This post features a meditation for anxiety with Thomas McConkie.
Have you ever felt more anxious when you’ve tried to calm down? Some people try deep breathing or vagus nerve exercises to calm anxiety—and end up feeling more anxious. In this conversation, Emma and Thomas explore why that happens, why it’s actually a sign of progress, and how learning to stay present with discomfort can strengthen your nervous system and deepen your sense of peace. Learn how to lean into your feelings, how to sit with them and accept emotions with this exercise and debrief with Thomas McConkie. Thomas is a mindfulness and meditation expert and the founder of Lower Lights School of Wisdom.
The following is the raw transcript from my meditation and conversation with Thomas McConkie. After an intro, Thomas guides us through a 10-minute embodied awareness practice to help you stay grounded even when anxiety rises. Then, we unpack what it’s like to experience physical sensations — like jitteriness or “feeling big” — during deep meditation, and what those experiences reveal about how we relate to our bodies and emotions.
How Mindfulness Can Amplify Anxiety—at First
Emma: Thomas, thanks so much for agreeing to join us again. I really appreciate you being here.
Thomas McConkie: Happy to be here. Always good to see you, Emma.
Emma: Today I wanted to use your experience and expertise in this topic, because I think one of the areas that I see come up pretty frequently when I teach grounding skills or I teach people these ways to regulate their nervous system, is that they’ll try deep breathing or they’ll try a vagus nerve exercise and then they’ll say, “I feel more anxious. The more I try deep breathing, the more stressed I feel or I keep trying to make my body calm down or not feel anxious but it makes me feel more anxious.”
Thomas McConkie: Yes, this is good news disguised as bad news, as far as I’m concerned.
Emma: Oh, yeah?
Thomas McConkie: So I’m glad we’re talking about this.
Emma: Tell me more.
Thomas McConkie: To put it simply. [00:01:00] I believe we have so many subtle forms of resistance to anxiety and discomfort in the body that the moment we turn towards that anxiety, discomfort, even intensity in the body, it’s going to amplify it. We’re gonna be feeling more of it like out of the gate. And there’s an opportunity there to train ourselves to stay present to that. And over time, it becomes a new normal. We become better at staying fully present than embodied. But as they say, to make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs and to really do this anxiety practice, you actually need to get a little more, you need to feel a little bit more anxious, more of the anxiety that’s already there. But I think it’s manageable and I think everyone can do this.
Emma: So it’s one thing to say this theoretically. Hey, you should feel your feelings. You should allow anxiety to be there. And I know if people watch my [regular YouTube] channel, we’ve certainly talked about this quite a bit, but I’m wondering if you have [00:02:00] a way for us to practice this.
Thomas McConkie: For sure. That’s my favorite way to learn it, is to just jump into the territory. It’s a skillset that we develop over a lifetime, and now is the best time to start and just jump in and see what happens.
Emma: Great. If you’re ready. I’m ready. Let’s go.
Start the Practice: Mindfulness for Embodied Awareness
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, I’d love it. Let’s do it. I think we’ll go about 10 minutes here. That’s like a good, manageable bite-sized practice, but also meaningful. So just giving everyone a heads up. You can prepare for about that much time. One word before we get into the practice here, it is really common and normal to need several moments, several minutes even to let the dust settle a little bit.
I’m gonna invite you into an embodied practice. There’s no expectation that you stop on a dime and you’re just fully in it all at once. Give yourself a lot of space, a lot of grace to [00:03:00] have a busy mind and notice how many ways you try to distract yourself to get out of this practice, even as your body and mind are already dropping deeper into the practice.
Here we go.
If you are, whatever you’re doing, see if you can just find some space in your own experience to take a posture that lets you be [00:04:00] really relaxed, but also alert, just alive to your present moment experience, especially in and through the body and all of physical sensation. Eyes open, eyes closed, whatever your preference, whatever’s comfortable. Standing, sitting, lying down, even walking, depending on how you work with this kind of practice. And I find it helpful to acknowledge when we do this kind of practice that the body is always going to want to get comfortable, and the mind is always going to want answers. And to the extent that the body’s not comfortable and the mind doesn’t have answers, we feel [00:05:00] confused. Whatever. There’s gonna be some anxiety, there’s gonna be some resistance.
There’s going to be this desire to seek a more comfortable state in the body, a more settled state in the mind, and sometimes it’s intelligent to do that, to get more comfortable, to find answers. But so much of the challenge of human life is there are plenty of moments where we can’t get more comfortable.
We can’t flip a switch to make the body more comfortable. We can’t flip a switch to give the mind the answers to all the things it worries about, which leaves us with, one powerful possibility that we turn towards a part of ourselves that we’re not often taught to or invited to turn towards, and that part of us, it goes by different names, but I’m speaking to this [00:06:00] part of you that is spacious and open, and naturally present, not just present, but compassionately present. There’s a part of you, an awareness, a witness that can see what’s happening in the body, see what’s happening in the mind, but doesn’t need to get caught up in it, doesn’t need to get involved into it, sucked into it, trapped by it.
