Zaine 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.
Try Bikram yoga. For first-timers I think they offer a week of unlimited access for twenty dollars US - a fairly low-cost test. It's quite physically taxing - in the 90 minutes of the session, for perhaps only ten interspersed minutes, if that, does the sympathetic nervous system even have a chance to give way to the parasympathetic. I assume that those times would be the most risky for you, and of course cannot speak to your experience, but I find it difficult to imagine your imagined stress will be sufficient enough to convince your sympathetic nervous system to activate during those times; it will be quite exhausted already.
I found a place that offers 90-minutes classes for $30, which sounds worth a try.