Dear greenshade:

Congratulations for successfully managing to meditate through yesterday’s panic attacks.

Today, you wrote, your mind is quiet but you have this “feeling of heart crushing anxiety’- where do you feel it? Where in the body, that is, do you feel it (or felt it today)? How does it feel?

This is what my therapist taught me: attend to how it feels in the body, describe, observe how it changes (and it does change)- learn that way to be with the feeling.

anita

Dear greenshade:

One exercise is to just pay attention and feel the sensations. You did that and described it very well. I can relate to the chest feeling.

Another exercise that might help you (it helped me again and again)- is to do the following once in a while, whether you feel that hurt in your chest, in a cross shape almost, or not-

Do a “chest opener” which simply means, stand straight and place your arms parallel to the floor/ ground and move them backward, so your chest is open, wide open. Hope you can google it if you are not clear about this posture. What it does in affect is to facilitate breathing, making more space available for oxygen. It also stretches certain muscles in the chest that are tight.

Any kind of other stretching exercise (simple yoga stretching postures) can help when anxious or otherwise, help with your lower back and any part of the body that is tense because of anxiety.

anita

Dear greenshade:

You are welcome. The chest opener doesn’t require energy of course-

For the lower back, what helped me a lot was the yoga Child Pose. That too requires no physical exertion at all!

anita