There's nothing worse than being suddenly beset with intense anxiety and panic. It's an emotional hijack -- a hostile takeover by the fear center of your brain. The part of you that is usually reasonable and self-reassuring has been momentarily knocked out of commission. You feel out of control, helpless, demoralized by the emotional excesses running rampant within you, at loss for your usual coping mechanisms.
It is always temporary. But it doesn't feel so at the time. It feels more like an abyss.
Many kinds of events can trigger this state. They can be large or small, but enough to make you fear being ripped away from something you hold dear -- life itself perhaps, or someone your love, or your job, house, or lifestyle. For many this fear is triggered when your primary relationship feels threatened in some way -- when you sense your attachment pulling away.
Regardless of what causes the emotional hijack, how to quell it?
It takes a kind of yoga on the spot -- mindfulness meditation to go. When fear is in charge, it takes a special effort to 'center in', so you need step-by-step help.
1. Put all of the circumstances triggering the fear aside for the moment. It's too overwhelming to take on the whole situation at once. You must break it down to its most basic parts.
2. It won't help to snap your fingers and hope to find instant serenity. The part that snaps its fingers is currently incapacitated -- held hostage by fear. So you must direct your focus to the very center of the fear. If you can't beat it, join it. Discover its core. What is this fear?
3. It is primal abandonment fear - the fear of being abjectly alone, torn from your attachment, lost, left, cast out alone. Abandonment is our oldest and truest fear. Breathe into it.
4. The raw nerve of abandonment twists within. Experience it fully. It is the universal core of human vulnerability. Depending on its intensity, this fear can bring most humans to their knees. For adults it is a feeling, not a reality, yet it rules the world.
5. The raw human nerve twists because you resist it. Reduce its spasm by accepting its premise -- the aloneness that is its core. Yes, in this moment you are alone, as we are all alone. Existentially.
6. Breathe into this aloneness. On the inhale: Acknowledge your aloneness. On the exhale: Accept it as part of being human.
7. Whether you are happily married or by yourself, you came into the world alone and will exit the world alone. Each of us is alone in the very center of ourselves. This is a moment to accept and make peace with your aloneness. On your intakes and outtakes of breath meditate on your separateness as a human being.
8. The circumstances triggering the fear of abandonment are not material at this moment. All that matters is existence itself and this stark moment of separateness. Something has caused you to feel ripped away from a beloved attachment, separated from it, wrested from your clinging grasp to it. But behold: the fear reminds you to make peace with your wholeness and oneness as a separate self.
9. Meditate on your separateness. It is your surviving self. Breathe into the part of you that exists by itself in this moment. Accept that you've entered through the birth canal alone to survive as a separate human being. You were helpless then. You are not helpless now.
10. All of your attachments aside, by accepting your separateness, you are transporting healing energy directly to the source of your greatest fear. Primal fear is helping you delve into your yogic center -- the deepest space within that you feel most when it twinges -- inside the very center of the self which is the universe.
11. By zeroing in on the terror source -- the aloneness within the molten core of self -- you lend it your essence of reality and acceptance. This strengthens the self -- not just self-soothes, but strengthens the self.
12. When you return to the circumstances of your life, take on small parts only. Focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Stay in the moment. Keep your focus in the now. There is help. You can survive and survive well one moment at a time.