Meditation and Social Anxiety:
Meditation
can be a great help in reducing or eliminating ones social anxiety symptoms. In Social Phobic’s Anonymous,
one may choose to learn how to use meditation but meditation as a practice is it
is not required in the SPA program—it is solely an option.
To meditate or not to
meditate. In our literature and in our support
groups we mention some specific focusing and relaxation techniques that can be
very helpful.
The question of
religion. Some may be concerned that meditation
would run contrary to their own personal religious faith. Although meditation is optional in the SPA program of recovery, some may
be surprised to find that every major religion of the world utilizes meditation (including
all the worlds great religions— Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, Buddhism etc.). Often people are most surprised to find
that their own personal faith tradition includes meditation when previously
they had assumed it did not.
Meditation
has no bearing on ones personal concept of God.
Between people of differing faiths and even between people of faith and non-faith,
specific practices of focusing one's attention, calming oneself, or simply
learning to be receptive to what is happening within us, around us, or beyond
us in each unfolding moment.
In so doing,
we do not impose our personal religious beliefs on others in the group. We
may discuss our faith or our specific meditative manner of focusing, but we
keep our conception of what, or who God is, a strictly personal matter.
Meditation for
Agnostics and Atheists. For those SPA members of atheistic or
agnostic persuasion, many non-religious meditation techniques are also
available. One may always simply employ meditation as a way of focusing and
calming the mind rather than associating it with any particular religious
belief.
For the doubters
among us.
Some may insist that surely this opens a Pandora's box. Some may insist that allowing people to
talk specifically about how they meditate in the support groups must violate
the sacred 12-Step principle that ones relationship to ones higher power is
entirely personal. However, closer examination of the 11th
Step shows that this need not be a concern—
Let’s
take the example of prayer. Within the original A.A. 11th
Step, the recovered person is encouraged to ask sponsors and fellow AA members
how they specifically formulate their prayers in order to achieve the best
results for peace of mind and continued recovery.
"How can this be?" Some may exclaim, and yet the A.A.
and the SPA 11th
Step also specifically states this. In fact, the conflict is only
imaginary. Asking one what to pray for is an entirely different matter
than telling one who or what to pray to.
The same principle applies to meditation. Meditation is a matter of focusing and calming the mind, not defining ones personal conception of a
higher power. Discussions in the support groups about where one
focuses ones attention, or how one relaxes ones body are an entirely different
matter from discussions of religious belief.
Simply put-- where we place our attention or how we breathe
takes no stand either way on the question of who God specifically is, and
neither does it proclaim the existence or non-existence of a deity.
In SPA there is no one ‘official’ way to
meditate that SPA endorses over
any other. A member should be free to select the techniques that they prefer to
use and discard the rest. In our literature we discuss some ways of focusing
and relaxing that can be of help but these should not be considered an
exclusive list but rather as possible starting points.
Consequently in SPA
the people
of all faiths in our groups (including atheists or agnostics) can freely
share between each other techniques of mental focus that bring peace, serenity
and receptiveness to our feelings within and the universe beyond
ourselves. And in so doing, the
uncritical sharing of meditation approaches can open the door to greatly reduced or elimated social anxiety
symptoms.
We encourage each SPA
member to chart their own spiritual journey and then share it with others in
the groups so that we may all benefit.
For those who have tried meditation before with little or no
success, we have found that we often get better results when combining our practice
with regular participation in Social
Phobic’s Anonymous support groups.
Here
are a few possible starting points. We're going to
discuss some basic meditation techniques and also some general principles of
meditation that can help to reduce or eliminate
ones social anxiety symptoms—
Being
present. One thing that many different
meditation traditions help us to do is to focus on the present moment. We socially anxious people tend to have
a hard time living in the present, instead we expended
enormous amounts of mental energy obsessing about the future in the past. For example, we spend a great deal of
our time worrying about what just happened or about what's going to happen
next.
We worry a lot about the last social interaction that we had
and whether or not we may have screwed it up with our social anxiety or we
worry about how we're going to fare in upcoming social interactions. Socially anxious people waste enormous
amounts of time struggling mentally with the past and future.
