Meditation and Insight
Dealing with anxiety involves two parts, meditation and then the psychological insight. Meditation provides the strength and openness to experience anxiety and not get taken away by it. The goal of this meditation is not to stop the mind but to return over and over, to the breath and body. Then, insight provides the wisdom to transform anxiety, so it does not operate unconsciously and get acted-out in harmful ways. Insight is a kind of self reflection on the story I am telling myself, which may only be partially true.
Meditation for Dealing with Anxiety
1. Where is the anxiety in the body?
2. Feel the anxiety as you breath in the anxiety through the nose.
3. Accepting it on the in-breath, letting it go on the out breath.
4. Continue breathing through the nose deeply until it starts to subside.
5. Allow the breath to relax into its natural cycle, but keep the mind on the breath and body.
6. As the mind wants to focus on the anxiety, bring it back to the breath and the body.
7. Continue to bring the mind back, over and over and over, each time it goes to anxiety.
8. As the focus stays longer on the breath and less on the anxiety it will subside.
9. Return to the breath and body many time throughout the day for prevention.
10. Rejecting and fighting the anxiety will make it worse, just shift to breath and body.
Practice: Watching anxiety instead of rejecting anxiety
Feeling the sensations of anxiety pass through us without judging them as bad, allows them to leave sooner. They are like waves, the more we push on them and fight them, the more they stir up the water. Just returning the mind to the breath, allows the waves to subside, just as waves on water will subside if you quit splashing.
This basic meditation practice is very effective with anxiety symptoms, but you have to do it. It is interesting how our anxiety wants us to not meditate. If you meditate for a time in the morning and again in the evening, you can notice change immediately. Then, have reminders to do short one to three minute meditations throughout the day. I was teaching a meditation class at Kaiser Hospital. We had participants put little round stickers in various places in their house or car to remind them to breathe and take meditation breaks. Some people put the stickers on places that gave them anxiety; such as, the phone, car or the computer. One women asked if she should put a sticker on her husband’s forehead!
Anxiety is a natural emotion for protection, but it has gotten out of hand with modern culture. The stability of an inner life is lost and projected externally to a strange kind of perfectionism. Meditation and insight restore the stability. The next post will go into the insight and reflection for dealing with anxiety.
Continued in next post:
Anxiety Treatment
