Anxiety, fear, and panic are indeed upsetting. A central theme in this book is that most people have not been properly educated about the nature of these feelings (they are not you and not permanent), and certainly have not been properly trained to handle them in a skillful, meditative way (using affectionate, non-judging attention to alter the old mind-body habits of struggle and reactivity). The result is that there is a tendency to identify with anxiety, fear, or panic, and to become lost in the aversion to them as it arises, fills your awareness, and drives your consciousness moment by moment.

It can be helpful to remember that your inner life—distressing or not—is worthy of attention, and so are you! In fact, your best hope for changing the distress you feel is by trusting that turning toward the experience is the way home. The processes of anxiety, fear, and panic may generate doubts and discouraging thoughts that distract you from actually turning attention toward the unfolding experience, but don’t let yourself be fooled! There is a different way to relate to the pain of anxiety, fear, or panic besides taking them as an identity, or making war on them.

Vital to changing your relationship to inner experience is knowing that you can open into a place of inner spaciousness that can actually include and contain even the worst upset. In a sense, we could say that finding your inner spaciousness is really about learning how to make more room for whatever is happening on the inside—while it is happening.

To make room like this requires confidence and trust that it will not destroy you. It also requires patience and the courage to keep working at it. And, perhaps most importantly, making room for any upset depends much more on being kind, compassionate, and wise than it does on willpower or endurance.

How could you practice making room? Think about making more room at your dining room table for a loved one. It begins with a sense of welcome and valuing of the person who has just arrived. Then, here is the activity of softening and opening the existing space (with people in place and crowded together) to include them, as everyone literally moves back and apart just enough to make more space.

In practicing mindfulness, especially toward any intense or upsetting feeling or experience, can you begin to imagine how you might literally make more inner room for the upset?

Drop the hatred or dislike, perhaps, and become more welcoming? Let the out breath bring you a sense of ease and calm, possibly? Open to the always-present reality of inner spaciousness by turning attention toward the space between breaths, or sounds, or objects in your visual field, maybe? And, most important, let things be as they are by dropping any attachment to making things different.

Such things are not as difficult as you may think when you have your own meditation practice. Whenever you are meditating, you are “making room” through the activity of allowing attention, and the quality of friendly welcoming toward any experience that enters your awareness.

Calming Your Anxious Mind, 2nd edition: How Mindfulness & Compassion Can Free You from Anxiety, Fear & Panic by Jeffrey Brantley, MD.