Ways to Use Meditation for Anxiety
Meditate for Relief!
In the 21 century, meditation is making a resurgence as a practical tool for coping with life and nurturing personal growth. In fact, it has become very common to use meditation techniques for stress and anxiety relief-ever for banishing panic attacks.
The benefits of meditation for anxiety and stress include reducing physical discomfort, putting things into perspective to make better decision and coping with difficult situations.
Every individual has different reasons for meditating, from relieving job stress and reducing anxiety of all kind and minimizing physical pain to improving relationships and determining life's direction. No matter what the stress or anxiety, meditation can provide immediate relief. Later, meditation can be used to get to the heart of anxious feelings and make deeper changes.
How to Meditate to Relieve Anxiety
Do you know the nature of your anxiety & stress?
If you already know the nature of your anxiety and stress, simply find it (or something similar) in this list of 17 Meditation Tips for Anxiety and focus your meditation practice in the recommended areas.
New to meditation
If you are new to meditation, begin by reading this Introduction to Meditation article by Ram Dass to learn about different meditation techniques, such as insight meditation with breathing, meditating on gurus and mantras. You'll find techniques and ideas throughout the Ram Dass website and elsewhere that can help you improve the effectiveness of your meditation for anxiety or any other reason, including using mala beads or meditation beads, meditating on a flame and other ways to focus as you practice. It's easy to gain meditation skills you can use right away!
Don't worry
On the other hand, don't worry if your experience doesn't live up to your expectations of meditation. There are likely to be many good things going on that you can't see immediately. Later, you can search for guided meditations and other advanced techniques that deepen your relief from anxiety as well as deeper knowing of yourself as you continue to practice.
Meditate to Calm Chaos
"I've been living closer to the truth for a few months now. Over time, my daily meditations helped me regard what was happening in any moment with curiosity and kindness, without the mindless chatter and instant evaluation that used to whip me into a frenzy."
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Chaos demands our attention. It's like a bratty child, jealous of our peace. Chaos will do everything in its power to suck you in and keep your stress level high. With meditation, you can use the quietness of your mind to surround and subdue chaos. Let it go easily somewhere else, while you apply your energy to reaching out into the universe for answers. Let the answers come to you as easily as you let chaos go.
Meditate to Manage Anger
"I've been living closer to the truth for a few months now. Over time, my daily meditations helped me regard what was happening in any moment with curiosity and kindness, without the mindless chatter and instant evaluation that used to whip me into a frenzy."
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Anger is a difficult form of anxiety. We often become consumed with the accompanying stress and anguish because meditation stems from quietness, it allows you to take yourself away from anger's usual stressful breeding ground, where you can examine the emotion honestly and safely apart from your day-to-day world. When you meditate for anxiety relief, your awareness is stronger than your anger.
Meditate to Let Go of Drama
"Don't treat yourself so gingerly; you can let go of stuff. Sometimes it takes three breaths instead of two to do it, but you can do it. Be a little tougher and don't cling to stuff. People go around carrying everybody's stuff all of the time. I just pick it up and put it down. Pick it up and put it down."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
We have a bad habit of gathering up dramatic feelings and situations, clutching them to us as if they were prized possessions. We feel we are entitled to our ownership of this anxiety, and we believe we must hold onto it in order to keep ourselves emotionally safe. It takes a little courage, but meditation can help us see and nurture our internal strength, so we can separate ourselves from drama and achieve anxiety relief.
Meditate to See Your Path
"In order to see the path, you have to be very quiet and stop thinking."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
In case you haven't figured it out by now, using meditation for anxiety and stress often hinges on finding quietness. If your anxiety is caused by not knowing which direction you should go, quietness can help you accept the answers, rather than forcing them to come. This also requires that you allow yourself to accept the path that appears to you naturally, rather than forcing your way onto a path out of fear and panic.
Meditate to Improve Your Health
"Through Mindfulness-Based Stress Relief (MBSR), patients learn how to mobilize their inner resources for coping and healing – especially for dealing with symptoms of chronic illness, and symptoms that no longer respond to standard medical treatment. Mindfulness practice helps people promote their own health by reducing the effects of stress in mind and body."
