Anxiety can be the most crippling condition an otherwise healthy person could have. Anxiety causes difficulty breathing, digestive issues, and an overall sense of constriction in your body. In this article, I will give you six things to consider which can help you as you develop a practice of meditation as one possible means of combating anxiety.
- Meditation can cause anxiety when you first begin practicing meditation. This is caused by sitting still for a long period of time trying to observe yourself as yourself. Anxiety creates an increased difficulty in sitting still so in the beginning the gesture of sitting down will be a little overwhelming. This feeling does get easier to deal with over time. Be sure to start a meditation practice slowly because traumatizing yourself will make it harder to relax and get the full benefit of meditation.
- Meditation cannot fix anxiety alone. Anxiety has a variety of causes as a general disorder, and there are also many types of situational anxiety. A meditation practice no matter how practiced or elaborate your meditation is cannot take away all fears. Fear is a human instinct so the main thing meditation can do is to put fear in its correct place. Fear is something you need to have in certain situations but not excessive or persistent fear. This excessive or persistent fear is the stem of anxiety.
- Meditation can be a practice done in as little as 5-to-10 minutes a day. Your meditation practice is supposed to help you feel comfortable and recentered. You can accomplish this in a short amount of time if you are practicing regularly to not have a burden of memories to have to sift through before you can get to a meditative state. However, it is also important to let yourself have time so that you can have spiritual experiences if you are so moved.
- Meditation takes very little thought power. In essence, you sit down and stop interacting with any person or interactive media. Then you wait in silence in a comfortable position. This is the bare-bones essential practice of meditation. Additions of sound, ambience, and surfaces can add a lot to meditation but are not strictly necessary to have a meditation practice.
- Anyone can sit or lay still. The biggest challenge is not to think too hard about the motion.
- Meditation should be accompanied by some sort of therapy, psychiatry, or working with a natural health specialist. To try to use meditation as a fix all is to ignore the purpose of meditation. The overall goal of meditation is to have an experience where you are watching yourself be in its natural state and letting it be. A lot of systems have to be in order for you to have this kind of experience, so make sure you have a good support system taking care of your other needs as well.
Anxiety can be very difficult to handle and meditation can provide some relief. I hope these secrets will help you as you are trying to overcome anxiety. It is a difficult challenge and one which yields great reward.