Anxiety is a heart massage. Over the course of one’s life, it can also be understood as a profound blessing. Let’s say you’re getting nervous before an event or a presentation. You feel the energy of anxiety welling up in your heart. It starts to overrun your mind, you start feeling confused and inadequate to the task (and maybe a little crazy and out of your mind?) and you think, “I can’t do this.” And the energy is building so much in your body, it’s making you freak out. Some people cry and wail, some people just internalize it and start shaking…

What is this energy? It’s an intuition of moving into a space of heightened powers. Simply put, it’s the energy to get the job done. It’s the inflow of energy you’ll need to operate on the higher level that’s necessary for you. You might feel like you’re in a mildly psychedelic state. Your reality starts vibrating at a higher frequency, and that’s exactly what’s happening: you’re upleveling. And the former person you were a few minutes ago, before this nervousness set in, was incapable of stepping up to that space of power.

You’ve been blessed and anointed with divine ability to go in there and do what needs to be done… to speak on a high level, to participate more fully, to ride that event horizon that’s coming in like waves in the ocean, rising higher and higher to these vertiginous heights, and you think, “I can’t perform up here.” But actually what’s happening is you’re being given the means and the ability to do just that. 

It’s like the mother whose baby gets pinned under the car, and the mother suddenly gets this massive burst of power that gives her unseen abilities to lift up the car and pull her baby out to safety—something she never could have done with her normal strength. She was gifted the divine ability to step up in the moment.

So we need to stop looking at anxiety as some sort of fault or deficit that makes you weak. It’s actually what’s most divinely radiant inside of you coming out in its fullest expression. Anxiety is a subtle, long-term tuning up of your spiritual frequency. It will tell you the people you should be around and shouldn’t be around. It will tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing. It will guide you into the realms where you will be able to perform and contribute most and be most in your dharma. It’s a cosmic, low-level, often present energy that is tuning your chakras up to a higher octave of light.

Meditation helps to coral and synergise these energies. It’s not a virtue to feel uncomfortable. It’s a virtue to recognize and feel fully whatever is happening in the moment. And in order to do that, energies like anxiety and nervousness will be allowed to do their work in you and you will emerge as a higher spiritual being. So rather than believing the misunderstanding that the only way to solve what’s happening in your body is with prescriptions, do a little interior research. Rest with these energies, let them do their work in you. Take them into your meditations, take them into your times of prayer and silence, and investigate. You may find that they’re actually your secret allies, and you’re doing just fine.

Adapted from the podcast BEINGNESS with David Thomas Scott, now available on Apple Podcasts, Insight Timer, and Spotify.