How to Meditate When Anxious: 3 Somatic Shifts That Change the Way We Meditate
Meditation is so often recommended for anxiety. We hear that it can calm the mind, settle the nervous system, help us sleep and bring us back into our bodies. For many people it can do exactly that.
But what happens when meditation makes you more anxious, not less?
I have been meditating since my twenties. Over the years, meditation has taken me through Vipassana courses, Satyananda retreats, solo stays in ashrams, Eastern medicine studies, yoga and contemplative practices in different countries around the world.
It has been woven through much of my adult life, both personally and professionally.
So when I question the way meditation is being offered, I am not questioning its value. I know its value intimately.
I am questioning something else.
Why are we still offering powerful practices as though they are harmless for every nervous system?
Because after years of working with trauma, I am tired of seeing people distressed by practices that were supposed to help them.
I have seen it while working in psychiatric settings. I have seen it following retreats and breathwork sessions. I have seen practices offered by health professionals with little understanding of what may happen when someone with a trauma history is asked to close their eyes, become still, control their breathing or turn deeply inward.
And I continue to see it in my clinical practice.
People arrive believing they have somehow failed at meditation.
They tell me they can’t sit still. Their thoughts get louder. Focusing on their breathing makes them panic. Closing their eyes doesn’t feel safe. Going inward brings up sensations, memories or feelings they weren’t prepared for.
Sometimes they have kept pushing through because they were told meditation was good for them.
That concerns me.
Meditation is not always benign
I was relieved to see the ABC recently opening up this conversation in its reporting on what can happen when meditation goes wrong.
Research discussed in the report suggests that around one in ten meditators may experience an adverse effect lasting more than a month or associated with impaired functioning.
That deserves more than a footnote.
We have spent years talking about the benefits of meditation, mindfulness and breathwork. There is good reason for that, and there is research supporting many of those benefits.
But somewhere along the way, I think we have confused beneficial with universally safe.
They are not the same thing.
Meditation is a powerful practice. Powerful practices need to be offered with care.
This becomes particularly important when we are working with trauma.
We need to talk about the way meditation is prescribed
I still hear people experiencing anxiety being casually told to “take a deep breath”.
Box breathing is recommended. Eyes are closed. Often with very little curiosity about the person sitting in front of them.
What happens when we ask someone to focus on sensations inside a body that may have been the place where trauma was experienced?
For some people, breath awareness can be deeply supportive. For someone else, suddenly becoming intensely aware of their breathing, heartbeat or internal sensations can increase anxiety.
For some, closing the eyes creates spaciousness. For another person, being able to see the room and know where they are may be an important source of orientation.
Even stillness is not neutral.
A body shaped by survival may have learnt to run, brace, freeze, disappear, become very still or stay constantly alert.
And then we put that body in a meditation class and tell it what it should do.
iRest Yoga Nidra taught me something important about this
I have practised and taught iRest Yoga Nidra for many years. It is a beautiful practice and one I deeply respect.
But Yoga Nidra also gives us a useful example of why how we offer a meditation matters.
Some practices include extended stillness, detailed body scanning, breath awareness and visualisations. For many people this can be deeply restorative.
For somebody living with trauma, anxiety or dissociation, that inner landscape may be much more complicated.
Visualisation is a good example. Asking someone to imagine a particular image may sound innocuous, but we cannot know what associations that image carries for another person.
The same is true of the body.
We cannot assume that every part of the body is somewhere a person wants to place their attention.
This is one reason my own teaching moved towards iRest Yoga Nidra, a trauma-aware adaptation of the Yoga Nidra tradition.
Within iRest there is much more recognition of resource, choice and the movement of attention. There can be an invitation to meet experience without having to force ourselves deeper into it. Eyes can remain open. Bodies can move. Attention can shift.
There is room for the person practising to remain in relationship with themselves.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Trauma-aware meditation is not simply meditation with softer language. It asks us to reconsider where the power sits in the practice.
Anxiety is embodied
When we talk about anxiety, we can become very focused on thoughts. But anxiety lives through the whole body.
It may be felt in a racing heart, a tight chest, a churning belly, heat, trembling, muscular tension or a breath that suddenly feels difficult to find. There may be an impulse to move, an urge to escape, a sense of being intensely alert to everything around you.
Sometimes there is numbness or a feeling of being far away from yourself.
And then we tell this body to sit still, close its eyes and go inward.
For some bodies that may feel supportive.
For others, particularly where trauma is present, it may be the place where distress begins.
