Calming Your Anxious Mind Page 16

  Like Ellen, you can be living in a world of inner meanness and come to identify it as self. You can come to believe all the harsh judgments, and live in the fear body whenever the judges speak.

  When this meanness happens in you, you become your own worst stressor. No matter how bad the situation is, your mean attitude amplifies and adds to your misery, usually through the addition of criticism, judgment, and blame.

  Of course, meanness also lashes out at others. “You,” “they,” “that one”—all become the objects of the criticism. The tone of anger and hostility that drives the meanness spares no one.

  By practicing mindfulness, kindness, and compassion in a steady and committed way, you will begin to recognize the habits of meanness toward self or another when they surface. You can become free of their hold. Their reach into your other experiences and relationships will diminish. The toxic effects of meanness in your body will be reduced.

  The way to manage the damaging energies of anger and hostility lies in establishing a conscious connection with them in the present moment. This means establishing a kind attention on your inner experience of anger and hostility, recognizing it as experience, not as self. It means being a friend to yourself and to the anger.

  The same applies to fear and anxiety. Indeed, fear and anxiety usually lie beneath anger and hostility. Can you learn to befriend your anxiety and fear when they arise? Can you hold them in kind awareness?

  It is only when you can stay connected with the present moment that real caring can arise. The kindness within can shine through, and compassion can awaken. To evoke this kindness, you must teach yourself to stay present with pain and difficulty as well as everything else .

  Can you find a way to cherish yourself in the midst of a storm of fear, anger, or anxiety? Acknowledging your own courage in bearing the distress and upset? Holding yourself in a cradle of compassion?

  Kindness and compassion directed to self and experience can help you stay connected with the present moment in a way far more powerful than mere willpower. Kindness within can shine through, and compassion can awaken in the midst of pain and upset. A good way to explore this depth of kindness within is to work with meditations focused on directing kindness to your own pain and to difficult people.

  Opening to the Pain in & Around You

  Have you ever stopped to ask the question: What is my relationship to the pain I feel? This includes the pain of fear and the pain of anxiety and panic.

  You do have a relationship; you just may not recognize it. For many people, the relationship they have with any kind of pain is one of denial and dismissal. For others, the relationship is flavored by anger, fear, or a desperate attempt to escape the pain. Driven by pain, people fall into patterns of addiction and despair.

  Remember Pema Chödrön’s story of the old woman telling her, “Don’t go letting life harden your heart”? Has your relationship to pain caused your heart to harden? Are you less connected with life as a result? Do you feel less alive?

  To practice mindfulness means to pay attention to life with an open heart. Meditation can actually help this way. Meditation is a heart-opening activity!

  On a meditation retreat once, I entered a phase when either sitting or walking, all of my periods of meditation were consumed by angry, destructive images and stories filled with hostility and rage. When I asked the teacher about this, he responded with great gentleness and kindness. He told me, “Beneath anger is fear. Beneath fear is a belief about something. Keep sitting with each thing and let it be. Let it reveal itself to you. When you get to the belief, investigate that. Is the belief true? Is the belief you?” Sitting with the experience, I connected with deep feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy about a new job situation. Sitting longer, I found that the feelings left me. I saw how untrue they actually were.

  We all have a relationship with pain and habits for dealing with it. We all have developed attitudes and views about the pain we feel. In many cases we have also developed an identity around the pain. To the extent these attitudes and identity have become fixed, we are prisoners of the pain.

  How might this be true for you? How does it apply to the impact of fear, anxiety, or panic in your life?

  Practicing mindfulness wholeheartedly requires the willingness to pay attention, stay present, and investigate your deep inner pain—including the pain of fear, anxiety, or even panic. Approaching the pain with kindness and compassion is crucial. Meeting pain with anger does not help. Meeting fear or anxiety in oneself with anger or hostility simply multiplies it.

  Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg has been a leader in bringing Western students meditation practices focused on kindness and compassion. In her 1995 book Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness , Salzberg describes compassion meditation as “purifying and transforming our relationship to suffering, whether it is our own or that of others. Being able to acknowledge suffering, open to it, and respond to it with tenderness of heart allows us to join with all beings, and to realize that we are never alone” (117).

  In this chapter, we will learn loving-kindness meditation, a practice aimed at strengthening attitudes of kindness and compassion. As you will see, it is a basic meditation practice that is friendly to any faith tradition.

  Mindfulness helps you recognize any mean thoughts or feelings that are here. The meanness may be blocking you from experiencing your deep capacity for kindness and compassion. You can learn to hold the feelings of anger and meanness with more kindness. You can teach yourself to meet fear and anxiety with compassion. This is deep inner work that allows you to access a profoundly healing dimension in your being .

