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Excellent articles on letting you know about panic attacks and how to make friends with them...
好棒的理解恐慌与恐慌为友文章等待阅读
http://hk.tergarasia.org/ebook/jol-magazine-2018q2.pdf
Good extracts from the magazine articles with good points on handling panic attacks.
Good for everyone who once in a while may suffer from mild anxiety or nervousness such as going for interviews or facing new events...
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Welcome to come, Welcome to go
My practice slowly transformed my theoretical
understanding into experiential understanding. I
started to glimpse the real problem: that the mind’s
dualistic fixation creates a strong sense of self,
and this mistaken perception is the source of my
anxiety.
On top of that, years of experiencing panic
attacks created habitual neural pathways that made
it worse.
I started to recognise my own mistaken
perceptions (the mind’s fixation on permanence,
singularity, and independence), and used them to
analyse the problems that I encountered in life.
For example, when I travel, I have a fear of fainting
during the voyage. I addressed this during my
meditation practice, and learned how to address the fear: I told myself that just because I had fainted
once during a trip did not mean I would do so
again.
Each occasion is different.
This is a very good method for healing trauma.
I had to re-educate myself, training to form new
neural pathways by telling myself that the idea
that “I will faint on the way” is invalid. I would repeat
this to myself three times, then continue meditating
without being critical of my own thoughts or
feelings.
I was also able to use the idea of nonsingularity
(multiplicity) to investigate my bodily
discomforts.
My panic attacks usually bring on
a chain of bodily reactions.
In the past, all these
feelings and sensations seemed like one huge, solid
object. Anxiety made me feel faint, and feeling
faint made me anxious, in a vicious cycle.
Now I
can separate these things: the tight feeling in my
forehead and face; the pain in my back; feelings of
suffocation, fatigue, shortness of breath and chills.
I have learned to see each of these as separate
elements. I can see that panic isn’t one great
massive emotion, but rather is composed of many
small parts. When I gradually relax and examine
these small parts, handling the problem becomes
easier and the bodily discomforts subside.
The meditation on emptiness is also an
excellent practice. One time when panic struck, I
used it as my object of meditation and suddenly the
feeling of panic became dream-like. When I saw that
panic was only the result of causes and conditions, neither permanent nor singular, then “phat!” – like
a needle popping a balloon – this once seemingly
huge and real thing immediately disappeared and I
saw that there was nothing there. Then when panic
comes again, there was nothing to fear.
Healing doesn’t mean that panic no longer
comes, but that it doesn’t matter even if it does
come.
If it recurs, it’s time to practise.
.....
Then I realised that my earlier trauma in
the metro, and a few other occasions of similar
experience, were the reasons for my strong fear
of long journeys. It occurred to me that my fear of
travel was simply my neurons acting to protect me,
based on this memory. They were telling me to be
careful, using anxiety as a way to “kindly warn” me
each time I left the house. Haha! There was no need
to blame the neurons: they were only wishing for me
to be happy and free of suffering.
The only problem
was, they did not know the way to attain happiness.
As I became aware that our bodies and our
experiences are all impermanent, I began to
understand that the source of my panic was my fixation on having absolute control, including control
over my body.
By the time I finally returned to Hong
Kong from Thailand, I was exhausted but my panic
had subsided.
Meditation is a wonderful journey, and the
road ahead is still long. I’m very grateful to the
teachers and fellow students along the way. “Please
practise”, the title of one of Rinpoche’s books, is
truly a reminder of our path to happiness.
======================
Not an enemy but a friend
...
In meditation, we simply become aware of emotions rather than trying to suppress them. The
emotions then become objects of awareness, and
supports for our meditation practice.
In the end, we find that the recognition of
awareness is more important in our lives than the
emotions themselves. ...
A panic attack is a manifestation of a medical
condition called anxiety disorder.
Attacks are
usually spontaneous, and seem to happen for no
reason. During such an attack, a person can feel
as if they are going to die; they sense that they
are trapped and losing control of their body and
thoughts.
The medical community has not been
able to pinpoint the cause of panic attacks.
Various theories have linked them to genetic
predisposition, environmental factors, past
experiences or a combination of all three. Such
attacks are not life-threatening and are curable
with professional help. But if they are not well
managed, the patient can develop many other
problems arising from them.
As an integrative medical doctor and also a
meditation student, I encourage my patients to
give meditation a try.
....
How does awareness meditation work? The
explanation is not simple, but some neuroscientists
have shown that meditation actually changes the
structure of our brain. The point is that meditation
can change our perceptions, and perceptions
affect our experiences and behaviour. Behaviour
in turn reinforces experience, while experience
reinforces perception. Therefore, with regular
meditation practice, we can free ourselves from
our mental traps, and in the long run change the
structure of our brains. This is called neuroplasticity
– the brain’s capability to change or rewire itself.
I have seen for myself many positive changes
among people who practise meditation. Victims of
panic attacks have turned their lives around once
they learned to help themselves in this way. They
became free of their panic, and were able to sleep
better and to feel more peaceful and joyful.
I believe that, as a method of practice,
meditation goes far beyond helping us to
become just “okay”. It can help us reach our full
potential as people.
As Rinpoche puts it in Joyful
Wisdom,
meditation helps “awaken our capacity
to approach every experience – grief, shame,
jealousy, frustration, illness and even death – with
the innocent perspective we experience when
looking for the first time... the moment of pristine
awareness that transcends any distinction between
experience and the experiencer”.
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Happy reading...
http://hk.tergarasia.org/ebook/jol-magazine-2018q2.pdf