So I have become much less interested in asking:
How do we get an anxious person to meditate?
I am much more interested in asking:
How can meditation meet the body that is actually here?
That question changes the practice.
Three somatic shifts
This is what I explore in my free course, How to Meditate When Anxious. Rather than offering another meditation technique to master, I introduce three somatic shifts that have emerged from my own years of meditation practice and my clinical work with anxiety and trauma.
The first is move before you meditate. We have become so accustomed to the idea that meditation begins with stillness that we rarely question it. Sit down. Stop moving. Close your eyes. Settle. But for an anxious body, stillness doesn't always need to come first. Sometimes the body needs to walk, stretch, sway, shake or simply move in the way it is already asking to move. Movement itself can become part of the meditation, a way of meeting the body rather than immediately asking it to be different.
The second shift is safety, not silence. We often associate meditation with creating a quiet environment, but silence and safety are not the same thing. Sometimes what helps us arrive is being able to see the room, hear familiar sounds, feel our feet on the ground or sense the support beneath us. For someone with a history of trauma, closing the eyes and removing all those external points of reference may actually make it harder to settle. Before asking someone to go inward, I want to know that there is enough of a sense of here first.
And the third is use your inner resource. This is something that has deeply influenced the way I teach through iRest. An inner resource is an inside felt sense of steadiness — something we can connect with and return to as we move through a meditation. It may arise through a memory, a place, a person, an animal, an image or simply a felt sense within the body. It isn't about manufacturing a safe place or pretending everything is okay. It is about recognising that before we invite ourselves towards difficult sensations, emotions or memories, there can also be somewhere within our experience that offers a sense of support.
This changes something quite fundamental for me. We don't have to plunge into the inner landscape simply because we have begun meditating, and we don't have to stay with an experience because somebody has told us that this is where the healing happens. We can move towards and away. We can open our eyes, change position, orient to the room or return to that inner resource.
Perhaps trauma-aware meditation is less about learning how to stay with everything that arises, and more about discovering that we have choices in how we meet what arises.
We need to stop confusing endurance with healing
This is where I think the wider meditation and wellbeing culture needs to change.
There can still be an idea that if discomfort appears during meditation, we should remain with it, observe it and eventually move through it. Within particular traditions and with appropriate support, there can be value in learning to be with discomfort. My own years of meditation practice have taught me a great deal about this.
But trauma complicates that conversation.
There is a difference between meeting discomfort within our capacity and overriding a body that is communicating enough. There is a difference between consciously choosing to stay with an experience and believing we have to stay because the teacher, practitioner or recording has told us to.
This is particularly important when we consider that trauma so often involves a loss of choice, boundaries being crossed, needs being ignored or the experience of somebody else's agenda becoming more important than our own.
If we are not careful, practices intended to support healing can quietly reproduce some of those same dynamics.
When somebody's body wants to move, I don't want them learning that successful meditation means overriding that impulse. When their eyes want to open, I don't want them believing they have failed because everybody else has their eyes closed. When focusing on the breath increases distress, I don't want them continuing because a health professional told them this particular breathing pattern will calm their nervous system.
Healing practices should not require us to abandon our own experience in order to perform them correctly.
That is the change I would like to see across meditation, yoga, breathwork, retreats and healthcare more broadly. Trauma awareness cannot simply mean using softer language while continuing to hold the same assumptions about what another person's body should be doing. It asks something more of us as practitioners. It asks us to become curious, to make room for choice and to recognise when the practice needs to adapt to the person rather than expecting the person to adapt to the practice.
Maybe you aren't bad at meditation
Over the years, I have heard some version of “I can't meditate” many, many times. Often, when we explore what that actually means, the person isn't incapable of meditation at all. They have simply been trying to meditate in a way that asks too much of their nervous system.
Perhaps sitting still makes you restless. Perhaps focusing on your breathing makes your anxiety louder. Perhaps closing your eyes doesn't feel right, or turning inward brings you too quickly into sensations you would rather approach slowly.
I don't think those experiences need to be interpreted as failures. They may be useful information from the body.
My free course, How to Meditate When Anxious, grew from this understanding and from the many people I have worked with who needed another doorway into meditation. I teach the three somatic shifts — move before you meditate, safety not silence, and use your inner resource — as ways of beginning to explore meditation with more awareness of what your body may actually need.
This isn't about finding another technique for making anxiety disappear. It is about changing the relationship we have with meditation, so that the body has a voice within the practice and there is room to notice, respond and choose.
You don't have to override your body to learn how to meditate. There may be another way in.
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