  Meditation Practice: Loving-kindness

  With a kind and compassionate heart, all you attempt—including your practice of mindfulness—will flow more easily. Loving-kindness meditation uses repeated phrases, images, and feelings to evoke kindness and compassion. It is not exactly a mindfulness practice, yet the qualities it cultivates are crucial to the practice of mindfulness.

  This meditation is not about sentimentality or about manufacturing “good” feelings. It is about connecting with and cultivating a capacity for kindness and friendliness that is already within you. At first it may feel mechanical or clumsy. It may arouse painful feelings like anger or grief. Don’t let this disturb you. Keep up your practice and discover what happens next. When you have difficulty, hold yourself with kindness and compassion.

  When you do loving-kindness meditation as a formal practice, begin with sessions of fifteen to twenty minutes and increase to thirty to forty-five minutes at your own pace.

  Guided Meditation: Loving-kindness

  Take a comfortable position, either seated or lying down.

  Bring awareness to the breath and the body as they are in this moment.

  Let your body relax and be at rest. As best you can, let your mind be quiet. Let go of plans and preoccupations.

  Allow a feeling of kindness and friendliness to arise within. Recalling a loved one or a pet can help to nurture this feeling.

  Begin by focusing kindness on yourself. It may help to find an image of yourself in your imagination or to say your own name quietly to yourself as you repeat the phrases below. Without kindness for yourself, it is almost impossible to be kind or compassionate with others. With the focus on yourself, begin to recite the following phrases: May I be happy. May I be healed and healthy. May I be filled with peace and ease. May I be safe.

  Continue repeating the phrases. Let them be like a song you sing quietly to yourself. As you repeat them, adjust the language so that you find the exact words and phrases to best nourish kindness in your own heart. You might also try the following: May I be free from all pain and sorrow. May I be at ease and at peace. May I be free from fear, anxiety, and worry. May I be well.

  Repeat the phrases that work best for you, over and over. Let the feelings penetrate and fill your body and mind. Experiment with other phrases if you need to. Use phrases that resonate deeply within
. Keep it simple and not too “heady.” Use a single phrase if that helps. Put all your attention and energy into one phrase at a time. Move at your own pace, softly, gently, lovingly.

  When you feel ready, in the same meditation period or in a separate period, expand the focus of your kindness to include others. Move to someone who has cared for you, to someone who is a friend, to someone whom you have no strong feelings for or don’t know well, to one who causes pain or hurt, and to all living things, including animals and plants. Experiment. Don’t be afraid.

  Practice as long as you like. When you are ready to stop, gently open the eyes and allow the body to stretch slowly. Notice how you feel without judgment or commentary. Allow yourself to feel what you feel.

  Suggestions for Practicing Loving-Kindness

  With some practice, a steady sense of kindness can develop. You will be able to work with directing kindness toward all kinds of people—even difficult people.

  With time you can learn to practice loving-kindness anywhere. As you silently practice repeating the phrases of loving-kindness in grocery checkout lines, in doctors’ waiting rooms, in traffic, in the middle of crowds, on the streets, or in a thousand other places, a deeper feeling of connection and compassion for all of life arises. A deeper sense of calm will fill your life and keep you connected to the present moment.

  Keep in Mind

  Mindfulness has a welcoming and friendly quality. To befriend what arises in awareness is essential to avoid the habits of meanness and judgment that lead to feelings of isolation and suffering. Befriending means meeting pain and distress, fear, anxiety, and even panic with kindness, compassion, and nondenying awareness. The qualities of kindness and compassion—toward yourself and others—can be cultivated by including loving-kindness meditation in your daily practice.

  Chapter 13

  Making Room for the Upset

  In my work teaching mindfulness meditation in health care settings, and especially in working with people struggling with anxiety, fear, and panic, a crucial question appears over and over again.

  I am so bothered by these upsetting feelings of anxiety, I don’t want to pay attention more closely to them. I am afraid to pay attention more closely. What can I do?

  This is a very understandable feeling, and can be worked with, as we shall see. Such aversion actually has its roots in the processes of anxiety, fear, and panic themselves.

  Your Inner Life—& You—Are Worthy of Attention

  Anxiety, fear, and panic are indeed upsetting. A central theme in this book is that most people have not been properly educated about the nature of these feelings (they are not you and not permanent), and certainly have not been properly trained to handle them in a skillful, meditative way (using affectionate, nonjudging attention to alter the old mind-body habits of struggle and reactivity). The result is that there is a tendency to identify with anxiety, fear, or panic, and to become lost in the aversion to them as it arises, fills your awareness, and drives your consciousness moment by moment.

  Remember Allen, who woke in the middle of the night panicked by fears of having another heart attack? Or Ellen, who took on her ex-husband’s criticisms of her and added to her own anxiety with negative self-talk whenever anything in her life went wrong?

  Allen or Ellen could be any of us. And, we could be them. They had become identified with powerful feelings and stories and were at war with themselves because of it. What helps in the face of intense upset is learning a different way to relate to inner experience that does not depend on believing the story or on making war on the unpleasant, upsetting experience as it unfolds.

