| | Hey,
I dealt with anxiety for a long time, so I can understand what you're going through. It's very tempting to see meditation as a cure-all, but the bad news is that it isn't. Noting sensations and emotions will not stop cronic depression or anxiety, and it may make them worse due to the increased concentration if you are trying to escape with a sense of desperation.
Please realize, you're going to need to change the actual thought patterns and beliefs that are fueling your anxiety. Meditation techniques can be helpful in analyzing your mind to discover the source of your anxiety, but the reason you feel afraid is going to be mundain (i.e. everyday life).
What you are calling the dark night, here, is a habit you've developed to focus on negative emotions and thought patterns. This is habitual rumination at its core.
Here is what I did to break out of my own thought patterns. Maybe you can try this before meditating each day. Firstly, open yourself up to how you feel, don't suppress anything. You need to be able to see your thought patterns clearly. If you're like me, you might find that, not only is something specific on your mind - but your also afraid of the fear itself. You might see desperation to escape, and a distrust of contentment, specifically, because it hasn't been reliable for you. These thoughts make up a chorus of voices in your head that want to be heard, and because of habitual supression, they've gotten louder and louder over the years. Your mind is split into pieces. Some of these pieces are trying to communicate, and others are trying to ignore, and it's all just a massive struggle. Once you let go of control and allow everything to say what it wants, the mind can relax its efforts.
Now letting go can be confusing and seem hard to do - but, by definition, it is the easiest thing you can do. Instead of trying to deny the fear and push it away, give it a moment to express itself. The next moment, a doubt will come up, or an alarm will tell you "no, you're not doing it right, you're trying to suppress something!" Let that alarm through as well. Let it say what it wants to say. Let all of the doubts, fears, fears about doubts, anger, resentment towards your own mind, desperation, etc. Let it tell you what it wants to say. And, because you are finally listening, they will begin to quiet down, take turns, and present you with real information about what you believe and why you believe it. In the short term, this technique can even cause temporary blissful states of ease and relaxation. But then thise old doubts will come back and say, "you can't trust this contentment, it isn't safe!" You must let that through as well. Let it say what it needs to say. You will lose the contentment, and it can be painful and create desperation again, but that must be let through as well.
Now, as you settle into this receptive attitude, your mind will understand that you're willing to listen, and you'll be able to gather information about who you are. You can use this information to work through your problems logically and sanely without the desperation to escape. It's important to remember, as well, that you aren't trying to focus on the painful manifestations of an emotion and wait for it to go away, you're specifically trying to let go of control and allow the suppressed reason to make its way into your consious thoughts without resistance. Ever tiny spec of anxiety you feel has a real life mundain cause, I'm going to make that guarantee to you. There is no such thing as formless anxiety - we are very logical creatures. I used to think I was anxious for no reason, or maybe for some chemical reason in the brain, and I'd spend my time laying on my couch asking, "why do I feel like this!? It makes no sense!" The reason I couldn't figure it out was because I was so focused on how bad I felt. If you feel stuck in an emotion, go distract yourself for a while until you feel a bit better, then come back to it. During the transition between feeling good and feeling anxious, you can often see the trigger quite clearly. Don't dismiss any reason as silly! My "formless anxiety" actually came from a fear of touching sticky or dirty objects. Imagine my suprise that it was something so simple!
Now, once you know the beliefs that are causing your fear, I have an exercise I like to use to challenge them and remove them. You have to realize that, unless your life is full of dangerous situations, you are basically afraid of your imagination. You're afraid of what it will present to you. The solution, then, is to allow your imagination to run wild, and face what it has to offer calmly. My anxiety has been caused by a number of things over the years: spiders, driving a car, touching sticky objects, calling a stranger on the phone, knives, the list goes on. So what I do is sit down and imagine scenarios like getting into a car accident, having spiders crawl on my face, getting stabbed, being mocked or shamed, and as I imagine these things, I challenge each reaction that comes up. I might feel a little jump in the heart reagion, so I'll stop for a moment, say to myself, "no, I'm not going to hold onto this reaction," and then confront the same scene again. It works very quickly to completely disable a habitual reaction because you're facing the worst your imagination can offer you, and you're coming out of it perfectly fine. You can supliment this with images and videos if your fear is physical (I googled spiders and accident photos, for example). The goal is to unify the mind, remove all inhibitions, and let go of the guarding mechanisms you are using to protect yourself from thinking certain thoughts. Once these guards are removed, you will be free to experience contentment without the distrust because there will no longer be anything to run from. You will be fearless, rather than brave. See what I mean?
I know how you feel, so I hope this helps. If you need some hope, it really only take a few weeks to disable a phobia. If your fears are more existential, and you feel they are justified, it may take longer as you reorganize your pholosophy of life to account for them - but it is posiible, and it's possible sooner rather than later. Remember this, fear does not make you better able to cope with anything, it doesn't help you remember anything better, it doesn't make you work more quickly, and it doesn't make you treat people better. It's completely useless - a mind that is content is willing to do any of those things, and can do them better because it isn't preoccupied. It is safe to let go of the fear. It is safe to be happy, even when life is difficult. A happy mind can solve any problem better than an axious one. You can give yourself permission to trust your future self to handle things. You don't need to rehearse for bad situations, and you don't need to solve problems and mistakes that have already happened.
Once you have freed yourself from the guarding mechanisms, vipassana practices will be much easier because there is very little resistance to things. |