You may have already developed techniques like using affirmations (making encouraging comments to yourself). Use these to steady yourself if necessary. Stay connected. Keep the panic experience in view, but beware of becoming sucked into it. You will have to practice with the methods of attention, awareness, and kindness in order to learn how to apply these skills to the direct experience of panic most effectively.
Keep in Mind
Remember, you do have what it takes. You can find the inner calm and peace you need. You can change things by paying attention.
The paradox is that you practice meditation with no goal in order to reach your goal of managing anxiety, fear, and panic.
By bringing a kind and compassionate attention to the experiences of fear, anxiety, and panic, you make them the objects of mindfulness. Meeting these experiences with nonjudging, curious attention is all you have to do to access the power of mindfulness.
Chapter 17
Taking a Larger View
The intrusive and painful experiences of fear, anxiety, and panic have a way of shrinking your view of yourself and your place in the world. Indeed, this is true of any form of pain or challenge that stops you in your tracks and demands that you pay attention to it above all else.
As the demands persist, becoming chronic as well as intense, you might come to feel as if you are in a prison. Life itself seems to shrink into compartments. What I can do and where I can go becomes less and less, smaller and smaller.
These thoughts and feelings of restriction and “fear about the fear” can become more powerful even than the intense experience of fear in the body.
The tendency to identify with the fear or anxiety grows as the feelings themselves strengthen. “I am anxious” or “I am afraid” becomes not only a self-description but an identity. Reactivity to the pain becomes the pervasive experience in life.
In these ways, fear, anxiety, and panic have become a prison. And the prisoner is the person who somehow feels less competent, less effective, less alive than before .
The message of this book is that you can be free of the prison of fear, anxiety, and panic. The keys to freedom lie within you. They operate as you teach yourself to bring full attention to life.
From the view of mindfulness, everything happens in the present moment. The experiences of life are flowing, even now, through the present moment. This includes the powerful inner experiences of fear, anxiety, and panic. These experiences are not permanent, and they are not who you are. Your connection with life has not ceased. You are not as isolated as it seems.
Recovering the Sense of Connection to Life
Healing is a process of making whole. For this to happen, all the parts that are separate and isolated or denied must be brought into awareness and included. This is true in healing individual people and in the healing of larger bodies such as communities or nations.
Psychotherapists have long held that this process of healing requires you to experience, accept, and take responsibility for the dark side of yourself. The dark side includes all the things that are fearsome, embarrassing, shame-filled, and the like. In short, the things you don’t want to know and vigorously deny about yourself. It also includes those inner energies and forces that you feel powerless to control. The process of healing makes inquiry into this valley of darkness vital. Yet most people do not enter this inquiry willingly.
John Tarrant is a well-known Zen teacher and Jungian psychotherapist. In The Light Inside the Dark (1998), he speaks of this descent into the darkness:
The journey into a life of awareness begins for most of us in a moment of helplessness. When our lives are going well, we do not feel any need to change them, or ourselves. . . . We are unperturbed, and half asleep. Then a crisis arrives . . . strips us of everything we have relied upon to stay the same. Yet this unexpected fall is also a gift, not to be refused. . . . We realize that we have no choice: before we can rise up, we must go down and through. (27)
The experiences of fear, anxiety, or panic may well have been the crisis that has driven you down into the darkness. Yet they also hold the promise of awakening into a life of greater awareness if you can manage them and learn from them. The pain you associate with them can be the link to a deeper self-understanding and to a broader connectedness with the life of the world around you.
Joan Halifax (1993), a respected Buddhist teacher and anthropologist, speaks in The Fruitful Darkness to the interrelatedness of life through painful experience:
My suffering is not unique but arises out of the ground of my culture. It arises out of the global culture and environment as well. I am part of the World’s Body. If part of this body is suffering, then the world suffers. Recognizing the World Wound also turns us away from a sense of exclusiveness. . . . Each of us carries or has carried suffering. This suffering is personal. But where is it that we end and the rest of creation begins? (13–14)
To recognize that the pain I feel in me is the same pain that you feel in you is to arrive at the heart of compassion and kindness. To begin to understand that the pain inside is not so much about you, in some self-centered way, as it is about a call to respond and relate to a larger context of life is to begin to awaken. These are messages that make more sense as you use mindfulness to connect with the moments of your life.
Meditation practiced correctly has no purpose other than to transform and awaken us. In connecting with the wholeness of experience in this moment, you are able to discover what matters most. The mystery and the beauty of living are experienced directly. Understanding and wisdom follow this direct experience.
As difficult as it may seem at times, you can be in a different relationship to the upset of fear, anxiety, and panic. The war with them can end. They can take their place alongside all the other experiences of your life. They can reveal their own message of mystery and awakening.
Meditation does not tell you what meaning life has. It allows you to discover the meaning for yourself. Indeed, no one can tell you what meaning life has for you.
Meaning must be discovered by listening and connecting with increasing sensitivity in each moment. It comes from asking, “What is the lesson in this experience?” Can you begin to ask that question about the fear, anxiety, or panic in your life?
