On anxiety and fear

Thought provoking words to take in about anxiety and fear from Br. David Steindl-Rast:

We want to acknowledge our anxiety but we must not fear.
Anxious- this word, comes from a root that means narrowness and choking.
The original anxiety is our birth anxiety. We all come into this world through this very uncomfortable process of being born.. it’s really a life and death struggle for both the mother and the child. And that is the original, the prototype, of anxiety. At that time we do it fearlessly, because fear is the resistance against anxiety. If you go with it, it brings you into birth. If you resist it, you die in the womb, or your mother dies.

[Anxiety] is a reasonable response, and we are to acknowledge it and to affirm it because to deny our anxiety is another form of resistance. Anxiety is not optional, it’s a part of life. We look at it, and we remember it, and we say to ourselves, “we made it, we got through it!”
In fact the worst anxieties, the worst tight spots in our lives, years later after we look at them, reveal themselves as the beginning of something completely new, and that can give us courage.