Understand that your fundamental nature is a wonderful ‘awareness, love and compassion, wisdom, three in one,’ which exists as a background to fear, panic, and depression. This deeper level of contentment and joy is always present, even amidst life’s ups and downs.
Instead of fighting anxiety, be happy to have it, viewing it as a teacher and friend that makes you more alive and reminds you to practice meditation. This perspective helps you discover a deeper, unchanging nature within you, like the sky unaffected by storms.
Follow a three-step approach to connect with awareness: first, use supports like sound or breath; second, apply meditation freely to all experiences; and third, cultivate open, objectless awareness. This systematic path helps you gradually recognize your inherent clarity and presence.
Begin by connecting with awareness through a chosen support for at least five minutes every day for one to two months. Options include listening to sounds, focusing on your breath, or silently reciting a word or mantra, ensuring regularity to make the mind pliable and foster acceptance.
In sound meditation, relax your body and spine, then simply listen with your ear and mind together, allowing sounds to come to you without strong focus or trying to stop thoughts. The key is to remember that you are still hearing, even if thoughts or emotions arise, which is the beginning of acceptance and self-compassion.
Extend your meditation practice to all situations, using everyday problems and emotions as objects of awareness, rather than limiting it to formal sessions. This means you can meditate ’everywhere, anytime, with anything,’ transforming challenges into opportunities for practice.
If a strong emotion like panic feels overwhelming to work with directly, begin by meditating on a smaller, less intense emotion, such as anger, as a stepping stone. This allows you to build capacity before tackling major afflictions.
When experiencing strong emotions, aim to ‘see’ them rather than being carried away by them, similar to seeing a river from its bank instead of falling in. This practice helps you realize that awareness is separate from the emotion, allowing you to be present without being overwhelmed.
Apply wisdom by deconstructing strong emotions like panic into their constituent parts: physical sensations, images, unpleasant voices, and underlying beliefs. Recognizing these pieces makes the emotion less solid, reveals its impermanence, and allows you to find space and freedom within it.
Understand that aversion (trying to push away unpleasant experiences) and craving (trying to grasp pleasant ones) are core causes of suffering. By letting go of these tendencies, emotions like panic can liberate themselves, allowing wisdom, love, and compassion to emerge as more effective guides for life.
Progress to open awareness, where you simply ‘just be’ with your mind as it is, without any specific focus or object of meditation. This ’non-meditation’ allows clarity and presence to naturally reveal themselves, a state made possible by consistent practice of the earlier steps.
Understand that awareness is not an esoteric state but is available to you 24/7, even in sleep, and can be recognized in simple moments. For instance, a nanosecond of noticing raw physical sensations of anxiety, rather than being lost in the story of fear, is connecting with awareness.
When meditation becomes challenging or overwhelming, employ four strategies: 1) be aware of the difficulty; 2) try something different (e.g., a smaller emotion, sound meditation); 3) step back and observe your aversion to the emotion; or 4) take a break from meditation entirely without guilt, as rest is part of the practice.
If direct awareness of panic is too difficult, shift your attention to the ‘panic of panic’—the feeling of fighting or aversion towards the initial panic. By observing this secondary emotion, you can use it as a support for meditation, allowing you to include everything as fuel for awareness.
Instead of clinging tightly to your life, work, or achievements (like clawing a watch with a downward-facing palm), learn to rest them gently on an open, upward-facing palm. This symbolizes letting go of aversion and craving while still holding your life, connecting with awareness, wisdom, love, and compassion without loss.
If you feel too tired or exhausted during meditation practice, it’s perfectly acceptable and even beneficial to take a break. Stop meditating for a while, engage in other activities like drinking coffee, exercising, or sleeping, understanding that resting is a valid part of the overall practice, not a failure.
Develop a clear understanding of what awareness is, how it functions, its benefits, and how to practice it, holding the idea that ‘my core being is awareness.’ This conceptual understanding provides a foundation that automatically guides your meditation practice and helps you connect with your core being.
When difficult emotions arise, practice saying ‘welcome’ to them, even if it initially feels like a ‘fake welcome’ driven by a desire for them to disappear. This act of welcoming, though imperfect, can still help to reduce aversion and soften the emotion’s power.
Understand that continually hearing and being reminded of these meditation principles, even after years of practice, is crucial because they cut against human nature and modern life. Each reminder offers a new ‘aha’ moment, deepening your understanding and making the practice more ordinary and profound.