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NancyLebovitz comments on A Less Mysterious Mindfulness Exercise - Less Wrong
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Bug report: Meditation (all types) is terrifying. I try to accept the slight anxiety... fear... mind-devouring terror, but twitching, jumping up and running away all interfere with practice. I do not become aware of them before they happen. Accepting them after the fact, or going back to my sitting position and starting again, have the same effect.
Have you tried tai chi and/or yoga?
I have tried relaxing/focusing on breath/mindfulness while in yoga positions; is there more to yoga? I haven't tried tai chi. Any tips? What I found boiled down to "focus on your breath while doing these moves".
You get the same sort of anxiety from yoga that you get from sitting(?) meditation?
I don't have tips, just suggestions of things to try. The reason I don't have tips is that I don't share your problem and I haven't taught meditation, so I'm guessing.
A tai chi class might be useful. The movements are sufficiently complex that that just learning them might be a distraction, perhaps enough that you can meditate a little without going into so much anxiety, and gradually decouple anxiety and meditation.
Have you tried research? I've taken a fast google at "anxiety while meditating" and a good bit came up, though lower levels of anxiety than yours seem to be more common. Still, there might be something useful for you if you poke around.
Is massage something you might like? I believe that a lot of emotional habits like anxiety are entangled with muscle tension.
Feldenkrais Method is a way of learning to move more easily and might be useful for you-- it's got a lot of attention to movement rather than breathing.
Research just turns up "keep at it, it'll go away" and "avoid specific triggers", which isn't super useful since AFAICT the trigger is my mind clearing.
Oooh, I did Feldenkrais once, though I didn't know it then. When I started panicking I just dropped the relaxation bits and did the movements.
I don't really want to spend time and money enrolling in a tai chi class since it's such a shot in the dark.
I'm not sure what you want me to do with a massage - get one and then try to meditate, or try to meditate during one?
I'm hoping that more research would turn up what to do with as severe a reaction as you get-- the advice that's easy to find is about more average levels of anxiety.
My hypothesis is that if you got enough massage to be more relaxed in general, you'd find that you'd be less anxious when you started to meditate. However, this is merely a guess, and would involve a substantial investment of time and money unless you got into self-massage, in which case it would be time but not money. Probably not worth it unless you like massage anyway and/or more evidence that it's useful turns up.
Tentatively again-- if you have problems with anxiety under other circumstances, it could make sense to try anti-anxiety meds. If it's just meditation, then drugs might not be worth it.
I did find some sources about severe anxiety, but only from traumatic flashbacks or the like.
Turns out I already have data on that: I dropped from having several panic attacks a day to slight nervosity in specific situations. This changed nothing about meditation.
How did your panic attacks go away?
They faded away on their own accord over five years. Moving/changing schools helped more often than it hurt. Why do you ask?
I thought it might give a clue about how to lower meditation-related anxiety, but apparently not.