Anxiety

What do you do when your emotional state overwhelms your spiritual intention?  What do you do when everything you know and have practiced drowns in a flood of uncontrollable emotion?  What do you do when the fears and concerns that you have patiently soothed with meditation and mindfulness erupt with a ferocity that threatens to destroy all your effort?

You breathe.  Slowly and deeply.  And you let the feeling wash over you, and do everything you can to just keep breathing, to let the energy of that experience move and keep moving.  You feel whatever there is to feel, and don't try to grab hold of it, manipulate or control it.  Because that fear is energy. It is energy that got stuck somewhere, somehow, and is trying to move, to get unstuck, and in whatever way you seek to control it, it will get stuck again.

The spiritual journey doesn't protect you from yourself.  It doesn't protect you from the reality of what you have lived through or what lives inside of you.  But regular spiritual practice gives you internal strength, and a sense of self bigger and more real than emotional upheaval and the havoc it might wreak.

The spiritual journey reminds you that the challenges along the way are very real, that the journey isn't an escape from yourself or your circumstances.  It reminds you that spirituality isn't a tool for manipulating the things we want to change, but a tool that gives us the courage to face what must be faced.  It doesn't change what's around you; it changes what's in you.