life affirming anxiety

If you have anxiety, the perceptive framework you ground the condition within is of vital importance in its best management and your ability to engage wholeheartedly with life.

Often, anxiety is seen as unconditionally 'bad,' and unfortunately many frameworks of thought focus on 'fixing,’ ‘ being completely free’ of the condition, and/or avoidance of any experience that initiates any challenging symptoms.

Now it needs to be said that 'anxiety' covers a broad range of physiological symptoms, and of course severe panic attacks and extreme anxiety is debilitating and understandably the tendency is to avoid, or preferably, manage such experiences.

And of course, some anxieties are the result of very specific traumas, and as these traumas are skillfully brought to the surface in an appropriate space and worked through, anxiety largely disappears, or at least lessens.

But then there are a whole host of general indefinable anxieties that don't appear to coincide with any single traumatic event, yet personal management still remains grounded in 'fixing' and avoidance, because the background frameworks of thought does not have a ready place for the free ongoing expression of such conditions.

But thinking about unique conditions like anxiety has not always run along these same lines.

In older cultures inner essence or soul had the prominent role in perceptive frameworks. Soul was inseparable from the body and its inbuilt intelligence, including the nervous system. And each individual’s body and thus interface with soul was unique. So body and soul were intrinsically connected.

Soul was seen as passive or inert, and engagement with other 'souls' made one feel alive; animated ones being.

This 'aliveness' included a full spectrum of experience from the ecstatic right through to dread. All of it was part of engaging with life/cosmos which acted relationally with body/soul.

Interestingly, there is a lot of cross-over of symptoms here. Both ends of the experience spectrum - ecstasy and dread - make the heart beat faster, make one breathless, sweaty, hyper aware; to 'stand outside of oneself'.

Even terror or experiences that scare or initiate anxiety were nevertheless seen as animating to the soul and thus had beneficial and life affirming characteristics.

Re-calibrating how you view life and your engagement with all aspects of life is a key to developing a more harmonious, life affirming relationship with anxiety.