Anxiety: Nothing to Do but Embrace the Dread

Psychedelic experiences and meditation are closely interrelated.

Filling your mind with one thing instead of the other is a temporary solution. It's another form of avoidance.

Anxiety arises from an underlying emotional issue that someone is avoiding.

In the psychedelic and meditative states, it is entirely possible to feel oneness and love for all that is. That's fine. For insight meditators, this is a peak experience that is itself transitory. We'd call this the first "flowering". There is still much work to reach the "fruit".

Think about it. You're given the gift of unity consciousness, of love and light. But, the tendency after that is then select only some of the experience as good, and to reject the rest as bad. The gift of the bliss and love is to teach you what it is like to be unconditionally accepting of all that is.

And unconditionally accepting includes the experiences of anxiety, depression, misery ... It's only when you accept the experiencing that you can become a complete person.

So HN gets in a spate of depression and anxiety discussion. "It drags my mental health down." The practice at this point is to disassociate the apparent cause and effect and focus on what you are experiencing at the moment. "I feel that my focus is breaking apart." "I feel my mood going down." And you go deeper, observing the sensations that make that up: where exactly, in your body, are you feeling it? What color is it? What texture? What temperature? Any sounds, smell, or taste? Then you note it and let it go, go back to focus on living and breathing.

Over time, you gain the ability to mindfully observe anxiety or any other sensation as they pass through your awareness, yet you are not moved. It is in this way, the mystics would call "finding your center". It no longer matters that HN gets in a spate of depression and anxiety discussions. You are OK with that.

It's less about doing and more about actually resting your awareness on the anxiety, and on what it is you are avoiding. The actual "doing" can come later; it is hard to do anything without presence of mind.

My wife had panic attacks for years until she was persuaded, for other reasons, to stop using caffeine and artificial sweeteners. A couple of months later, her panic attacks stopped, and they haven't returned. She's convinced one of the sweeteners -- she mostly used cyclamates, but also some sucralose -- screwed with her brain chemistry. (She's always avoided aspartame as it gave her a splitting headache, so it wasn't that.)

There are plenty of reasons to avoid artificial sweeteners, so I wouldn't necessarily weight this anecdatum too heavily, but I thought it worth passing on anyway.

I've recently suffered from acute anxiety, and it was not pleasant. But I figured out what was causing it, changed my diet and exercise patterns, and it's not happening anymore. The rest of the good things in that list remain in place.

That said, the author is probably not intentionally misleading his audience; his personal experience points to the connection between those good attributes and anxiety, and he assumes that if you lose one you lose them all. It's an honest mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.