The second category of benefits offers the greatest distinct contribution to those who experience panic. Learning the skills of meditation can dramatically increase your ability to control your fearful thinking by teaching you new ways to respond to your automatic thoughts, emotions, and images. The typical panic-prone person dwells on his worries, pays close attention to fearful thoughts, and responds emotionally to his negative images. Instead of being in control of these experiences, he is controlled by them.

To learn to meditate is to learn how to step away from these experiences to become a detached, quiet observer of your thoughts, emotions, and images, as though you were watching them from the outside. Anyone who has experienced panic knows that the negative thinking during panic is so powerful that you can't simply say to yourself, "These thoughts are ridiculous. I am not about to die." That only invites a mental argument that increases panic: "Yes, I am about to die! My heart's racing a mile a minute. People die under this kind of stress."

Any type of self-change strategy requires as a first step the skill of self-observation. To reduce your anxiety reaction and halt your negative thinking, you must be capable of stepping back from them far enough to put them in perspective. Chapters 13 through 16 of Don't Panic will teach you how to gain that perspective and use it to control panic. This section gives you the foundation skills needed to implement those techniques.

There are two types of meditation that you may choose from. Since they each accomplish similar goals, you can practice either or both of them. The first is "concentration" meditation.

Concentration meditation

The four essential features of this meditation are:

1. a quiet place
2. a comfortable position
3. an object to dwell on
4. a passive attitude

How to do it.

Just as with the relaxation techniques, you should use a quiet place in your home or elsewhere to practice. Then, assume a comfortable body posture and begin to invite a passive attitude within your mind (meaning that you don't need to worry about or become critical of distracting thoughts -- you just note them, let them go, and return to the object you are dwelling on). The difference is that during meditation you select one object to focus on continually during the twenty minutes. You may choose a word (such as "calm," "love," "peace"), a religious phrase ("Let go and let God"), a short sound (such as "ahh" or "omm"), a feeling or a thought. You gently repeat that word or phrase silently at an easy pace. (For instance, if it is a one-syllable sound, you might say it once on the inhale and once on the exhale.) Or you may use your breathing pattern as the focus of your attention.

Both in meditation and in relaxation you are attempting to quiet your mind and to pay attention to only one thing at a time. An especially important skill to develop is that passive attitude. There should be no effort involved in the meditation. You pay attention to instructions, but you don't struggle to achieve any goal. You don't have to work to create any images; you don't have to put any effort into feeling any sensations in your body. All you have to do is remain aware, be in a comfortable position, dwell on the phrase, and easily let go of any distracting thoughts until those twenty minutes are over. That is the passive attitude.

A modification to this traditional "concentration" meditation, called "Meditation of One Hundred Counts", is presented in Chapter 14 of Don't Panic. It can help you remain mentally focused if you continue to be bothered by irrelevant thoughts. A second modification of this technique is a tape called "Acoustic Meditation", which provides pleasant sounds, timbers, patterns and rhythms to enhance your ability to concentrate. See Self-Help Store for information.

Awareness Meditation

The second meditative technique is an "awareness" meditation. In concentration meditation, you dwell on one object and consider all other awarenesses as distractions. In awareness meditation, each new event that arises (including thoughts, fantasies, and emotions), becomes the meditative object. Nothing that rise up independent of your direction is distraction. The only distractions are the comments that you begin to have about what you see, hear or feel.

How to do it.

The process is as follows. Find a quiet place to sit comfortably for twenty minutes. Begin by focusing on your natural breathing pattern. Mentally follow each gentle inhalation and exhalation, without judgment and without comment. (Those who become anxious when attending to their breath may focus on a single word or sound instead.) After a few minutes, allow your attention to shift easily among any perceptions that rise up. As each new thought or sensation registers in your mind, observe it in a detached manner. As you observe it, give that perception a name.

For instance, in the first few minutes of meditation you are focusing your awareness on each breath. As you loosen your attention you soon notice the tension you are holding in your forehead muscles. Without effort or struggle, subvocalize a name of the experience -- perhaps "tension" or "forehead tension" -- and continue observing. Eventually, your perception will shift. As your detached observing mind follows your awareness, you take notice of a mental image of a man's face with the corners of his mouth turned downward. Do not become involved with the image: don't analyze its meaning or wonder why it appears. Simply notice it and name it -- "frown" or "man, sad face" -- while you maintain your uncritical perspective.