out of every day.
Sharing something that has started working for me...
I go to the gym 3 times a week for a full workout. I also go on Sunday evenings, because that is a bad time for me and being out of the house, engaged in something, in a happy atmosphere, helps.
The other three days when I'm at home, I thought of going for a brisk half-an-hour walk in the morning. It worked for a while but my gym instructor insisted that if I do the walk then I must give myself one whole day of total rest, otherwise the body would collapse under the strain. He suggested, instead, a 20-minute yoga work out combined with meditation. I was hesitant at first, but I trust my instructor implicitly so decided to give it a go. Believe me, this is helping and I'm the most surprised!!
Of course it didn't start off as a 20-minute session. When I first started, I felt terribly restless during the meditation time of 5 minutes I'd scheduled for before the yoga work out. Also, I found, to my dismay, that I couldn't do the yoga asanas and pranayams my instructor had suggested. The list of daily chores kept pinging on my brain, and I was restless and uncomfortable thinking I was spending precious time on yoga when I should be doing something that needed doing around the house. Gradually, very gradually, I forced myself not to quit. Forced myself to keep at it. Forced myself to just be on the mat. I couldn't do anything, not even the meditation....I was so tense....but then when I kept sitting there, every scheduled day, the tension eased off.
And now, slowly but surely, it is working.
I realized that one cannot do any yoga if the mind is troubled/in turmoil/uneasy/not at rest. My mind had to be absolutely calm and quiet. So I decided to concentrate on my 5-minute meditation. It didn't happen right away, but after a few days I could calm and quiet my mind. The asanas also took some time to work out the way they should (even now, if my mind is not totally calm, I cannot do the asanas successfully). Likewise for the pranayams. When I found I could handle these, I fixed another 5-minute meditation time at the end of the session.
Now I can spend 30 minutes without any panic attack! Best is this little bit of time sets me up for the day and I find that I can comfortably finish all my chores without rushing. The other things that used to turn on panic attacks are also all easing off. Loneliness was another thing that used to set off the panic button, but now that too has stopped, and I am more in charge of myself. Feelings and thoughts keep coming, but they are not to be taken seriously. They are just visitors, Zen Buddhism says, and as such should be allowed to move on and out of us. We need to keep only those thoughts and feelings in our mind that are uplifting...