Spiritual Meaning of Anxiety: What It May Be Asking You to Feel

Your heart is going too fast for a Tuesday. Nothing has happened. Nothing is wrong, exactly. And still there’s that hum under your ribs, as if something terrible is about to arrive and nobody has told you what.

So you started looking for meaning. An awakening, perhaps, or a message, or your soul trying to tell you to change your whole life.

Maybe. But here’s what we’ve come to think, in seven years of leading sessions: the message may be much simpler, and much closer. It isn’t in the sky. It’s in your chest.

What is anxiety trying to tell me?

In our book there’s a line from Rytis we come back to again and again: “You’re not afraid of the spider. You’re afraid of your own feeling.”

People think they’re afraid of the phone call, the bill, the doctor’s letter, being alone. “Under every one of those fears is a physical feeling in the body, and what we are truly afraid of is feeling it.”

So if anxiety is trying to tell you something, it may be this: there’s a feeling here, and you keep leaving before you’ve felt it.

And there’s a twist. “Anxiety stays alive mostly because of the fear of feeling the anxiety fully.” The running is what keeps it going. Every distraction, every reassurance search at midnight, every “I’ll think about it tomorrow” teaches your body that this feeling is too dangerous to touch.

Anxiety meaning, spiritual: a message to decode, or a feeling to feel?

Some of what you’ll read online treats anxiety as a code. A sign of growth. A wound from a past life. A message from your higher self.

We understand the pull of that. It gives the pain a reason. But decoding is still thinking, and anxiety is mostly thinking that’s run away. “Fear lives in the future. The feeling lives now.”

Your body can be lying in a warm bed while your mind is three months ahead, in the worst version of everything. That gap is where the anxiety lives. The spiritual move, if there is one, isn’t to find the deeper meaning. It’s to come back. Out of next year, into this minute, into the one place you can actually feel.

We call the anxious voice in your head “the dragon.” And one of the most freeing things we know is this: “That voice is not you.”

If the dragon gets loudest in the middle of the night, our piece on waking up at 3am with anxiety is for those hours.

Why trying to make it go away doesn’t work

People ask us: can I feel it so the anxiety goes away? Our answer: “You can try, and you will probably notice that it works best when you stop trying to make it go away. Feel it to meet it, not to get rid of it.”

It’s a strange difference, but your body knows it. If you’re feeling it while secretly checking whether it’s gone yet, that’s waiting for a bus. Feel it “the way you would listen to someone you love.”

One small help when the thoughts race: ask yourself, do I know this one hundred percent, right now? If the answer is no, you’re back where you can do something, here.

If panic attacks keep coming back, have them checked by a doctor too. Feeling and good care go together.

Practice2 min

Two minutes in the middle of the day

1. When something hits you, find the closest quiet place, even a bathroom.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Find where it presses.
4. Stay with it for two minutes, changing nothing.
5. Then go back to your day, and see what you do differently.

Try it the next time the hum starts, at your desk, in the car park, in the kitchen. Yours might sit in your chest, your throat or your stomach, or in your hands or your jaw. Wherever it presses, that’s the place. Don’t calm your breathing. Don’t tell yourself it’s fine. Just two minutes with it.

What you might notice: it may get stronger for a moment, then shift or spread. Or it may stay just as it is the first time. Both are okay.

Violeta knows this from her own bed. When Rytis once left for Lithuania without her, a story started at once, and with it “a pressure in her chest, heavy and familiar.” She could have called him. She could have built a whole case. “Instead she lay there and put all of her attention on the pressure itself. Every time the story pulled at her, she came back to the chest. The story never got its fuel.”

If something shifted in those two minutes, the book is the full practice: lying down, longer, with everything we know about fear and the voice that feeds it.

When the hum starts again

• Ask the one-hundred-percent question the next time a scary thought arrives.
• Put the reassurance search down. Instead, give the feeling one minute of attention.
• Find where it sits, and say hello. Change nothing.
• Ten seconds, a few times a day. Eyes closed, strongest sensation, change nothing, carry on.

When anxiety is about what’s coming next, you might also like how to deal with fear of the future. Our states section gathers the other restless, on-edge feelings, from overthinking to waking up anxious. The longer version of this practice is the Feeling Session.

Maybe the spiritual meaning is only this: you, here, now, staying with the place that flutters. The future can wait outside the door for two minutes.