And this is not exclusive to Hinduism or Buddhism. Across world religions and traditions, the final destination of one’s spiritual journey is more or less consistent but has variously been termed as nirvana, surrender, salvation and unattached living. At bottom, they entail a cessation of opposition, of resistance, of a preference for certain conditional states of existence over others—and espousing unreserved acceptance of situations, of how things are, how we feel, and what is to inevitably happen. These, by extension, are the very principles underlying anxiety management. Psychological states such as anxiety are predicated on the unacceptability of the anxiety inducer, and all of therapy ultimately revolves around making the individual increasingly more comfortable with and unbothered by the inducer’s presence. It must also be noted that anxiety and its allied conditions are often aggressively self-perpetuating, and in common practice, it is helpful to think of anxiety as the villain whose commands one must not obey. Here, anxiety may be likened to the concept of maya. Maya, which, simply put, is the manifold world surrounding us, is the seat of all differential preferences, and therefore, of all desire.

Without due spiritual discipline, maya is rapaciously self-reinforcing, which explains why it takes immense labour to sustain spiritual gains. The acme of spiritual evolution is where the mind learns not to obey the commands of maya. When talking of spirituality, references to terms like freedom and detachment are commonplace, but what very often remains understated is that fear is the biggest nemesis of spirituality, for fear symbolises attachment. And what is anxiety other than fear of things or states that haven’t even yet manifested?

The most straightforward corollary of the relationship between spirituality and anxiety is that tackling anxiety through the correct approaches can contribute towards scaling spiritual heights. And no wonder that the first steps of spiritual advancement for an uninitiated mind are often characterised by potent existential angst, and often frank anxiety and despair. Here, anxiety becomes an insignia of spiritual progression—the fact that one has started seeing the world as never before and the edifices of ignorance have begun to crumble—until the new, spiritual worldview becomes firmly established.

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