Dealing with Anxiety and Worry

Many people express the idea that simply living life without any form of planning or care about organizing one’s activities is the ideal ‘worry-free’ way of living. This conflates reasonable planning in the outer life with the internal process of worrying.

Worrying is basically an inability to let go of some issue or circumstance that might affect one’s life. A certain amount of worry tends to occur when people find that their income has been affected, or when they get potentially devastating health news for themeselves or any of their family, or when someone is involved in some kind of accident, etc.

Anxiety tends to arise when there are unknown factors or when the ego-personality is put under pressure, such as having to do a speech before a large public audience, or facing an examination upon which one’s future career may be affected, or when going in for a job interview. In many cases, the creation of “what if” scenarios takes up a lot of time and energy for things which in fact never occur! Confidence and faith can help mitigate this type of anxiety.

For a spiritual seeker who may have found ways to mitigate most of the external causes of worry, there arise issues of worrying about his fitness for the spiritual path, his abiilty to maintain himself on that path, and the support he gets from the Divine to whom he has dedicated himself.

All of these causes of worry and anxiety can and should be addressed, while at the same time, the reasonable need for planning, using the mental powers available to us, can and should be maintained. Planning ties into the scheduled and fixed ways the world operates, whether it is regarding plane or train schedules, banking hours, shop openings, work schedules etc. Planning also comes in when one is trying to operate a complex organization that has many moving parts that need to work together, coordinate and which are dependent on one another for the success of the activity. Planning should not revolve around worry, but around the organization of tasks and actions around a chosen goal or objective.

Worry is actually destructive rather than constructive, as it eats away at the vital force and actually opens up the individual to the factor that is causing the worry in the first place. It is like punching a hole in one’s aura, the protective vital envelope that helps mitigate the impact of forces with which an individual comes into contact.

His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama, has this to say about worry: “If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”

The Mother writes: “Let us live each day without anxiety. Why worry beforehand about something that will probably never happen?”

“Don’t foresee difficulties — it does not help to surmount them and helps them to come.”

“Live in the consciousness of the Eternal and you will have no more worry.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 4, Ordeals and Difficulties, pp..98-99