Calming Your Anxious Mind Read online

  Consequently, many health care providers have been looking to other sources for ways to promote healing and health. This has led many to investigate the health and healing potential of meditation. As a result, meditation has become much more widely used in Western health care settings over the past twenty-five years .

  Who This Book Is Written For

  This book is designed to help anyone who is burdened by fear, worry, anxiety, or panic and would like to do something to improve the situation.

  If you have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and are being treated for that, or if you have no diagnosis but feel the pain of fear, worry, anxiety, or panic from whatever source, the approach in this book is directed at you.

  Health care providers who seek to aid those beset by fear, worry, anxiety, or panic will find useful information about mindfulness and meditation, as well as valuable support for their own meditation practice experience.

  The Invitation, Challenge & Opportunity of Mindfulness

  The approach offered in this book relies on a basic human quality called mindfulness. Mindfulness may be understood as friendly, nonjudging, present-moment awareness. To succeed with this approach, you must learn and use a variety of meditation practices all directed at cultivating mindfulness.

  As a training program in mindfulness aimed at dealing with fear, worry, anxiety, or panic, this book is an invitation, an opportunity, and a challenge as well.

  It’s an invitation in that the practices you will learn are a gentle call to stop and pay more attention to yourself and your life. They invite you to allow the awareness that flows naturally from that act of paying attention to inform how you live, each day and each moment, in each relationship, and with yourself. The invitation to practice mindfulness is an invitation to come into a new and more wholesome relationship with your own experience—including fear, worry, anxiety, or panic.

  As you practice mindfulness, you will have a rich opportunity to discover the inner space, stillness, and simplicity that are our natural heritage as human beings. It is a heritage we so often forget, yet we long for it deeply as our lives seem to spin more and more out of control. By taking this opportunity to learn and develop skills for being more present, you can realize in yourself the spaciousness and stillness that can safely contain even the most anxious moments of heart and mind.

  But be warned! Doing what is asked here is a challenge. Mindfulness is not always easy to achieve or to sustain. You will have moments when you are filled with doubt and don’t want to do any more meditation. There will be times when you don’t like it. But you don’t have to like it—just do it!

  Cultivating awareness takes effort. Changing the habits of inattention and distraction we have developed over a lifetime is hard work. It is more hard work to allow yourself to stop and feel the present moment in its fullness. And it can be very hard work learning to open when you desire to close down, or learning to stay present for what is painful and unwanted in your life, especially when it is clouded by fear and great anxiety.

  Kindness & Compassion

  Mindfulness is practiced by paying attention on purpose, nonjudgmentally, and with a welcoming and allowing attitude. It means turning toward present-moment experience rather than away from it. Two qualities that support this way of relating to experience are kindness and compassion.

  Kindness here means friendliness, or openheartedness. It enables you to welcome experience.

  Compassion is usually associated with feelings of empathy and concern for pain or suffering in another. With this recognition of pain and suffering comes the wish for it to end. The practice of compassion carries with it a willingness to remain present and in contact with the painful situation, in the hope of bringing some measure of relief.

  In this book, you will be invited to apply kindness and compassion to yourself and to the pain you feel from anxiety, fear, and panic. You will learn a specific meditation practice to cultivate these qualities in your life. For your mindfulness practice to deepen, it is very important that you open to and explore these qualities of kindness and compassion in yourself .

  Mindfulness and compassion can free you from anxiety, fear, and panic as you learn to be present with an awareness that remains soft and open to pain and suffering. Learning to remain present with compassion for yourself as you bear the pain of anxiety, fear, and panic is an important part of your inner journey in meditation. As you learn through meditation to remain soft and openhearted in the presence of pain and fear, you will also learn what it means to be free of their control.

  Self-Help Is Not a Substitute for Treatment

  When you learn to do something to help yourself, you become an even more active and effective partner in your own treatment and health care. If you’re receiving treatment for a diagnosed condition, this activity on your part can make a crucial difference in the progression and outcome of your illness. Self-help skills and practices can also have a significant and positive impact on your quality of life as you cope with the illness.

  The mindfulness training offered in this book is a powerful self-help resource. However, it is in no way intended to be used as a substitute for any medical or psychological treatments you are already receiving.

  While meditation is an extremely friendly and safe activity, please consult with your therapist or physician before doing the practices in this book if you are currently in treatment for any psychological or psychiatric condition. If you have a history of severe anxiety or trauma, you may need to use meditation in partnership with good treatment.

  Mindfulness: A Way of Living, Not a Technique

  Although many people learn to practice mindfulness as part of a larger treatment plan for a specific medical or psychological condition, it is a mistake to think of mindfulness as simply a treatment technique. While there is exciting evidence that practicing mindfulness might aid treatment, mindfulness itself is most powerful and most effective when practiced as a way of living.

