Dear Cruzzie:

You wrote that you feel these things when you meditate: “extremely sad, almost downright depressed… so scared and anxious… quicker, for no particular reason, and like a wave that crashes over me. I feel like sometimes I’m going crazy.”

And you are “wondering if the meditation is just making it worse sometimes??”

Meditation leads to more awareness, more awakened awareness to your feelings, so it is a different experience of feelings. It is different to experience anxiety without awareness than it is to experience anxiety with awareness. In the first case, it feels bad but you do your best to not notice, to distract, to take a break from the anxiety in one way or another. In the second case, it feels bad and you don’t distract, so there it is, the fear.

My experience with mindfulness, the ongoing meditation form, ongoing awareness, is that my feelings, over time, are less overwhelming and I am less reactive to them. Anxiety is still unpleasant and I have been unable, so far, to experience anxiety without judgment- it is an experience I want to avoid, don’t want to feel it. I don’t know if it is possible to feel it and not dislike feeling it. I need to pay more attention to it, to how it feels and stay with it, more than before.

anita