Change #3
"I want to avoid the symptoms." to "I want to
face the symptoms to gain skills."
Another common expression in the martial
arts is, "Love the mat." In other words,
during the learning process you'll find yourself, again and again,
lying flat out on the mat after your opponent gets the best of you. By
embracing challenging experiences as a necessary part of your
training, you reduce your resistance to the learning process.
"Love the mat" is a winning attitude of the student who
knows that she doesn't always get to be in control.
The only way to get the best of panic is
to face the symptoms directly and practice your skills.
Many people make the error of designing practice sessions in which
they enter the fearful situations until the point that they
feel discomfort. Then they retreat. This approach makes their recovery
process long, slow and arduous.
This task -- of provoking your
symptoms -- requires courage. Think of courage as "being
scared and doing it anyway." This way, as you face
panic, you don't have to get rid of fear, you need to add
courage. In fact, you only need courage in fearful situations!
Provoking your symptoms is exactly what I
encourage you to do. Don't wait until your weekly schedule puts you
into a panicky situation. Set up events that will provoke your
distress. Some would say that this goes beyond courage to stupidity.
It's like being in the jungle and running toward the lion's
roar. But that is the move, and the expression "run
toward the roar" will be a useful reminder.
If your symptoms suddenly end without any
effort on your part, that will be a wonderful experience. However, you
will still be open to blackmail by panic because you have yet to learn
how to respond to the symptoms when they come. If at any point in the
future the symptoms return, you'll be back at ground zero: reacting to
panic with many of the eight expected attitudes. Although it is
difficult to push yourself into situations that make you anxious,
those efforts will help inoculate you against panic's control of your
future.
Your job here is to be proactive, not
reactive. Don't wait for the anxiety-provoking situations to arrive.
Look around your world for ways to stir up trouble. Ask yourself, "What
can I do to get myself anxious today?"
I can still remember Mary B.'s words: "Come
on, panic, give me your best shot." Here's how she set
the scene. "I was at the library gathering some research for a
paper. After about twenty or thirty minutes I suddenly started feeling
quite anxious and confined. I really wanted to run out of there. My
body started shaking, I felt lightheaded and I lost all concentration
on my work. Then, I don't know how it came to me, but I decided to
take the bull by the horns. I walked to the end of the row of shelves
and sat down cross-legged on the floor. (I didn't want to crack my
head open if I fainted.) Then I said, 'Come on, panic, give me your
best shot.' And I just sat there. I sat there and took it. Within two
or three minutes all the symptoms stopped. I got up and finished my
work, which required about three more hours in the library."
That was quite a learning experience for
Mary B. Before that night she would have left the building immediately
upon noticing her symptoms, gone straight home, never finished that
research and mentally kicked herself over the next two or three weeks
for having failed at her task.
The nature of panic is that it produces involuntary
symptoms in your body. By voluntarily seeking out those symptoms you
begin to change panic. You take away its involuntary nature, and start
to shift the control over to you. So as you accept this challenge of "I
want to face the symptoms to gain skills," remember to love
the mat and run toward the roar.
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