  It can be helpful to remember that your inner life—distressing or not— is worthy of attention, and so are you! In fact, your best hope for changing the distress you feel is by trusting that turning toward the experience is the way home. The processes of anxiety, fear, and panic may generate doubts and discouraging thoughts that distract you from actually turning attention toward the unfolding experience, but don’t let yourself be fooled! There is a different way to relate to the pain of anxiety, fear, or panic besides taking them as an identity, or making war on them.

  Vital to changing your relationship to inner experience is knowing that you can open into a place of inner spaciousness that can actually include and contain even the worst upset. In a sense, we could say that finding your inner spaciousness is really about learning how to make more room for whatever is happening on the inside—while it is happening.

  To make room like this requires confidence and trust that it will not destroy you. It also requires patience and the courage to keep working at it. And, perhaps most importantly, making room for any upset depends much more on being kind, compassionate, and wise than it does on willpower or endurance.

  How could you practice making room? Think about making more room at your dining room table for a loved one. It begins with a sense of welcome and valuing of the person who has just arrived. Then, here is the activity of softening and opening the existing space (with people in place and crowded together) to include them, as everyone literally moves back and apart just enough to make more space.

  In practicing mindfulness, especially toward any intense or upsetting feeling or experience, can you begin to imagine how you might literally make more inner room for the upset?

  Drop the hatred or dislike, perhaps, and become more welcoming? Let the out breath bring you a sense of ease and calm, possibly? Open to the always-present reality of inner spaciousness by turning attention toward the space between breaths, or sounds, or objects in your visual field, maybe? And, most important, let things be as they are by dropping any attachment to making things different.

  Such things are not as difficult as you may think when you have your own meditation practice. Whenever you are meditating, you are “making room” through the activity of allowing attention, and the quality of friendly welcoming toward any experience that enters your awareness.

  The Time is Now. The Place is Here. This Is the Way It Is.

  Making room for things means being willing to name them and to let them be as they are. Being mindful is about being here, now, and being clear and concrete about what is here with us. The poet David Budbill offers some guidance.

  Don’t Speak in the Abstract

  Say rather:

  It’s a nice day.

  Pass the mashed potatoes, please.

  Look, there’s a chickadee.

  Your voice makes me swoon.

  Let’s plant the beans.

  I miss my dead mother so much today.

  I want to touch your face .

  Clean up this mess!

  What’s better than a cool glass of water?

  I feel so sad; all I want to do is cry.

  What time is it?

  I want to touch you everywhere.

  Let’s go for a walk.

  Will you have tea with me?

  Let’s play some music.

  I don’t want to die.

  Come visit again soon.

  Now — here — this —is the way it is. Attention with compassion and welcoming friendliness puts you in touch with your whole self. It connects you with all that you are, moment by moment. The willingness to acknowledge exactly what is happening, to return attention to it repeatedly, and to soften around the hardening of resistance in the mind and body—this willingness requires faith, courage, and patience. Your rewards are a growing confidence that you are more than your worst fears or anxieties, and a deepening faith that a place of spaciousness, ease, and peace exists inside you that can contain even the most intense upsets.

  Ending the War on Anxiety, Fear & Panic

  Remember the story of Sam, who was traumatized by childhood trips to the dentist and took his fear and anxiety to every visit as an adult? Things shifted for Sam when he was able to establish attention on his breath, relax a bit, and stop fighting the other experiences happening in the present moment of his current visit to his dentist.

  Making ro
om for experience, especially when it is unpleasant, usually also requires acknowledging the war you are waging to get rid of it. The very feelings of unpleasantness associated with anxiety, fear, and panic lead to a strong desire to be rid of them, and then to fighting and plotting how to become free. The same process—unpleasant feelings associated with a condition or situation leading to aversion and hatred of it leading to waging war to be rid of it—can be found in many places, from physical pain to interpersonal relationships to international relations.

  It is important to recall that when you notice a feeling of aversion or hatred for something unpleasant, you have not done anything wrong! It is just a habit of mind and body in reaction to the unpleasantness of the situation. Now, you may get into trouble as you follow the hatred or aversion into actions that harden the situation and make things worse, but to recognize the presence of such aversion is a moment of mindfulness and the first step toward a different response, and to freedom.

  When intense aversion and dislike are present, it is important to make room, to acknowledge, and to find space within to contain them. Then, as you continue your mindful attention to the flow of experiences, you will see how powerful untended aversion and hatred actually are, and how they easily hijack all of us into destructive reactions.

  The core attitudes of acceptance (the willingness to see things as they are), nonjudging, and nonstriving (not trying to change how things are) now become your good friends and allies in ending the war on anxiety, fear, and panic. Practicing these attitudes toward even the feelings of aversion is powerfully transforming.