How to Use Meditation For Managing Your Anxiety ⋆ Earth and Water

People are often very confused about meditation. It’s not a widely practiced thing in western culture and can often be seen as taboo. I’m not kidding. I’ve had someone in my life tell me that children shouldn’t meditate because they “shouldn’t commune with spirits”. Yes. That happened.

So let’s start with some basics of meditation. Since the misconceptions are so wild.

Meditation is not communing with spirits. Although some people do use it to commune with the other side. It’s main purpose, for all of us regular folks, is to learn who you are, why you are and how to be the best you.

Meditation is about understanding yourself fully, learning to control your emotions and actions so that you can make better decisions, have better relationships and live life intentionally instead of on auto pilot.

It’s a personal thing and there’s a thousand different ways to do it. It builds on your strengths and corrects your weaknesses so that you can live a life that’s more balanced and in alignment with the greatest good of yourself and the world as a whole.

Meditation has the ability to take you from lost, confused, angry, sad and all of the negative emotions to peaceful, happy, content and all of the positive ones.

Ultimately, we want to create space between stimulus and reaction so we can stay intentional with our thoughts, words, actions and feelings. We want to be able to decide what to do instead of being controlled by our immediate reactions.

Understanding What Happens in The Brain During a Meditation Practice

Meditation is a core practice in not only the spiritual community, but also in the personal development, business and performance worlds. Micheal Jordan was a meditator and many say it’s what gave him an edge on the court (other than his raw talent).

If you want to start meditating, (and I avidly believe all people should) you may want to decide what your goal is for it first so that you have a direction to move towards.

You see, meditation creates connections in the brain. Just as we all start out ambidextrous as babies, because we have a more or less equal amount of connections in the brain for both left and right hands. We then begin to lose connections for one as we use the other and build connections on the dominant hand. It’s a use it or lose it type of situation.

Some believe the future of mental health lies in meditation. That one day we’ll be able to walk into a meditation clinic and tell them what we want to improve in or lessen in our habits and emotions and they’ll give us a tailored meditation program to build connections in the brain and lessen others.

Choosing Meditation Goals

As said above, there are a thousand different ways to meditate. So how do you know which one to try?

Firstly, you should try them all! You’ll like some more than others and find something in between all you’ve learned a long the way to create your own unique practice.

When you’re starting out, though, decide what your goal is for your practice.

Performance?
Lessening anxiety?
Lowering stress?
Healing trauma?
Clarity?
Understanding?
Happiness?
Trust?
Breaking Habits?
Creating Habits?

Honestly, we could go on forever.

We’re going to assume, though, that sense you’re here, you want to lower your anxiety.

You create more brain connections around that which you do more often, and lose brain connections when you don’t do things. This rewiring can help you lessen anxiety by building connections around positive coping mechanisms.

Inward Focused Meditations

Most meditation practices are inwardly focused. And this can be helpful for battling anxiety as well. You need to learn about and understand your unique form of anxiety. To know it is to navigate it.

If you understand that it’s coming from a particular belief or trauma of your past, you can use meditation to reshape those beliefs into something more helpful and rewrite the trauma or find meaning in it so that you may convince your body that you’re safe now.

Understanding it takes a “I’m having a panic attack and I don’t understand but I’m freaking out and need help” to a “Oh okay, here’s a panic attack. This is what’s causing it, I need to move into my coping mechanisms”.

Fighting against your panic attacks can make them seem unmanageable. Meditation can help you understand and stay calm(ish) and focused on flowing with and getting through them in a timely manner.

Always start with understanding your brand of anxiety. There’s a post on it here.

Outward Focused Meditations

Sometimes, anxiety is a result of too much inward focus. In this case, being in our heads about things can make our panic attacks worse.

If you have trouble staying grounded, meaning you feel spacy, floaty, not all here phycially, like you may dematerialize into another state of existence at any moment, (yeah, I’m familiar with the feeling) outward focused meditation may be the solution.

This can be a grounding exercise or a mindfulness practice. There are lots of ways to do this but essentially it’s just connecting to the physical world.

A Basic Grounding Exercise:

Sit / lie in a comfortable position or stand in a solid, yet soft posture without locking the knees.
Roll the shoulders back and down, opening the heart center.
Take a deep, full breath into the belly, allowing the chest to fill last.
Pause for a moment (2-4 seconds) then release slowly
Bring your awareness to the energy in your body
Drop this energy from the top half of your body to the lower half, feeling the lower half become heavier and more solid.
Notice gravity pull you more securely to the earth.
Imagine a cord running from the base of your spine, down into the earth, tethering you to it.
Feel the solidity of your body and your connection to the planet

A Basic Mindfulness Exercise

Sit or lie in a comfortable position.
Roll the shoulders back and down, opening the heart center.
Take a deep, full breath into the belly, allowing the chest to fill last.
Pause for a moment (2-4 seconds) then release slowly
Begin noticing your surroundings.
What do you see?
Notice the shapes, colors, textures of everything. Really focus on them.
What do you hear?
What do you smell?
What do you taste?
What do you feel?
Go through each sense slowly and analyze it. Honing into all of the details.
Appreciate the world you’re in. Find it’s beauty and solidity and your connection to it.

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