A viewer asks: “I thought I was handling things pretty well but was just at the doctor’s and my blood pressure, which has always been low, is very high. (I checked it again at home and was shocked at the numbers,) I eat very healthy, walk nearly every day and meditate often. So, I am ascribing it to the amount of anxiety that I am carrying around—and PTSD from all we’ve gone through with my son and his addiction…now, my husband and his considerable medical issues (upcoming cancer surgery). I often have a “is the other shoe is going to drop” feeling. I have a hard time staying in the present…’What if’s’ seem to haunt me.” How can we best help her? What is the cause of her high blood pressure?

These, indeed, are symptoms of a deep emotional inner conflict, and that is the cause of her high blood pressure, not a truly organic illness from a cardiovascular condition per se. We would see this is a higher priority and, in fact, the two are not unrelated—that she is blocked because of all that is going on within her that she has to juggle in her day-to-day existence. So this is something you can explore with her and pursue if she agrees. The high blood pressure is stress-induced and has a karmic underpinning as well, in the inner turmoil giving rise to the emotional response and the ramping up of a fight or flight reaction that is putting her system into high gear, so to speak, in anticipation of an impending disaster. That is why doing some trauma resolution work for the inner conflicts can be of great help, and a more long-lasting answer, because it will be addressing the causal factors. This does not rule out medical treatment either, if that makes her more secure and particularly, if recommended by her physician. That would be covering all the bases of what can be done immediately, and what might take longer time to show evidence of a benefit. Healing through the divine can be a long-term proposition. That is just simply the nature of things, that there can be such a huge backlog that is so complex and many layered, it becomes quite a project rather quickly to untangle all the inter-weaving threads. Everything you do to promote that healing will be a benefit, regardless of what the blood pressure readings turn out to be, because you are only out from under your karmic burdens when you are out from under your karmic burdens, and that will not happen by itself.