  Failure to appreciate this larger view of mindfulness ignores the ancient tradition of mindfulness as a practice pursued by countless people in many places and times. The essential power of the practice of mindfulness may be distorted or even lost by those who see it as only a technique.

  Mindfulness is based in a daily meditation practice. In this book, you will be encouraged and guided in starting and maintaining your own meditation practice as a vehicle to cultivate mindfulness in your life. If you are interested in using mindfulness as part of a larger approach to treatment for an anxiety problem, the approach in this book will certainly help you. But you can enrich your life even more by considering mindfulness an integral approach to being in the world.

  Experiential Learning

  You must actually do the meditation practice to benefit. It will not help you much if all you do is read about mindfulness. In fact, some of it may sound crazy until you actually try it.

  For example, in doing the body scan, you will be asked to breathe in and out of your toes. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? This instruction has to do with feeling the direct sensations of your breath and the sensations in your toes and holding all of that with steady attention. At this point, maybe that sounds crazy too.

  Please make no judgments until you actually do the meditation practices. To realize what mindfulness means and how it can transform your life and your relationship to fear, anxiety, and panic, you must actually experience mindfulness through practice.

  There is a capacity inside each of us to be calm and stable. We are capable of containing even the most intense fear and anxiety. This capacity is not something you can think about and understand. It is a direct experience that is always available. It is not a destination but a way of being .

  Discovering your own capacity for calm, steadiness, and awareness requires turning inward and using your natural ability to pay attention. To turn inward this way is to meditate. This book is about learning to meditate in a very basic way that nourishes mindfulness, or friendly, nonjudging
awareness.

  The practices you will be invited to do in this book are about stopping and looking around. You will be invited to practice being and not doing. You will discover that it is possible to be more present with just about everything you do.

  To support this, you will learn how to establish calm attention and a relaxed feeling in the body. A calm attention and a relaxed body are important elements of meditation. The practices in this book are compatible with any faith tradition or religious practice. They are simply about being present, in this calm and relaxed way, and opening to what is here—in us and in our life.

  If you accept this challenge, commit to practicing meditation regularly, and have enough energy and discipline to make the practices in this book a part of your life, there is a very good chance you will begin a process of profound life change and transformation. Take as much time as you need to develop these practices. The important thing is that you remain committed.

  In making this commitment to being aware and paying more careful attention, you will join people from all walks of life, cultures, and creeds who have discovered the profound richness that is available when we become mindful, or truly present to life. And you will realize what it truly means to calm your anxious mind.

  The Goals of This Book

  The goal of this book is to offer a self-guided training program in mindfulness meditation to ease the burden of fear, panic, and anxiety. It is suitable for people who wish to begin a mindfulness practice or to deepen a practice they already have. The meditation practices taught here are typical of those taught in a mindfulness-based stress reduction program. They are accessible and easy to learn.

  More specifically, as you read this book and learn the practices, you will gain:

  A direct and real sense of what it means to practice mindfulness. Armed with this understanding, you will be able to use mindfulness practice to more effectively manage fear, panic, and anxiety in your life.

  A real and direct understanding of mindfulness as a way of living and being in life, with all the richness that brings. Beyond managing fear, you will discover unexpected benefits of being more present for life.

  A deep sense of your own wholeness and potential for healing and transformation through the process of facing fear, worry, and anxiety.

  How to Use This Book

  This book contains several different types of information. It provides current information and resources about mind-body health, mindfulness, meditation, and applications to conditions such as fear, worry, anxiety, and panic.

  I include numerous examples of people facing situations of fear, anxiety, and panic. These examples come directly from my experience with hundreds of meditation students. Of course, their names and identifying personal details have been changed for confidentiality.

  A large part of this book is devoted to the instruction and practice of mindfulness. Commentaries and guided meditation narratives focus on specific mindfulness practices. The power to heal and transform lies in doing the practices.

  You will notice that there is great detail in the guided meditations. You might try breathing several times gently and naturally between each line of the narrative. This will help you do your practice better.

  Reading can be distracting. It may work better to have someone read the guided meditation slowly to you. Alternatively, you could make your own tape or CD using your own voice or another person’s voice reading the guided meditation phrases. Then practice by listening to your tape or CD.

  The goal is to eventually learn to meditate without the guided meditation phrases. They are not the only words to use to do any of these mindfulness practices. The guided meditations give you a place to start. As you become more practiced and confident, you can let the guided phrases go. Learn to trust your own awareness and wisdom.