Viktor Frankl survived Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz. His experiences there led him to develop a form of psychotherapy he called logotherapy. The name is taken from the Greek word logos , which denotes “meaning.” Logotherapy focuses on the meaning of human existence and on each human being’s search for meaning as a primary motivational force in life. This approach puts a person immediately in a larger context beyond the small, ego-driven view of the world. As Frankl stated in Man’s Search for Meaning (1959, 172),“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Can you move beyond the idea of fear, anxiety, and panic as intruders or enemies? Can you find the lessons of transformation they hold? Can you discover your interconnection with others through the pain of anxiety and panic? Can you find a deeper meaning and purpose by taking Frankl’s approach and considering what question life is asking you through fear, anxiety, or panic?
As you teach yourself to connect with and remain present in the moments of your life, the lessons, transformations, questions, and answers will begin to reveal themselves to you.
Come Here, Fear
To hold fear, or anxiety, or panic with kindness and compassion is powerful. The ability to do this comes from the understanding that they are not you, but are only experiences and conditions flowing into and out of the present moment. The pain and suffering they carry is only momentary experience. Yet that pain also calls for kindness and compassion.
The poet Joy Harjo speaks to this new relationship with fear in her beautiful poem “I Give
You Back.”
I Give You Back
I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart
But come here, fear
I am alive and you are so afraid
of dying.
It is my deep hope that you will be able to use this book to establish your own practice of mindfulness.
May it grow and sustain you.
May you find peace and calm as a result.
May that practice awaken your heart of kindness and compassion.
May clarity and understanding follow in all your days.
May mindfulness and compassion free you from anxiety, fear, and panic.
May the world benefit from your courage, peace, and wisdom.
Resources
Books on Meditation & Mindfulness
Brach, Tara. 2003. Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha. New York: Bantam Dell.
Feldman, Christina. 1998. Thorsons Principles of Meditation . London: Thorsons.
Glassman, Bernie. 1998. Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace. New York: Bell Tower.
Goldstein, Joseph. 1993. Insight Meditation. Boston: Shambhala.
———. 2002. One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco .
Gunaratana, Henepola. 1994. Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. 1990. Full Catastrophe Living. New York: Delacorte Press.
———. 1994. Wherever You Go, There You Are. New York: Hyperion.
———. 2005. Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness . New York: Hyperion.
Kornfield, Jack. 1993. A Path with Heart. New York: Bantam.
Kornfield, Jack, and Joseph Goldstein. 1987. Seeking the Heart of Wisdom. Boston: Shambhala.
Levine, Stephen. 1979. A Gradual Awakening. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
———. 2005. Untended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart . Rodale.
McQuaid, John, and Paula Carmona. 2004. Peaceful Mind: Using Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Psychology to Overcome Depression . Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Rosenbaum, Elana. 2005. Here for Now: Living Well with Cancer Through Mindfulness . Hardwick, MA: Satya House Publications.
Rosenberg, Larry, with David Guy. 1998. Breath by Breath. Boston: Shambhala.
———. 2000. Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive . Boston: Shambhala.
Salzberg, Sharon. 1995. Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boston: Shambhala.
———. 1997. A Heart as Wide as the World. Boston: Shambhala.
———. 2005. The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love & Compassion . Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Santorelli, Saki. 1999. Heal Thyself. New York: Bell Tower.
Thich Nhat Hanh. 1975. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1987. Being Peace. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press .
Meditation Recordings
Sounds True in Boulder, Colorado, has a wonderful collection. Contact them at (800) 333-9185 or www.soundstrue.com (click on “shop,” then click on “meditation & prayer”).
Dharma Seed, Box 66, Wendell Depot, Massachusetts, has an extensive collection of Dharma talks, and mindfulness and other Buddhist meditation teachings available on CD. Contact them at (800) 969-7333, or on the Web at www.dharmaseed.org.
Books on Yoga
Feuerstein, Georg, and Stephan Bodian, with the staff of Yoga Journal. 1993. Living Yoga: A Comprehensive Guide for Everyday Life. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
Francina, Suza. 1997. The New Yoga for People over 50. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc.
Johnson, Will. 2000. Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfulness. Boston: Shambhala.
Yoga Videos & DVDs
Yoga Journal ’sinstructional videotapes and DVDs are widely available in bookstores, online, and in health product stores.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Programs
The author is the director of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program in the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine. The program may be contacted by mail at: MBSR Program, DUMC 3022, Durham, NC 27710; by phone at (919) 660-6745; or on the Web at www.dukeintegrativemedicine.org.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction was developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The director of that program is Saki Santorelli. You may contact the program by mail at: Stress Reduction Clinic, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, 55 Lake Avenue North, Worcester, MA 01655; by phone at (508) 856-2656; or on the Web at www.umassmed.edu/cfm/index.aspx.
You may also locate mindfulness-based stress reduction programs by Internet search using MBSR or mindfulness-based stress reduction as your key words.
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