Introduction & Guidelines– Mindfulness practice is a vehicle to help strengthen our capacity to stay with mind and feeling states like fear and anxiety. Routine practice cultivates a concentrated and stable mindsight oriented and sustained by purposeful intent, courage, and curiosity to allow the sensations of fear and anxiety the “space” in our awareness to arise and fall in their own time. Like pleasant experiences, our unpleasant happenings are just as impermanent. Fear and anxiety sustains only by our experiential avoidance… “that which we resist persists.”

The question is whether our practice (e.g. concentration, stability, & confidence, etc.)  has developed enough for us to sit with our fear and anxiety- to approach and step into it… to observe its underlying energy, impulses, thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations associated with the mind-body experience? To bear our fear and anxiety, we develop resiliency for future episodes. We become more confident, stronger, and freer as we willfully examine these turbulent states of mind and of being without exacerbating them.

For this exercise, you will need at least 20 minutes in a quiet setting. Like our other mindfulness exercises, when practiced with purposeful intent, it can be profoundly helpful in strengthening our capacity to stay with unpleasant experiences.

Practice– When ready, let’s begin with a few minutes of silent meditation simply focusing on the breath cycle. With the eyes closed, gently scan your body to see if you can detect any physical imprints of anxious or tense feeling. If not, try to stimulate by thinking or imagining of something that provokes a fearful and/or anxious state of being for you. As best you can, do this now for a minute or two.

Once you locate some anxiety or tension in your body, see if you can energize and expand it- you might simply focus on the physiological (e.g. body’s heart rate; breathing rhythm, muscle tension, restlessness, etc.) arousal in your body- or by stimulating fear-based images or thoughts (i.e. “catastrophic thinking”). Sense the perceived threat as fully as you can, and observe the arising arousal. As best you can, spend a few minutes here just staying with the sensed experience.

When ready and as best you can, try intensifying this experience- concentrate in visualizing or imagining the impending threat. Allow its energy to surge and flow within your conscious awareness as a clearly anxious experience. It is your mindful awareness and volitional acceptance of this experience that serves as an antidote to the reactionary undercurrent of impulses to stop, avoid, and/or be carried away.

Sitting with our fear and anxiety, we see its transparency- its impersonal nature to simply rise and fall like any other event of mind. Without our resistance, anxiety or fear lacks the fuel for prolonged sustainability. Try to stay with the intensity of the experience for at least 10 minutes. Observe how this experience changes and ultimately stabilizes and subsides in awareness.

When ready, gently bring your attention back to your breath for a couple of minutes. Just be with the experience, and be mindful that the undercurrent of energy associated with your fear and anxiety may still be bubbling in awareness. Simply note whatever may be present, and stay with your breath.

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