All of us at some point have experienced a situation in which, either because we believed we had made a serious mistake or because we felt that our lives were genuinely in danger, we allowed panic and terror to take over us.
An accident, lost money or an important document, the transit of some unbearable bodily discomfort, or simply submerging in the sea and feeling that we are drowning… All are moments in which, if we let ourselves be carried away by the idea of what we are feeling, it may end up worse than it already is.
For example, one of the regulations that rescuers and first aid apply when the latter occurs is to ask the victim to please, not fight and remain calm in order to be helped, or otherwise; You can endanger the life of those who have come to rescue you.
It sounds very easy to say, but obviously in an emergency situation like this, it is inevitable to get scared because we are human and our fear is that sense of alertness that tells us that something is wrong. What we cannot do is fall into despair, at the risk of turning the situation into a greater catastrophe than it already is.
This applies to any situation in our lives, because acting quickly doesn’t exactly mean we should panic.
I can tell you that those of us who have been meditating for several years know the value of knowing how to focus on our breathing when something like this happens, on pain of our despair becoming our worst enemy, and we end up losing the real battle.
So when you find yourself at a crossroads, it’s always better to take things easy. Epictetus said it well when he pointed out that: “Man is not so much concerned with real problems, as with his imagined anxieties about them.”
That is one of the central axes of our Meditation Diploma: to provide people with a powerful tool that will help them improve their self-management in situations in which other people could easily lose their minds.
We all breathe automatically, but when we do it consciously, that is; we inhale deeply and exhale slowly, we can think more clearly, since we feel more aware of our body.
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