Calming Your Anxious Mind Page 8

  A successful meditation practice requires both internal and external conditions of support. This chapter is focused on the internal conditions. In the next chapter, we will take a look at the necessary external conditions and some practical issues related to meditation practice.

  The Key Factors Within

  There are four important internal factors that support your meditation practice .

  Attitude. Your attitude about practicing meditation should not be too idealistic or too cynical. The don’t- know-it-all attitude is best.

  Curiosity. Cultivate the interest and desire to discover something more about yourself and your life as it unfolds, even in the unpleasant or difficult moments.

  Motivation, determination, and discipline. To benefit, you have to practice mindfulness faithfully and regularly. You don’t have to like it, but you do need to do it!

  Belief in yourself. This means developing confidence in your own ability and power to do something to help yourself manage fear, anxiety, or panic.

  What Approach Will You Take?

  Take a moment to consider the inner orientation you are bringing to this practice of mindfulness. The orientation or position you take at the beginning is absolutely critical. It is probably the most important condition of all.

  The Cynic

  Have you become cynical, even bitter, about your situation? Are you discouraged about ever finding relief? Are you feeling hopeless? Have you given up on the possibility of overcoming the fear and anxiety that interrupt your life?

  The cynic might approach the idea of practicing mindfulness for help with fear, panic, and anxiety with an attitude something like this: “I know nothing can really help me, but I will do this meditation anyway and prove it!” Then, the first time fear or panic returns, the cynic says, “See, I told you so. Mindfulness can’t help me either. ”

  The True Believer

  Or are you the “true believer”? True believers come to meditation practice (like so much else in life) with an idealized view that “this is the answer to all my problems. This will take care of me.” They don’t understand that effort and practice are required, or that life will continue to present challenges and ups and downs. When fear or panic returns, the true believer becomes discouraged and says, “Oh well, I guess it wasn’t the answer after all. I must keep looking.”

  The Curious Skeptic

  There is a middle ground that is far more realistic and more potent. The most helpful attitude you can bring and maintain throughout your practice is what Jon Kabat-Zinn (1990) has called skeptical curiosity. You are not a true believer, and you are not a hopeless and bitter cynic, either.

  You are skeptical in that you do not automatically assume that your practice of mindfulness will relieve all your problems or that it will happen without effort and commitment on your part. In fact, you are willing to admit that you do not know how or even whether it will really help.

  But, at the same time, you are curious. You recognize that any worthwhile pursuit takes commitment, discipline, and effort. You are willing to give your best effort to your mindfulness practice over time to find out where that might lead. You are willing to give yourself and the process some time and energy, and are curious to learn what might happen if you stick with it.

  If you want to develop your ability to calm your mind, relax your body, and be truly aware, now, in the present moment, then you must examine your attitudes and be willing to change them if necessary .

  Embarking on an Experiential Journey

  To cultivate the healing power of mindfulness in your life requires more than just sitting in a meditative posture, or following a set of meditation instructions, or listening to a tape. By taking on this practice, you are embarking on a new way of learning. The focus is on you and your life as it unfolds moment by moment. And this way of learning happens from the inside out.

  This is experiential learning. You learn by having the experience directly. As you practice mindfulness, your life continues to unfold, and your practice changes your experience of your life.

  What and how much you learn depend directly on you. You learn through your entire being, not just the part that thinks. You learn by being present as experience occurs in your body—through your senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting—as well as what is happening in your thoughts.

  This learning takes place only through your own practice and willingness to be present and to pay attention. It is not based on preconceived ideas or what you think you know. Your understanding grows over time as you gain direct experience practicing meditation regularly.

  This learning cannot be forced but is a process of allowing, discovery, and unfolding. The awareness you develop does not try to change anything. Change comes later, and is guided by awareness. It is very likely that you will make significant changes in how you handle fear, anxiety, and panic, but you will do so only after you have touched each of those experiences deeply with mindfulness. Acceptance and openness to what arises in the present moment are vital.

  It is helpful to view the activity of meditation and its application to healing your life as a process or a journey. It is ongoing, changing in each moment, and changing over time as you develop consistent habits of attention and presence.

  From this view, the attitudes you hold (especially the unrecognized ones), the attitudes you let go of, and the attitudes you cultivate all have a deep impact on the process of learning and being present .

  The Seven Essential Attitudes

  In Full Catastrophe Living (1990), Jon Kabat-Zinn outlines seven specific attitudes that form a foundation for mindfulness. They apply directly, moment by moment and day by day, as you cultivate and deepen mindfulness. These attitudes are nonjudging , patience , beginner’s mind , trust , nonstriving , acceptance , and letting go . Throughout this book you will be called on to recognize and apply these important attitudes as you learn to cultivate mindfulness and apply it to face fear, anxiety, and panic.

