Calming the Rush of Panic (11 page)

Panic and sadness go hand in hand for many people. Panic is not easily fixed, and it can leave you feeling depressed, desperate, alone, and unable to cope with even small problems. You may find yourself crying at the slightest provocation and without warning. Long after a panic attack has diminished, you may experience a clinging sorrow and heavy-heartedness throughout your mind and body. By the time you return home for what you hope to be a peaceful evening with your family or roommates, making dinner and watching TV, your misery may be telling you to isolate yourself in your room and forget about everything else.

R.A.I.N. can teach you to embrace your sadness in order to understand your panic and sadness from another viewpoint. You can practice R.A.I.N. while eating dinner or while watching your favorite TV programs. It is useful to bring mindfulness into your life, however briefly, even when life is bubbling all around you, brimming with activity.

1. Once you’re ready to begin, center on your breathing. Notice the oscillation between air moving into and air moving out of your body. In and out.
   
2. Take this pause to recognize any intense emotions or feelings that come up. By recognizing, you are just identifying the feelings and making a note of them. You may think to yourself:
   I feel depressed. I feel misunderstood. I feel utterly sad and empty.
   
3. Acknowledge these emotions by allowing them to be here with you. Perhaps you might envision your feelings of sadness or desperation sitting beside you, like a couple of very close friends. Your feelings of sorrow are with you but they are separate, outside of you, accompanying you on your path through life.
   
4. Return to your breathing and being present.
   
5. You may experience some doubt along the way in your practice. This is perfectly normal. Doubt will try to sabotage your practice and convince you that nothing can help you through your sorrow and panic. Doubt may say to you:
   This meditation won’t work. Nothing works, so why bother?
   The best prescription for doubt is to just be aware of your doubt. When you notice and acknowledge your doubt, you can begin to take back your confidence and move ahead. By identifying your doubt, you can add doubt to your row of emotional friends seated with you. Allow your disbelief to just hang around if it wants to. Doubt is just another companion who likes to tag along for the ride.
   
6. Now it’s time to investigate how the sadness feels in your mind and body. Where is the sadness coming from? Where does your sadness like to hide out? Be patient and be aware of any feelings that arise.
   
7. The final step is to not take your feelings personally and to not identify with your sadness. You are you, and your emotions are just emotions. Remember, your feelings are just close friends who come and go. Some feelings may sit and stay for a bit, while others may drop in for only a quick visit. Eventually, each one leaves. How does it feel to not identify with your panicky and sorrowful emotions?
   
8. As you return to your dinner and interactions with others or your program, take a mindful moment to be fully present with yourself and others.
   

This practice offers you a chance to form a new perspective and choose a more constructive response to your panic rather than the old, familiar way of withdrawing from your painful and despairing emotions.

Let Emotions Be

Another common feeling for people who struggle with panic is overwhelming fear, alarm, and apprehension. You may fear something from your past or something that might happen in the future. You may fear being out of control, and when a panic attack strikes, you may fear that it will never end. As soon as one panic attack has passed, you may live in constant fear of another attack. Your fear is normal, but you might be surprised at how powerful the practice of mindfulness can be for changing your response to these frightening emotions that accompany panic. This next mindful practice will assist you with acknowledging troubling feelings and letting them be while doing chores at home, such as folding laundry.

1. Start by checking in with your breath. Even as you get stationed with piles of laundry stretched in front of you, tune in to your breathing and connect with this present moment right now.
   
2. Feel free to set your intentions for this practice, such as
   May this practice bring me more awareness. May this practice enhance my self-compassion and understanding when I am feeling afraid and overwhelmed
   .
   
3. While you fold your laundry, take this time to really be conscious of every detail about the laundry. Are the clothes fresh from the dryer and still warm? Who was wearing these clothes or sleeping on them or using these items last? Notice the colors, the sizes, the variety, the worn spots, and so on. With tenderness and sensitivity, acknowledge any feelings that arise as you fold your laundry.
   
4. Acknowledge any fears that spring to mind. Are you fearful of someone seeing you have a panic attack? Are you scared of a future attack? Are you apprehensive and anxious about leaving the house for fear of something going wrong? Take this pause to recognize all the emotions that come up. Practice folding each fear into an article of laundry that you’re folding. Place each fear on top of the other, as if making a pile of fears out of your laundry. These fears are with you, but they don’t own you. They exist, but they don’t make up who you are. They are just fears.
   
5. Check in again with your breathing and connect with the present.
   
6. Finally, let your feelings of fear and apprehension just be. This is not the same thing as letting go. If you’ve ever tried to let go of your panic, it probably didn’t work. If letting go was so easy, you’d have mastered your panic by now. Letting be means not putting any effort into changing or controlling your feelings. Your feelings are here with you, piled up in the folded laundry before you. There they sit. And the next time you fold laundry, you will likely have a whole new set of articles to fold and a whole new list of emotions and fears and apprehensions waiting for you to pay attention to. The feelings will change as often as the laundry changes, as often as the weather changes.
   

Letting your emotions run their course is one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself. In time, you will become more and more familiar with the passing and changing of your emotions, and you will learn to go with the flow of your feelings without needing to control or change anything. May you experience more peace and contentment with each passing breath.

Get the Rest You Need

Panic attacks are one of the most frightening emotional experiences in life. It’s difficult to describe the disabling sense of extreme terror and the intense psychological distress that overcome you in the midst of a panic attack. Some people say that they feel paralyzed with terror. Others describe a sensation of choking or being smothered. One woman described feeling as though her heart would burst or explode in her chest. If you experience panic before bed at night, then you may also face disrupted sleep or no sleep at all.

