What kind of fear lives in the Solar Plexus
Nervousness is the fear of instability. The emotional center is a motor that works in a wave, so nothing in it can be pinned down. When you're at the top, there's an uneasy feeling that it won't last. When you're at the bottom, that you'll never come back up.
A splenic fear is about survival and lasts a moment. An Ajna anxiety is mental and spins in your head for a long time. The nervousness of the emotional center is about the quality of life: experience, intimacy, feelings. It isn't fixed: what seemed overwhelming yesterday looks trivial today, and the other way around. That's why these fears are the least trustworthy in the moment, but over time they reveal the truth.
Seven gates, seven kinds of nervousness
Gate 6: nervousness about intimacy. Gate 6 decides whom to let closer and fears that the intimacy won't be real. Someone can be warm and open at the top of the wave and keep their distance the next time. Real intimacy here is tested only by time.
Gate 22: nervousness about silence. The fear that there will be nothing to hear and nothing to say. In a relationship it sounds like “come on, say something”: the fear of a silence in which nothing new and alive will be said.
Gate 37: nervousness about tradition. Nervousness tied to the traditions of the family and the close circle, to the way things are done among your own.
Gate 49: nervousness about nature. The fear of the unpredictable forces of nature. In human relationships, it's the fear that at the moment you need it you won't be supported, or will even be betrayed. At the bottom of the wave, the mind gladly brings back every old grievance. It helps to know this is the wave and to decide nothing until it changes.
Gate 55: nervousness about emptiness. The fear of living an empty, spiritless life, even with plenty of everything. This is the gate of the glass that one day is half full and the next half empty. This fear can push people to extremes: strictly denying themselves, or trying to fill the emptiness with food and pleasures.
Gate 30: nervousness about fate. The fear that life will shatter every expectation. You can build and plan and cushion every fall, and then a storm comes. This gate is where you learn to accept that life doesn't follow a plan.
Gate 36: nervousness about inadequacy. The fear that in a new experience you won't have what it takes and won't cope. But this gate is designed to enter the new, and in something new nobody has experience. If you enter an experience from emotional clarity, it's correct, even if it turns out to be hard.
Some emotional gates have “twins” in the Spleen. Gates 36 and 48 share the theme of inadequacy: in the Spleen, whether there's enough depth to survive; in the emotional center, whether you'll cope with a new experience. And gate 55 echoes gate 28: there, the fear of dying without finding a purpose; here, of living a life without spirit.
Defined and open emotional center
In a defined emotional center, the nervousness of its gates moves with your own wave. At the top there may be none at all, and that's a trap too: you can jump into something without noticing what you should have noticed. At the bottom the same situation can look like a disaster.
An open emotional center takes in other people's waves and other people's nervousness and amplifies them. It seems to you that you are the nervous one, when often this nervousness came from the people around you. It helps to ask yourself: is this mine, or am I feeling someone else right now?
How to live with this nervousness
Emotional nervousness isn't something to put out by force. The main rule of the emotional center is that there's no truth in the now. For a defined center this means not acting either from nervousness or from its absence until clarity comes. Give yourself time to live with a decision at different points of the wave.
When an emotional person learns to wait, nervousness stops being the enemy. It becomes part of the movement: over time it shows where intimacy is real and where it isn't, and which new experience is worth entering. For people with an open center, it helps not to identify with other people's feelings and not to make decisions just to get rid of the tension faster.
Nervousness is a wave, not a verdict. Wait, and it will show you more than the moment can.
A question to ask yourself
Which decision in my life came out of nervousness rather than clarity?