  The attitudes support each other and are deeply interconnected. Practicing one will lead to the others.

  Your ability to bring these attitudes forward in your mindfulness practice will have a great deal to do with your long-term success and ability to calm your anxious mind. In the actual meditation practices you will learn, you will revisit them many times, and will come to understand what vital supports they truly are.

  Nonjudging

  Mindfulness is compassionate, openhearted, choiceless awareness. It is cultivated by taking the position of an unbiased, attentive witness to your own experience as it happens in the present moment. To do this requires that you begin to relate to the contents of experience, without judgment, as the present moment unfolds.

  The habit of categorizing and judging experiences locks you into patterns of reacting and repeating thoughts, feelings, and behavior. You may not even be aware of these patterns. Judging acts to separate you from the direct experience of each moment and from the unfolding reality of life. When you practice mindfulness, it is important to recognize the judging quality of the mind and identify judgmental thinking as it arises. It is equally important not to judge the judging! Simply note that judging is present.

  Bill’s Stor y

  Bill has generalized anxiety disorder. He lives with intense worry and imagines a terrible variety of things that could happen in almost every situation he enters. Over the years of his suffering, Bill has come to hate the worry and fears. To make matters worse, he has become a harsh critic of himself in the process. Whenever a fearsome fantasy arises, it is accompanied almost immediately by mean and insulting thoughts like “I am such a weakling” or “I am so crazy.”

  After Bill began to practice mindfulness, he started to notice the patterns of his thoughts and the habits of criticizing and judging that arose whenever the anxiety and worry came. He remembered to practice nonjudging.

  After a while, Bill was able to recognize at least some of the judgments as just another set of thoughts passing through t
he present moment.He found he could relax a bit, could soften in his mind and body, despite the fact that his anxiety was still intense at times.

  Bill also began to notice that he could allow the feeling of anxiety itself to be present along with all the scary thoughts. They happened, but they had lost a lot of their hold over him. He was able to view these events, unpleasant as they were, as something else passing through the present moment.

  Patience

  Patience is the ability to bear difficulty with calmness and self-control. It requires connection with your calm inner core and also some faith and courage. Patience also requires a degree of kindness and compassion for yourself as you bear the upset of the situation. Often, impatience arises when the ego ,the self-centered part in each of us, screams for things to be different than they actually are.

  There is a certain wisdom that supports patience. This wisdom recognizes that things have a life cycle of their own and that the ego is not always calling the tune. As you learn to rest more and more with this truth, your patience will grow even stronger.

  To become more patient, you must learn to recognize impatience. Notice any tendency to rush through one moment to get to the next.

  Helen’s Stor y

  Helen does not have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. She lives a busy life, holding down a good job while maintaining a home for her husband and two children. She also helps care for her elderly mother, who lives in a nearby town. As her mother’s health began to decline, Helen became more worried about her mother’s health and ability to care for herself.

  About nine-thirty in the evening on a weeknight, Helen got a phone call from her mother’s neighbor. He was at the hospital with Helen’s mother, who seemed to have had a stroke. The neighbor told Helen the situation was very serious and urged Helen to come to the hospital immediately.

  Helen’s mind instantly began to fill with all kinds of fear-driven stories and ideas about her mother and what needed to be done. She felt her body begin to tighten up and noticed aches in her back and neck where she usually feels her stress. She was aware of a sinking feeling, and some deep dread began to arise.

  Helen had been in a meditation class for a few months before receiving this phone call. She had been learning about mindfulness and practicing some. She had started to pay attention more closely to her breathing, breath by breath. She had acknowledged more deeply the upset and pain in her own mind and body. She had learned to remember the quality of patience. Even while her ego voice was screaming at her, she was able to remember that life moves in cycles of creation and dissolution, and that she would have little or no control over the situation with her mother.

  In the moments after the phone call, Helen was able to use the conscious breathing method from her meditation class. She felt more centered. She informed her family, left a message on her supervisor’s voice mail, and prepared to leave for the hospital.

  As she traveled to be with her mother, Helen stayed present with herself with patience. She continued to acknowledge the fear and dread, the body reactions to the stress, and the cascade of plans and thoughts roaring through her mind. She remained patient with all of this and rested a bit in the wisdom that things are the way they are, and she was doing all she could do .

  Beginner’s Mind

  When you begin to observe what is here in the present moment, the thinking mind tends to believe it knows all about what is happening. Or it tries to control what is happening by desperately seeking more information. The activity of thinking forms as a kind of filter between you and the direct experience and true richness of life as it unfolds moment by moment.

  To practice beginner’s mind means to open to the experience in each moment as if meeting it for the first time.

