Question: I feel a great deal of anxiety all the time lately. How does TCM view anxiety, and can it relieve this kind of condition? I don’t want to take prescription medication.
Answer: TCM sees anxiety as the mind creating the “wrong” thinking. Your mind receives information from the outside and then you “cook” it, based on what you know from your past. You try to analyze what will happen in the future and your limited knowledge and narrowed vision cause you to see something you don’t want to see. You create this anxiety because your vision of the future doesn’t match your wish. That’s the whole idea. There’s a difference between how you want to see things and what actually is. In essence, all religions try to teach you how to see things differently. It is difficult because we cannot understand the new; our understanding is based on the old, the past, what we already know—the old databanks. So we always rely on the old databanks, which are limited, to analyze the new information. That’s the concept of what causes anxiety. Read more
