Welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer Podcast. I'm Shan Vanderleak here with my close friend and co-host Ananga Civier, we come together weekly from Kent and Lelandaw to share

anxiety slayer sessions with you and answer listener questions from our inbox and Facebook page.

Together, Ananga and I share a powerful collection of techniques

to reduce anxiety.

This week, our listener question is,

can meditation make anxiety worse. I have some experiences with pretty deep

meditations and some have been scary in the sense that I feel like I lose

myself and almost dissolve.

At the same time it has also given me a lot of insights.

I probably lack grounding and trust, but I do know there are several studies that say meditation can increase anxiety. I would

love to hear your thoughts on this. Well that's an interesting question that

has not come up for us in the almost 10 years.

We've been recording this podcast. Yeah, don't think it has.

Welcome back and Naga, so good to be with you today. Hi Shen. Let's dig in.

Yeah, it does meditation increase anxiety.

As an anxiety sufferer, although these days it's very much under control but former high anxiety sufferer and a meditator for 30 years. I don't think that meditation increases anxiety. I think what happens is that it's more that anxiety breaks through

into meditation when we're quiet and we're trying to still the mind and slow our thoughts,

very often anxiety can come rushing in and anxiety has a real energy to it where it almost feels like it floods into your mind and you can literally be sitting there with your hands on your head just wanting it to stop.

So I don't think that it's meditation that's at cause.

I think it's that anxiety tends to rush in to our quieter moments.

And let's talk about what is meditation.

We have the the Cambridge dictionary definition

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