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Practice, and they work synergistically. Stillness, as the low-
ering of arousal and muscle tone, is a physical skill. Detach-
ment is an emotional skill. The observer mind is a cognitive
skill. Being still and doing almost nothing may seem like
a waste of time, but it has many spin-off benefits. When we
finish our Standard Meditation Practice, we should be phys-
ically calm, mentally clear, somewhat refreshed, and above
all, ready to reenter the world of action.
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2
Anxiety and the
Overactive Mind
How does a monk contemplate his states of mind? . . .
When his mind is caught in Desire, he knows: “This
is Desire .” When his mind is free of Desire, he knows:
“This is the mind free of Desire .” He carefully observes
how desire arises and passes away, and what causes
it to do so . He learns how to extinguish desire when
it arises, and how to prevent it arising in the future .
In the same manner, he examines the four other
Hindrances, namely Anger, Lethargy,
Anxiety, and Despair .
—Satipatthana Sutta
When I ask my students why they want to learn to med-
itate, one reason consistently comes out on top: They
are too anxious. They have runaway minds and sleep poorly.
They may also have chronic muscle tension, headaches, pain,
and poor digestion. They feel off-color and irritable most of
the time. Their mood is low. They feel mentally dull, unable
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to focus or to enjoy life. If they have tried sedatives or antidepressants, those didn’t seem to work.
This is the normal anxiety bundle. It involves the whole
body and mind, not just mood. Psychologists try to improve
mood but tend to neglect the body. Meditation takes the
opposite approach. It tackles anxiety from the body up. It
releases muscle tension, lowers agitation, and improves sleep
as the crucial first steps.
Anxiety is a 24/7 state of chronic arousal and muscle
tension. Anxious people remain tenser than they need to
be, even while they’re sleeping. Their cortisol levels remain
elevated. They spend less time in deep sleep. They are likely
to wake up frequently during the night, and they won’t feel
rested in the morning.
It can be surprisingly hard to recognize our own level of
anxiety. It is easily masked by hyperactivity and a sense of
excitement. When we’re young, anxiety actually makes us
more productive because of the effects of adrenaline and
cortisol. Over time, however, anxiety can creep invisibly into
our habits of thought and behavior in a way that becomes
destructive. We can easily mistake it as a normal part of our
character (“I was born anxious”). An anxious person never
has anxiety-free periods. It is embedded in her body in the
form of higher baseline levels of arousal and muscle tension.
When we finally recognize anxiety as a problem that
could be solved, we’ve usually been anxious for years. We
will still tend to underestimate or minimize its effects. Stu-
dents who come to my classes often say, “I’m just feeling a bit
anxious these days.” Fortunately, their psychologist or doctor
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will often set them straight: “This is anxiety. It deserves to be taken seriously.”
Pills and quick-fix palliative techniques are not much use
against entrenched anxiety, but mindfulness is promising.
If we build a habit of self-observation, we can gradually chip
away at the problem. If we notice a clenched jaw or a runaway
thought or an emotional overreaction, we can start to under-
mine it in that very moment.
This is the value of doing short, frequent “reset” medita-
tions during the day. To release a tension “on the spot” is a
small but very real improvement, and its effects are cumula-
tive. It is much better to dissolve anxiety through hundreds
of small adjustments rather than hoping that occasional long
meditations will do it.
Anxiety naturally builds on itself. If we don’t relax well,
our baseline levels of arousal and muscle tension just keep
increasing as the years go by. Trying to push on regardless
can be an acceptable short-term solution, but it is dreadful in
the long run. Trying to ignore the way we feel (that is, being
unmindful) paradoxically increases tension, cortisol levels,
and cognitive failings.
We can regard anxiety as maladaptive fear. Fear and
worry in themselves can be helpful emotions. Fear enables us
to respond rapidly to a threat. Worry helps us anticipate and
prepare for future problems. Anxiety, however, is directed
indiscriminately and ineffectually toward everything. We
lose perspective, and even small problems can feel like crises.
Fear sharpens the mind and heightens our percep-
tions under threat, but anxiety just makes us agitated and
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confused. We feel bad and don’t know what to do about it.