  I will offer many suggestions about making these practices your own and weaving them into your life. Please make the commitment and find the discipline to do this. Move at your own pace. You might find you work with a particular practice quite some time before moving on. That is okay. When you have done them all, you will begin to see how they work together, but each works quite well by itself. Please give yourself—and each practice—a fair chance by working faithfully and patiently.

  See for Yourself

  You have to do the practices to get the benefit! The direct experience you gain through meditation is crucial. What you see for yourself makes all the difference. In fact, if you have to make a choice between practicing mindfulness and reading about it, practice first. And keep practicing! If you practice, you will find that what you do read will make a lot more sense, and you will find that your practice will go deeper and farther.

  Don’t ever think you “know” what is happening. Words, thoughts, and the illusion that we “know” are very tricky! It is better to practice not knowing. Don’t think your ideas are the way it really is. The map is not the territory.

  And when you do the practices and start to feel some benefit, don’t stop. Keep practicing! Don’t try to make something come back or happen again. Just keep paying attention. You already have what you need to succeed. You are starting a journey down a path of awakening. On that journey, you are required to do some work, be persistent, and keep coming back to it even when you feel lost or discouraged.

  If you stay on this path of awakening, your life will change in unexpected and wonderful ways. It is guaranteed!

  Part 1

  Getting Oriented

  Chapter 1

  A Mindful Approach to Fear & Anxiety

  From the point of view of mindfulness, everything happens in the present moment. All we have is the present moment. What we call the past is a memory that actually occurs in the present moment, and what we call the future is something we are imagining or planning now—in the present moment. This present-moment focus is crucial to understanding all our experiences, including fear, anxiety, and panic. In the present moment, the mind and body interact with the environment in an ever-changing and dynamic way.

  If you desire to teach yourself a better way to manage fear, anxiety, and panic, then the lesson must begin with what is happening in the present moment. Through meditation, you learn to establish and maintain attention in the present moment. From this base of attention, awareness or mindfulness produces clarity and understanding. From understanding flows constructive and compassionate action.

  Physical experience is deeply interconnected with psychological and emotional experience moment by moment. Physical sensations can trigger thoughts (as when you perceive pain in your knee as arthritis and begin to think of the story of your arthritis and your fear of arthritis), and thoughts can stimulate physical responses (as when you recall an angry outburst in a meeting, and your neck and shoulders immediately tense up).

  Fear, anxiety, and panic also occur as experience, flowing into and out of the present moment. They command physical, psychological, and emotional attention as well. To view them as experience in the present moment may seem radical. You have probably thought of fear, anxiety, or panic more as problems you had to deal with, or as conditions (or even illnesses) that too often seemed to have the upper hand in your life.

  You may even have come to identify with them. Have you referred to yourself as “an anxious person” or “a frightened person,” in a way that suggests that anxiety or fear is mostly who you are, or mostly what your life is about?

  In fact, such a limiting definition of who you are is completely inaccurate, even if:

  at times anxiety is so strong you fear you are going crazy

  it seems that your heart is always pounding

  you avoid people and places because you are afraid you will make a fool of yourself

  you are a perfectionist tormented by guilt because you feel like you never measure up

  The truth is that you are much more than any momentary experience, even if it is an intense one like fear, anxiety, or panic.

  You have the capacity to recognize
this and reconnect with the whole of who you are. By teaching yourself the art of attention and awareness, or mindfulness, you will come to understand deeply what it means to be present, and how, by learning to listen with your whole being, you can be free from the limitations and distortions of fear, anxiety, and panic .

  Understanding Fear, Panic & Anxiety

  Both fear and anxiety share the intensely unpleasant feelings of dread and foreboding, but when the source of the dread is a threat that can be identified, the feeling is called fear. Fear may be defined as the feeling of agitation, apprehension, dread, or even terror caused by the presence or nearness of a danger or threat.

  For example, you see a snake and feel fear. Or you find a lump in your breast and feel fear. Or you hear on your car radio that a tornado has been sighted in your area of town, and you feel fear. Or as you get near the top of a high cliff, you slip and fall toward the edge, and you feel fear.

  When the feelings of dread and foreboding are not so clearly associated with an identified danger or threat, they are called anxiety. Indeed, this difficulty or inability to identify exactly what you are anxious about is a hallmark of anxiety.

  The word “anxiety” comes from the Latin word anxius , which means a condition of agitation and distress. With anxiety, this agitation and distress is felt deeply—in the mind and body—in the present moment. The fearful feeling is more internal and seems to be in response to something threatening but hazy, something vague or far away. You cannot identify the danger but feel the fear anyway.