The following application of R.A.I.N. will help you relax and get the rest that you need each night. Like any exercise in self-inquiry, to be truly beneficial, it takes regular practice, incorporating each step into your nightly routine.

1. You may sit up in bed or lie down—it doesn’t matter, as long as you are fully alert and comfortable.
   
2. Become aware of your breathing. This is the first step in aligning with the present moment, living in the now. Each conscious breath is your bridge to a deeper connection with being more present. You may be more accustomed to experiencing your life with a focus on the past or the future, but for this moment you are consciously focusing on what is happening right here and now.
   
3. When you are in the throes of panicky emotions, it is difficult to unwind from the terror. Take this moment to set your intentions for what you would like to walk away with from this practice, such as
   May this practice restore my belief in my own capacity to heal. May this practice help me live with more ease in my body and mind. May it teach me to have greater self-compassion, kindness, and gentleness
   .
   
4. Begin to recognize whatever powerful or severe emotions come up. Envision your feelings as leaves on a tree…each feeling fluttering on a branch, asking to be seen and heard and paid attention to.
   
5. Acknowledge and allow your feelings. You may say:
   I feel scared and panicky. I feel terrified and full of dread. I feel stressed about every little thing in my life.
   Again, imagine each of your feelings as a leaf on a windy day. Some leaves, like feelings, will cling tightly to the branch, and others will spin and flutter about. Allow each feeling to move freely and dance around. You might say to yourself:
   Oh look, there’s terror, gripping the highest branch overhead. And oh look, there’s manic distress, swirling wildly around and around the base of the tree.
   Simply observe each feeling, one at a time.
   
6. Now take this pause to investigate your feelings in your mind and body and see what’s really going on. What are you experiencing directly? What are the facts here in your situation?
   
7. Remember to be aware of your breathing from time to time, paying mindful attention to the flow of air into and out of your body.
   
8. The final step is non-identification, or not taking your feelings personally. Your feelings of terror and immense fear are just feelings. These feelings cannot define who you are or your purpose in life. You are not the feelings that come and go, just as you are not the leaves on the tree that come and go and change with the seasons.
   
9. Check in again with your breathing and your awareness of being present. How are you feeling now? Do you notice a shift in your mind and body?
   

When you mindfully observe your feelings, you can loosen the grip that panic and terror have on your life. Mindfulness is a powerful tool for reviving your sense of ease and deepening your self-compassion for a more restful night ahead.

Here We Are

In this chapter you have been introduced to mindful inquiry meditation and the R.A.I.N. mindful practice as a way to deal with panic in your emotions and feelings. You also explored and practiced some ways that you can bring mindfulness into different parts of your life. We recommend that you informally practice mindfulness every day, bringing mindfulness into your daily life as suggested, and also continue to practice S.T.O.P. from the previous chapter. In the next chapter you’ll investigate how mindfulness works to help you deal with the rush of panic in your thoughts.

chapter 3

Calming the Rush of Panic in Your Thoughts

I
n the Foundation chapter you learned about mindfulness in both its formal and informal practices. In chapter 1, you worked with feelings of panic in the body and learned the foundational MBSR meditations of mindful breathing and the body scan, as well as the S.T.O.P. practice. In chapter 2, you explored dealing with panic-filled emotions and feelings using mindful inquiry meditation and the R.A.I.N. practice. In this chapter we will introduce you to sitting meditation and the “Pause, Observe/Experience, and Allow” practice for working with thoughts related to panic.

When your mind is occupied with panicky thoughts, you may feel as if they’ll never stop. You may feel like you’re losing control, you’re going crazy, or you’re going to die. This type of thinking is called “catastrophic thinking,” and it can spin you down a spiral of despair to a place where you feel overwhelmed and paralyzed. Through sitting meditation you will gradually deepen your understanding of the nature of change in your breath, senses, and states of mind and learn how to deal better with panic, distress, and the other “ten thousand” sufferings of life. Your perspective will widen. This understanding will help you loosen the grip of panic, because you will see panic-stricken thoughts to be just as transient as bodily sensations or feelings and emotions. Sitting meditation will help further your understanding of non-identification, which we introduced in the R.A.I.N. practice in chapter 2. Both of these mindful practices will help you keep your thoughts—rumination, anticipation of future panic attacks, “what if” thinking, and habitual thought patterns—from fueling panic. We will investigate this deeply because this is an important catalyst for living a life with less panic and more ease of being.

Sitting Meditation

Sitting meditation is a blended practice that consists of bringing your awareness to five objects of meditation, progressively: (1) the breath, (2) physical sensations, (3) sounds, (4) mind states, and (5) choiceless or present-moment awareness. This meditation teaches you that no matter what you bring your attention to, you can experience directly the impersonal or ownerl- ess nature of change. What we mean by the impersonal or ownerless nature of change is that your physical sensations, other senses, and mind states—meaning your thoughts and emotions—are ceaselessly changing and that you don’t have much control over them. You will come to realize, for example, that you can work on living a healthy life, but you cannot prevent illness, aging, or death; these things happen regardless of your intentions for them not to happen.

As you see more clearly into the workings of your mind and body, you’ll also begin to see old, habitual, reactive thought patterns that are fueled by the stories you tell yourself and identify with. With this growing understanding, you can learn to see, from your own direct experience, a wider perspective and not be held to self-limiting definitions of yourself that don’t serve your health and well-being. You can make choices to live much better in the midst of panic, stress, imperfection, and dissatisfaction.