Fear is short-lasting, and worry should come and go accord-
ing to circumstances, but anxiety can set in for a lifetime.
Because fear and worry are essential to our well-being, they
tend to stay active in the brain and body long after they have
ceased to be useful. We do relax a bit after a stressful email or
the drive to work, but usually not much, and not very quickly.
A new baseline will have been set.
After a high-energy event, we don’t relax completely. We
settle back into a state of mild overarousal that intuitively
feels safe, given what has just happened. We remain partially
fired up just in case another “predator” is lurking. This edgy,
“looking around for danger” state makes it hard for us to
focus adequately on what we are doing. If we are habitually
more stirred up than we need to be for the task at hand, we
can self-diagnose this as “anxiety” or “stress.”
We are all descendants of African ancestors who responded
quickly and without deliberation to potential threats either
by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. This bias toward a knee-jerk
response doesn’t help when we have to make decisions more
complex than “fight or flight.” Anxiety makes us think too
quickly to be productive. It is the mental equivalent of the
fight-or-flight response.
Anxiety typically leads to an overactive, runaway, obses-
sive mind. Our thoughts take over. We can’t stop them or
direct them. We overreact to everything indiscriminately.
Even when we are exhausted, the mind doesn’t give up, and
its incessant chatter can keep us awake at night.<
br />
Anxiety is like coffee. It increases arousal and energy con-
sumption. It makes more energy available in the bloodstream,
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but we also burn through it more quickly. Coffee in the morning charges us up, but we can feel exhausted by midafternoon.
Anxiety depletes us in the same way. This means that we can
feel anxiety both as high-energy agitation and as low-energy
dullness and muddle.
In the high-energy state, the mind is too fast. It jumps too
rapidly from one thought to another on impulse, without
reflection. It constantly scans the periphery for danger or
advantage. It is easily distracted and can’t concentrate. This
rapid thought switching can give us the illusion of being busy
and therefore productive.
Unfortunately, burning energy is not the same as doing
things well. Shifting attention is always an expensive maneu-
ver. We lose energy and a few seconds each time we shift focus
and have to adjust our mental settings to another thought or
action. If we do this several times a minute, we burn through
our reserves very quickly. Multitasking is one of the most
wasteful activities we can ever attempt to do.
If the mind is too speedy, it doesn’t spend enough time
with any one issue to process it adequately. We leave behind
a trail of unfinished, ill-digested actions that we often have
to return to and patch up afterward. For mental efficiency
it is much better to slow down, pay attention, and keep the
thought switching to a minimum. Just a few seconds more
with any one issue would be a vast improvement.
Anxiety can also be a low-energy state. When our energy is
depleted, the mind gets too tired to focus at all. It drifts uncon-
trollably from one thought to another at the mercy of any dis-
traction, or it defaults to its habitual worries. It can’t follow a
train of thought productively and often just spaces out.
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When we are tired and fretful, we can still function and
apparently get through the day, but there is a price. We won’t
be mindful enough to adequately monitor what we are doing.
We will probably be forgetful and neglect important details.
Our mood will be poor, with little enjoyment or enthusiasm.
We will also be worried that we are not functioning well,
which is of course an accurate assessment.
This combination of low energy, dull attention, scrappy
performance, poor recall, irritability, and foul mood can make
us feel we are not coping well at all. In fact, this is a rule-of-
thumb definition of stress. Whether the demands on you are
heavy or light, you can say that you are “stressed” if you feel
that you don’t have the inner or outer resources to cope with
them. One more email or harsh comment can make you snap.
An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the population of devel-
oped countries is likely to be suffering from anxiety at any
one time, and it is a common component of other maladies.
People with free-floating anxiety are often diagnosed as hav-
ing a generalized anxiety disorder. About a quarter of such
people will also face the horror of panic attacks. These sud-
den eruptions of paralytic fear can occur without any obvi-
ous trigger and are often mistaken for heart attacks.
Habitual anxiety, the high-energy state, often leads inex-
orably over the years into mild depression, the low-energy
state. With no energy or enthusiasm, many people give in to
a sense of futility. They get trapped in dull, obsessive, circular
patterns of thought. They eat, drink, smoke, shop, watch TV,
or sleep to excess, and with varying degrees of self-loathing.
