Part 3 of my Meditation for Anxiety series couldn’t come at a better time. I am just back from the vacation from hell… truly.

All this month, we have been working with meditation as a tool for anxiety. Our daily mindfulness meditation practice is the very best tool we have for managing everyday stress. However, when we are in the throes of deep anxiety or high stress, sometimes we need something a little more specific to help us through the moment.

Meditation for anxiety is a two-part practice. One, we must have a consistent, daily practice so that our foundation is one of calm wakefulness. Practicing coming back to the present moment without judgment time and again will do more for our stress than any emergency response.

“Between stimulus and response there is a pause and in that pause lies your power and your freedom.”  ~Victor Frankl

When things get hard or when things get stressful, what do you do?

Most people tend to try harder. We tend to actively look for solutions; to do more to try to fix it.

In this month’s series, we have already explored several tools we can use to help us reconnect to ourselves. We discussed the importance of loving kindness and simply being still {part 1} as well as cultivating freedom through generosity {part 2.}

“A meditation master from Thailand’s forest tradition came to visit the US several years ago. After just a short time here, he said rather bemusedly, “In Asia, the classical sequence of the teachings and practice is first generosity, then morality, and then meditation. But here in the US, the sequence seems to be meditation, then morality, and after some time, as a kind of appendix, there is some teaching about generosity. What’s going on here?”  ~Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness

This month’s meditation series is a look at the many facets of disconnection, and how we can use it as a tool for reconnection.