The meditation/anxiety connection:
We're learning more every day about the connection between the mind and body. Meditation harnesses the power of the mind to make healthy changes in the body. One of the first benefits of meditation is relaxation and comfort. This can be measured by traditional medical means, including blood pressure, heart rate, and a decrease in anxiety-related symptoms, such as headaches and muscle tension.
Meditate to Feel the Natural Pacing of Life
"Let it be something that naturally falls away, rather than something you rip away."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Anxiety can be caused by forcing life to happen against the natural flow. The harder we push, the more difficult life seems and the higher our anxiety and panic rise. It's better to let go and let things happen naturally. Meditation brings anxiety relief by simply focusing on goals and allowing them to unfold.
Meditate to Seek Simplicity
The meditation/anxiety connection:
The less you have in life, the less you have to worry about. However, achieving a simple life can be easier said than done. Meditation helps internalize the benefits of simplicity in life, and therefore makes it possible to not only desire simplicity but make it real. An immediate result of making a decision to focus on simplicity is anxiety relief, because you instantly have fewer problems you must address.
"There is as much joy in doing with less as there is in doing with more; it's bizarre, and much cheaper! It also means you have to spend less time being worried about your economic situation, because you are spending less."
- Ram Dass
Meditation advice for seeking simplicity:
As you meditate, visualize life without the extras. What can you do without? Would you really miss those things, or would there be more room for joy as your possessions decrease?
Increase your meditation focus on intangibles, such as love, beauty and peace, instead of giving mental and spiritual power to possessions.
Give yourself permission to trade the joy of having for the joy of not having.
Meditate to Seek Clarity
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Focusing too narrowly on stressful problems can bog down the mind and heart and keep us from moving forward. The harder we try, the more muddled everything becomes and the more anxious we feel. The key to clarity is to slow down and think positively about the big picture. As you meditate on the big picture, you begin to see how things fit together – how you fit into the world. This brings peace and anxiety relief.
"The quiet appreciation of the total situation and its inherent possibilities steadily moves things toward resolution."
- Ram Dass
Meditate to Let Thoughts Go By Easily
"Well, if I can't stop thinking, maybe I can just let my thoughts go by without getting all caught up in them. Feel the breeze on your face or your neck? See how it's going by? You're not all hung up with it. You don't have to see where each breeze goes. Make your thoughts like those breezes, those little breezes...just going by."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Anxiety rises as we wrestle with thoughts. The harder we think, the higher the anxiety. Especially if thoughts are negative or fearful, it can be difficult to let them go. They carry a compelling presence. The trick is to choose something else as the focus of your attention and imagine your anxious thoughts are light and airy. Acknowledge them as you would a light evening breeze, then let the breeze blow on by.
Meditate to Relax Your Body
"Scientific studies of Indian yoga masters demonstrate that meditation can, in fact, slow the heart rate, lower the blood pressure, reduce the breathing rate, diminish the body's oxygen consumption, reduce blood adrenaline levels, and change skin temperature."
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Anxiety and stress cause the body to tighten up, breath to quicken, and arteries to narrow. Nothing in our bodies works as well when we're feeling anxious. Then, when we are not feeling well physically, we just keep feeling more anxiety. Meditation for anxiety breaks this vicious cycle by creating a state of mind in which the body naturally and easily lets go of all the tensions and anxieties blocking your ability to relax.
Meditate to Strengthen Your Faith
"I have the sense that as your faith gets stronger, you keep needing less and less, and when your faith is flickering, you keep wanting more security. But as your faith gets stronger, you just keep letting it go and letting it go."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
What do you need to have faith in? Yourself? A power greater than yourself? Your circumstances? A future path? As faith grows, it fills voids and blasts away depression. As you experience fulfillment, as Ram Dass did when he spent a day with the his guru Neem Karoli Baba, your anxiety will wither away. Meditation techniques strengthen faith by making time and space to connect and open your heart.
Meditate to Cultivate Mindfulness
"The interesting thing about cultivating mindfulness in golf, as an example, is that what you are cultivating is a part of your mind that is noticing the rest of the game, the rest of life ... is noticing everything else that's going on ... is noticing, 'Now I'm speaking'. The 'noticer' is not the same as the 'speaker'; they're two different things. This has no judgment; it's just noticing how it is."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Mindfulness means becoming aware of everything around you – the sights, sounds, smells and feel of where you are and people you're with. Make no judgments. Simply allow yourself to see, hear, smell and feel. Mindfulness meditation provides perspective and breaks the cycle of worry and anxiety that happens when your focus is clamped down on narrow thoughts with no connection to the rest of the world.