Many fall into the roundabout of legal drugs (antidepres-
sants and sedatives). For many people, these only seem to be
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helpful in the short term, and their benefits are by no means obvious. The legal drugs often have wide-ranging and unpre-dictable side effects over time. For many people, there is a sig-
nificant risk that prolonged use is more likely to exacerbate
their low mood rather than alleviate it.
All this anguish can start with feeling just a bit anxious.
Since chronic anxiety naturally edges upward from existing
levels of arousal, it is well worth trying to reverse it at an early
stage. Fairly minor interventions are usually enough to main-
tain existing levels and prevent blowouts. With deliberate
training, however, it is possible to reverse and virtually cure
anxiety. It all starts with relaxing the body, and controlling
attention and thought.
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3
The Breath Meditation
Mindfully he breathes in and mindfully he breathes
out . When inhaling a long breath, he thinks: “I
am inhaling a long breath .” When exhaling a long
breath, he thinks: “I am exhaling a long breath .”
Likewise, he knows when he is breathing in or out a
short breath . He is like a skilled turner who knows
when he is making a long or short turn on the lathe .
—Satipatthana Sutta
We can define meditation very simply. It means to focus
continuously on the breath or on the body in some
way. This is a crude but remarkably adequate definition.
There are dozens of possible ways of doing this, but they all
have the same modus operandi.
Meditation trains us to feel our bodies more vividly
from the inside. In particular we learn to read the real-time,
ever-changing sensations coming from the musculature and
the internal organs. This is how we become mindful of tension,
arousal, energy levels, balance, pain, comfort, and the quality
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of our health at any moment. This cognitive process is called
“interoception” (literally, “inner-perception”), and it makes our
mental map of our bodies more accessible to consciousness.
The technical name for this mental map is the “body
schema.” Originally this term only applied to musculoskel-
etal information. I’m using it a broader whole-body sense,
as many people now do. The body schema is in fact a com-
posite image. Signals from the muscles are mapped in the
somatosensory cortex of the brain. Signals from the internal
organs—the viscera—are mapped in the insula. Other signals
are mapped elsewhere in the brain. Nonetheless, we always
sense the body schema as an integrated whole.
Over time a meditator cultivates a rich attunement to
her body schema, almost without realizing it. Simply paying
good at
tention to the body for long enough will eventually
achieve this attunement. Many of the lasting benefits of med-
itation rely on this feeling of being “grounded” or “centered”
or “embodied.” This deeper, conscious familiarity with the
body is another reason why it feels so good to meditate. With-
out this anchor, we can easily get caught in the world of per-
petual thought.
Some people prefer to meditate on the breath. Others
prefer to explore the body. This chapter will focus on breath
meditations, and “body scan” meditations will be discussed
in chapter 5. The distinction is somewhat arbitrary, since
each implies the other. We couldn’t focus on the breath with-
out also being aware of the body, and vice versa. It is simply a
question of which is consciously in the foreground and which
is in the background. Focusing on either is guaranteed to
strengthen our conscious perception of the body schema.
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The breath meditation is easy to understand and do. Body
scanning is more complex and detailed. In the Sutta, the Bud-
dha starts with the breath meditation and develops it imme-
diately into the body scan meditation. In two other important
texts from the Pali Canon, Mindfulness of the Breath and Mindfulness of the Body, he treats them as entirely separate medi-
tations. Each of these ancient practices has developed many
variants, but the ten-day Vipassana retreats and the MBSR pro-
gram that introduced mindfulness to psychology both derive
from the original meditations as described in the Sutta.
Focusing on the breath is often presented as a complete
description of meditation itself, but this is a mistake. Meditat-
ing is more about cultivating total body awareness and devel-
oping the cognitive skill of focusing itself. The breath is just
one point of entry into the body schema. Nor does the breath
meditation suit everyone. Many people actively dislike it
and prefer scanning the body. Focusing on the breath makes
some people more, not less, anxious, and many get caught up
in the trap of trying to breathe “correctly.”
We can make another distinction. The body scan is a superb
way of releasing subtle muscle tension. It works directly on the
musculoskeletal system. As soon as we notice unnecessary