  Imagine the wonder of a child as she encounters something for the first time. The first smell of a flower, the first drop of rain, and the first taste of orange: all are experienced without the intermediate layer of thought or comparison to the past. These moments are experienced just as they are, in the now, directly, as smell or touch or taste, as sound or sight.

  In truth, each moment is unique. Though you may have experienced a thousand sunsets, you have not experienced this particular sunset. The same is true of a lifetime of in breaths, or the hundredth time you taste your favorite dessert. This particular breath and this particular taste have never happened before and will never happen again.

  When practicing mindfulness, you are asked to cultivate this same quality of direct experience, receiving whatever arises as a unique and precious experience. To do this is to practice beginner’s mind.

  Anne’s Story

  Anne woke in the middle of the night with her heart racing, feeling she was choking, in a sweat. Thoughts about immediate death filled her head. She was having a panic attack. It had happened before. She had had the attacks for over three years and was under psychiatric care for them. She had noticed that they seemed to come more often when she was “stressed out.” Just that morning, Anne had told her best friend that her work and the breakup of a relationship after eight months had “really stressed me out. ”

  As the minutes dragged by and Anne felt worse and worse, the thought “I hate these panic attacks” came to her. “This feels like the last one! I couldn’t breathe then either. I think I am going to die.”

  Then Anne remembered what she learned in her mindfulness meditation class. She acknowledged the fear and upset she felt, and the intense physical sensations in her body. She got out of bed and took a seat in the chair where she meditates each day. She focused on her breathing, breath by breath, until she felt a bit more present. She was still experiencing terror, but she was also aware of some space in herself that seemed to be able to contain the terror.

  Anne remembered something about beginner’s mind; about trying to meet each experience as if for the first time; about how it doesn’t help to assume anything about the experience. That the way you talk to yourself about what is happening can actually worsen things. Anne tried to meet the panic attack as if she had never seen it before.

  She had learned to bring mindfulness into her body in her class, so she began to pay careful attention to the actual physical, emotional, and mental experience unfolding as her panic attack. She allowed the sensations to come and go, just as she had been taught. It was not easy. She had to come back repeatedly to her breath for a focus.

  After a bit longer, the attack passed. Anne was very relieved. She noticed the clock and thought to herself, “It was over quicker than the usual ones. Maybe these attacks are different each time. Maybe I can do something to manage them myself using meditation.”

  Trust

  A basic part of learning to meditate is learning to trust yourself and your feelings. You learn to trust that you can see clearly what is actually happening to you.

  As you practice mindfulness, you will deepen your awareness of life and your own moment-to-moment experience. You will develop increasing sensitivity and accuracy in discerning what is here now, and what is happening in your own body and mind, as well as what is happening around you. You will learn that you and you alone are the best person to know what is going on inside your own skin and what is happening outside of it. You do not need an expert to tell you these things.

  You can learn to pay attention and to be present using powerful capabilities of attention and awareness that you already have. It is important to learn to trust in your own authority to know yourself, rather than to look outside yourself for authority. In this process, you discover what it really means to be your own person and to live life with authenticity.

  Mack’s Story

  Mack is a veteran of the Vietnam War. For almost thirty years, he fought to hold back the memories that intruded on his daily life. His head filled with terrible scenes and sounds, and his body recoiled from these every way it could. He paid a horrific price, but he managed to hold a job and to maintain his second marriage successfully.

  Mack began to have more problems wi
th high blood pressure and disturbing dreams. His medications didn’t seem to be working as well. His psychiatrist advised him that he “needed to do something” to break out of the cycle he was in.

  Mack heard about a mindfulness-based meditation program. He signed up. After about four weeks of meditating daily and opening his awareness in his body and to his thoughts, he began to feel more relaxed. His blood pressure went down, and his sleep got better.

  Then, things got tougher. Mack began to have more vivid flashbacks. They were extremely intense and painful. The details were agonizing. He began to question whether he could survive the experiences.

  Mack had a talk with his meditation teacher. The teacher reminded Mack that he is no longer in Vietnam. What is happening is happening only in the present moment. The flashbacks are only memories. The body sensations are only reactions, and they will pass.

  Mack began to trust that he was in touch with exactly what was happening. He practiced mindfulness faithfully. As he paid more careful attention, moment by moment, he could see the thoughts and pictures arise, feel his body stiffen and react, and then, amazingly, he watched as the entire experience faded and was replaced by something else. His confidence in himself grew immensely.

  It was not easy going, however. Mack had to use all of his new meditation skills to remain present during the worst of the flashbacks. He spent extra time practicing meditation to calm and relax his mind and body. He refused to give up or to give in.

  After a few more weeks, Mack was visibly relaxed and happier. He told his meditation teacher and his psychiatrist, “I fought those memories for thirty years because I thought they would kill me. Now I know them for what they are. I trust myself enough to take them on, and I know that I can handle them.”