In this video of Mingyur Rinpoche talking about his own panic attacks and how he worked to overcome them.  Mingyur Rinpoche is a highly accomplished meditation teacher who travels all over the world teaching meditation and Buddhist Philosophy.  His humbleness and willingness to talk about his own struggles with anxiety and panic in this six minute video is an inspiration for all people who suffer from panic attacks or other forms of anxiety.

As a teacher of mindfulness meditation, I’m always interested in research that looks at the effects of modern life on our minds. Some recent research by Larry D. Rosen, PhD, California State University, shows some interesting finding about the effects of social media and high internet use on children’s and teenagers minds. Many of you are parents so I thought it would be useful to share this with you.

In summary here are Dr. Rosen’s finding:

Pros for frequent internet use:

• Can become faster learners; better at task switching
• Help shy teens become more outgoing in the real world
• Can improve empathy; virtual empathy leads to actual empathy

Cons to frequent internet use:

• High use can increase problems with anxiety and depression
• Don’t always realize when task switching is not effective
• Increased tendency towards narrcicism
• Lower grades from too much use instead of studying

None of these finding mean you should immediately wean your child off of computers. But it does reinforce the already wise policy of being involved in your children’s internet use and monitoring how much time they spend on the internet and what sites they visit. It’s very easy for children and especially teenagers to go to places on the internet that are not age appropriate. Supervision, conversation and shared time between parents and children of all ages will help your children to healthy adulthood.

While this research was done with children and adolescents, it’s not unreasonable to assume that similar effects occur in adults who spend a lot of time on the web.

Here is a link to a report on Dr. Rosen’s research:

Most of us experience stress and anxiety as something that is caused by events outside of our own personal awareness; “If my boss would only back off I’d be able to relax.” More generally, it goes like this: “if only circumstances beyond my control were different then they are, I wouldn’t be worried and upset.”

If we carefully analyze our response to the events of daily life it doesn’t take long to realize that stress and anxiety are entirely caused by our own thinking. It is our own response to the world of unpredictability and ever-changing circumstances that causes us stress, not the event itself. A closer analysis of our own internal process reveals the following:

1.Something happens that we don’t have direct control over.

2.We become aware of this event through our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and/or touch

3.Based on how this new awareness makes us feel in our body, we identify it and give it a name that is based on past conditioning; sad, scared, angry, happy, etc. Most often when we go to stress and anxiety, it is because the emotion we are experiencing is some version of fear.

4.In micro-seconds, we search our memory and tell ourselves that this experience means ____________; fill in the blank. So we do. We fill in the blank based on our personal and collective history.

5.We then start running stories in our mind about what is going to happen next. At this point our stress and anxiety start to overwhelm us; “This event happened and now some doomsday scenario is going to play out if I can’t do something about it. It is like playing old home movies in our mind. And some of these movies are so old that they are on super 8 film! (For you younger people out there super 8 was pre-VCR.)

Now to be fair, all of this happens in unconscious mind unless we become aware of this ongoing process. If we do learn to recognize this process then we are no longer run by it and can learn to control our mind. We can break this bad habit right after step 3 and learn to respond differently to the ever-arising and unpredictable events that make up all of our lives.

One of my teachers, Dzochen Ponlop Rinpoche, calls this process “minding the gap.” He says there is a gap between step 3 and step 4 above. With practice we can learn to slow this process down and “mind the gap.” Once we learn to “mind the gap” we no longer need to be run by our fear and can choose not to run those old mind movies any more. Instead he teaches us that we should rest in the gap that exists between feeling and making meaning out of feeling.

When we are able to “mind the gap” we get used to feeling our fear and we no longer have to react in our old conditioned ways; stressing ourselves out by running our mind movies. Fear is an emotion. It doesn’t inherently mean something. Historically, when all of us were still living in tribes as hunter/gathers, fear was the signal that we were in danger of being eaten by a tiger, some other large carnivore or other life-threatening situations. For most of us in today’s world that is no longer the situation. However, that deeply ingrained response is still in our DNA and as a result we tend to react to modern situations in our home and workplace with as much adrenaline as we would if we were in danger of being eaten by a tiger. This sets off a stress/anxiety response and we can’t just run away on our two legs to solve the problem. Thus we tend to feel trapped and our anxiety goes through the roof.

So practice “minding the gap.” When you find yourself getting stressed out see if you can:

1.back up to the emotion and say to yourself “I feel afraid.”

2.stop the VCR in your mind.

3.and rest.

Be willing to feel your fear. I guarantee you it won’t kill you and feeling fear does not make you a weakling or a sissy. Rest into it. You’ll be surprised at how fast stress and anxiety go away when you mind the gap.

I’ve had the honor of teaching some of your how to manage difficult emotions during our work together. I’d be equally honored to share these wonderful teachings with the rest of you.

For those of you who are interested in learning more about working with difficult emotions Dzochen Ponlop Rinpoche has a new book Rebel Buddha which comes out next week; on November 9th. And as a bonus, he will be here for what promises to be a wonderful all-day event on November 27th, at the Boulder Theater. You can learn more about the event and purchase a ticket at the Rebel Buddha website. I plan to attend myself and I hope to see you all there.

So dare to be daring; let your inner Rebel Buddha out to the world and let yourself experience the fact that you too can stress less and still succeed and thrive.

All of us have probably experienced being told “don’t worry about it” when we are upset about something and I think it is fair to say that being told not to worry never helps. If the solution to stress and anxiety is that simple then why can’t we do it?

The problem is that we’ve trained ourselves since childhood to have internal dialogs about all of the bad things that are going to happen because of the event that set off the worry. We are afraid and trying to think away the fear. These dialogs are like movie scripts that we write, direct and star in. Then we forget it’s a movie and respond to it believing it is reality. If we can step back and realize that it is just a movie, we can then do as the teaching suggests, stop worrying and relax. The outcome will be the same and we can be worry less. Yet I suspect that many of you may object to this idea saying that you have real problems that you need to find a solution for.

Life is complicated with many issues to grapple with. However it is useful to distinguish between problem solving and worrying. They are not the same thing. Actively searching out solutions to problems, dialoging, researching and trying things are constructive strategies that actually reduce stress by allowing you to feel like you have some power and can take charge of a situation. Worrying is a fantasy activity that constructs a dreaded future with no positive outcome. The energy behind worrying is fear and fear is a normal response to uncertainty. So how do we constructively deal with the fear and uncertainty that is a normal part of life?

Try this:

1.Acknowledge you are feeling fear.

2.Realize that making the leap from fear to anxious thinking is a voluntary conditioned act.

3.Find the gap between the feeling and the thinking. It really is there!

4.Rest in the gap and feel the fear. Notice how that feeling changes when you pay attention.

5.Just relax and slow down your mind.

6.Now engage in constructive problem solving. If no solution presents itself at this time, rest, knowing that either this is not yet the time to deal with the problem or that you don’t yet have enough information to make a decision.