Meditate to Release Judgment
"When you go out into the woods and you look at trees ... some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. So I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
It's hard not to judge. As humans, we almost can't help ourselves. We instinctively know it's not right to judge, so we end up judging ourselves! All of this judgment causes anxiety and unhappiness. You can use meditation to release the judgment and anxiety you feel, allow others to be who they are and let go of responsibility for them. Not having to judge is a big relief, and it frees us to focus on more peaceful things.
Meditation advice for releasing judgment:
As you meditate, briefly acknowledge every judgmental thought that comes into your mind, then simply release it and refocus on your meditation.
In your meditation, practice witnessing without judgement. The more you practice, the easier it will become to replace judgment with compassion.
Consider exploring karma yoga, which focuses your meditation on serving others rather than judging them, then offering your service as a devotion to achieve greater peacefulness.
Meditate to Allow Emotion
"Getting lost in your emotional reactivity just digs a deeper karmic hole. So you cultivate a quietness in yourself that just watches these things coming and going and arising and passing away. And you learn not to act out your emotions, but just to appreciate and allow them."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Stress and anxiety are made of emotion. We feel this pain both physically and mentally. Sometimes we pull pain to us because it's familiar. Other times, we strain as we push stress and anxiety away from us, but the harder we push, the more they grow. The secret is to embrace these emotions and others, such as depression, by focusing on those feelings, then learning from them and moving forward peacefully.
Meditate to Remove Defense Mechanisms
"The nature of a defense mechanism is that most of it is underground and you're not even conscious of it. It's just acting on you, from a deep fear. To me, it's a little bit like skimming soup when you meditate and get really quiet, and then, in the quietness, stuff starts to come up. If you're quiet enough, you sort of skim it off the top as it comes up."
- Ram Dass
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Everyone gets defensive. Our defense mechanisms sometimes keep us from being able to honestly face our fears and anxieties, which creates additional anxiety. Through meditation, we can more clearly see our defenses and skim them off, which immediately reduces our anxiety because we are then able to see our fears clearly, be more honest with ourselves and realize we are moving toward improvement.
Meditate to Hear The Silence
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Anxiety and stress can be caused by a feeling that you should understand the truth about things in your life, along with the conflicting belief that you are not capable enough to really know the truth. Use the quietness of meditation to open yourself to a truth that doesn't need to be put into words. You can reduce your anxiety right now by being okay with whatever part of truth you see in this moment of silence.
"My universe involves using silence and not waiting for something to happen, because the silence is what's happening, because you and I come here seeking truth and the best I can understand it is that truth is not conceptual, that what you can think about isn't the ultimate truth."
- Ram Dass
Meditate to Achieve a Higher State of Consciousness
"Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already."
Pema Chödrön
The meditation/anxiety connection:
Anxiety and stress are tiring. After a while, we just want anxiety – life in general – to loosen its grip and let us rest. When destructive feelings become extremely intense, many people just give up. But you don't have to give up. Meditation is easy. You can find peace and transform your energy the very first day you try it. Then, as you continue to practice, you'll learn to sink even more deeply into an anxiety-free state.
How to Use These Meditation for Anxiety Tips
There is no right or wrong way to practice anxiety meditation. To get the most from these meditation-for-anxiety tips, first select one of your favorite meditation techniques. Then, read through the list of tips. Note which tips speak to you-the ones that seem to connect with the anxiety and stress you are feeling.
Next, choose one tip to focus on. Read the quote, summary and meditation advice. Take a few moments to internalize the information, then follow the advice as you begin your session. You will feel immediate relief from anxiety, even if you simply feel better because you are taking action.
Finally, follow the same process for each tip that connects with your anxiety and stress. If you like, research online to find a specific guided meditation for anxiety relief, and focus on the same topics.
You will no doubt have further work to do to achieve full anxiety relief, but meditation for anxiety can provide a great beginning!
