak to someone now — a friend, a doctor, or a free helpline: 116 123 (UK and Ireland), 988 (US and Canada), 13 11 14 (Australia). If you ever think of harming yourself, call your local emergency services straight away: 999 or 112 (UK and Ireland), 911 (US and Canada), 000 (Australia).
I know anxiety from the inside, too.
I was anxious almost all of my waking time
I once summed up a stretch of my own life in a single sentence: "I ended being miserable, depressed, anxious and stressed, almost all of my waking time... and, consequently, my health and physical condition starkly deteriorated."
Four states stand in a row there, with "anxious" third, between "depressed" and "stressed", as if it were just another weight to carry. Then the sentence ends with my health deteriorating.
Nothing in that sentence announces an awakening. It presents my anxiety as one part of a hard time in my life.
So I take your anxiety seriously, and I read no more meaning into it than it has.
Company is what I offer, rather than explaining your fear
When you are anxious, an explanation of what your fear means gives your mind one more thing to check. Company gives it somewhere to rest. And fear you share with another person tends to stay the size it is, instead of growing with every what if.
Being with you in your anxiety matters more to me than being right about it.
Whatever you feel, you are the one aware of it
So, can spiritual awakening cause anxiety, and is anxiety a sign that awakening is near? Each question searches your anxiety for awakening, one in its cause and the other in what it seems to announce.
Look at what both of them leave out. Someone feels every moment of your anxiety. When your heart races, you know it is racing, and the one who knows is you.
The next time a wave of anxiety comes, let the question "what does this mean?" wait until the wave has passed. In Weekes's terms, that pause can spare you the second fear. Meanwhile, breathe slowly and deeply, which is what Britain's National Health Service advises for anyone having a panic attack.
Anxiety is not part of spiritual awakening, nor does it foreshadow it.
The awakening you hope for is you, the one who knows whatever you feel.