One of the great gifts of meditation is that it helps the
Socially Phobic person to live more consistently in the present and-- when it
we stay focused on the president, worry any anxiety that it creates, becomes
impossible.
This is true because worry is the process of thinking about
what is going to happen in the future, if even only a few seconds into the
future, or alternately, thinking about the past-- the whether of few seconds
ago a few minutes or hours ago or even weeks, months or years ago. Almost all meditation practices break
this anxiety producing cycle of worry by gently training our minds to stay
right here in the present, also known as the ‘hear and now’.
In so doing the vicious cycle of anxiety --which relies
heavily on negative thinking-- is broken, with practice, for longer and longer
intervals.
Relaxation. The use of meditation to enhance relaxation
are more obvious but no less important.
Social anxiety sufferers live with constant physical and psychological
tension. Learning to relax our bodies and our minds can also be a great help in
breaking this vicious cycle. Scientific research has shown that regular
meditation practice can help one to develop very deep levels of relaxation that
not only helps anxiety but has many other health benefits as well.
Changing
our relationship with our emotions. This may be
the greatest benefit that meditation has to offer any anxiety sufferer. A great deal of what is happening to
someone in the throes of anxiety disorder is that they are trapped in an
endless cycle of reacting to their own emotions.
We do this very innocently -- -- all we're really trying to
do is control or fight the fear and unfortunately what happens is part of the
process of resisting the fear we unknowingly make it worse. What we have been unaware of for all
these years is that our fear feeds off of our resistance to it.
Studying the SPA literature
section on Social
Anxiety and Trust can also help with this work.
Stop
fighting. It is actually by fighting our fears that we fix them in
place to make them worse. We don't
do this because we're stupid; we do this because resisting a terrible feeling
comes naturally. Just like a
child's hand naturally recoils from a hot stove we naturally recoil from and
try to resist our own anxiety. What
we do not know however is that one of the secret to healing fear is being
willing to feel it more fully.
It is actually when we become willing to surrender to the
fear and allow it in to the center of our being, or, alternately, when we move
into the center of our fear, that we are paradoxically set free from it.
Meditation gives us a finer edge and a more effective focus
in doing just that. It provides us
with the tools that we need in order to not just wish that we could face our
fears more directly but to actually achieve this in a relaxed yet highly
effective manner.
The
first step is learning
how to successfully focus. One
of the most basic techniques found in almost every meditation tradition in the
world is what we call in SPA the
principle of gentle persistence—
Gentle Commitment to Focus.
Here's how it works— We choose
to commit to trying to keep ones mind focused on a particular point, feeling,
or perhaps the words of a person in an Social Phobics
Anonymous support group who is talking at the moment. In all cases we can fully expect to be
distracted over and over again by intervening thoughts and emotions— however if whenever we are distracted,
we gently and persistently bring our attention back to whatever we have committed
to remaining focused on— our focus will eventually strengthen and become
more steady.
Simply by staying
committed to gently accepting each distraction softly bringing our focus back
to whatever we have committed our attention to, our state of mind will eventually
change very significantly. We will
become more deeply relaxed, less distracted towards the negative and our
awareness will widen as our thoughts no longer race. We will experience a new
way of peaceful being, or strengthen a way of being that was previously only
fleeting for us.
Another approach is to focus directly on difficult feelings
when we meditate—
For instance, perhaps the worst piece of anxiety in our
body. This may be hard to sustain
at first, but practicing the principle of gentle persistence will get us to
this place of steady focus directly on a very difficult feeling or
emotion.
This focusing practice can dramatically reduce our
fears. Here's how: first our
anxiety will actually increase as we steadily focus on it. However this will not last for long. Once the fear peaks out it then drops
precipitously. It actually ends up
at a level far lower than before we started our meditation exercise.
All of the above approaches, as well as many others, can not
only reduce anxiety significantly but can help to quiet worrisome minds as
well.
Meditation
options are limitless. The above are only starting
points and are not meant to constrain SPA members— Each of us is free to choose our own meditative path or to
not follow it at all without pressure from other group members.
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