The invitation now to the extent that you feel resourced and safe going deep into your physical experience is to come from this place of open awareness, spaciousness, and fully open and alive to all physical sensation, all emotional activity, all thoughts coming and [00:07:00] going, and just take account, take inventory. Notice the quality of your experience. Is it primarily positive, negative, neutral? Maybe there are parts of the body that feel very much at rest and relaxed right now, but other places in the body that feel tense and anxious, difficult energy moving, coming from your depth, which is to say the part of you that is deeper than the feeling body, deeper than the thinking mind, just the part of you that’s purely aware.[00:08:00]
Practice holding the body and mind arising in this space, training yourself to stay present to what you might experience as intensity, you might experience as anxiety. Notice the very natural drive to want to seek pleasure, avoid pain.
If we really hold a microscope to our experience, we realize at a very subtle level, there’s often almost always a seeking energy [00:09:00] where I’m trying to feel something that’s not here right now, but I think if I could just feel it, I’d be okay. More happiness, more relaxation, whatever. And on the opposite side of the street, there’s this seeking energy where I’m already feeling something challenging. And I think if I could just stop feeling that, I would be okay. So when we really look closely, we notice this push, pull, this seeking energy. I want to feel something that’s not here. I want to not feel something that is here.
And what if you just called off the search and let go into what the Buddhist call no seeking mind. [00:10:00] There’s nothing to seek. Exactly right now is absolute fullness. Nothing is missing and the mind might object and say, “That’s crazy! Of course, there are things missing.” But we’re not talking to the narrative self. We’re not asking about the self-stories right now. We’re just escaping into the sensation of this moment embodied experience right now.[00:11:00]
And notice that you have the strength, you have the capacity to be fully embodied right now. Even when the experience is intense, it’s not your preference. Nevertheless, the more embodied you become, the more you realize there’s no evidence that there’s a problem here right now. Maybe there’s some difficult sensation. I’m having a hard time being fully present, but when I really test it, I realize I can be present, I can stay present. And in this way, you strengthen your nervous system to process more intense experience. You train yourself to be fully awake, present, and embodied in this moment.[00:12:00]
And a really common pitfall when we practice sway is after a moment of dipping into the body and feeling some anxiety, feeling some intensity, the brain kicks back in and says, “Okay, we did that. Did it go away yet?” The mind co-ops this whole practice and treats it as this kind of elaborate intervention to make difficult experiences go away.
So notice that temptation and see if you can fall even deeper into embodied experience. And appreciate that you’re not trying to understand your experience. You’re not trying to heal it. You’re not trying to liberate it. You’re not trying to do anything to it. You’re simply committing to yourself in this [00:13:00] moment. This is the truth of my experience. This is what it feels like to live in a vulnerable human body. And the more often you do this for five seconds at a time, 10 seconds at a time, 10 minutes at a time, the more you commit to your vulnerable embodied experience, the more you realize there’s no need to escape from it. Whatever sensation is coming up, you can stay present, fully embodied.
And in this way, you live a life not in denial of what you’re [00:14:00] actually experiencing, but fully informed by life. And whenever you’re fully informed by the truth of your life, you’re able to respond right now, in this moment, in the best way possible, the most compassionate way possible.
Debriefing the Meditation for Anxiety Practice with Thomas McConkie
Thomas McConkie: So that [00:15:00] was one version about just taking some time to like really come deeply into the body as it is.
Emma: I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, totally.
Emma: Really appreciate it.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. We can talk about that or not, doesn’t matter.
Emma: As always had an interesting experience. It’s always an interesting experience. Do you have a few minutes?
Thomas McConkie: Totally, absolutely.
Emma: Okay. I think I’d like to, like last time I really enjoyed talking through it with you. I thought that was fascinating.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, totally.
Emma: For me, as usual, it took me a while to settle.
Thomas McConkie: Yep.
Emma: My brain was still in like planning mode, like that is my easiest escape [00:16:00] valve was like, oh, let’s just plan.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, for sure.
Emma: So I found myself just, my, just constantly going back to, oh, planning what I’ll say next. Planning the recording.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah
Emma: Planning the morning, dealing with my daughter, who wants to have a cotton candy sale this morning. I wanna say this because I think some people think, oh, I should just be able to clear my mind and be 100% present. And for me personally, that’s never been my experience with meditation.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Emma: It’s just a process of coming back, just coming back over and over again.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. Yeah.
Emma: But within a few minutes, it did settle.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Increasing Embodied Awareness Through Mindfulness
Emma: And then I noticed how as much as I wanted to be calm and wise and transcendent, I was quite jittery inside [00:17:00] as I often am in the mornings.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Emma: And then as I continued to lean into that, it all slowed down and I don’t know. I had just an interesting experience where I felt very, how do I describe this? For me, I had these sensations of I don’t know, I don’t even know, I’ve never verbalized this before, but sometimes when I pray or meditate, I feel like my limbs change size.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Emma: Like they feel big or disproportionate.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. Yeah.
Emma: But in a really, like don’t know like wide heavy way.
Thomas McConkie: Yep.
Emma: I don’t know. Have you felt this before? Have you heard this?
Thomas McConkie: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Emma: What is this?
Thomas McConkie: I’ve experienced it, and students come with reports like this all the time. It’s all a mystery. So [00:18:00] I don’t presume to have the answer to it, but I do have a way of thinking about it that makes some sense, which is that we are so used to navigating life from a cognitive orientation where we think unconsciously that we’re just moving around in the world, interacting with people and things in the world, but actually what we’re interacting with is our own mental model of the self and of others in the world. We don’t ever come into contact with whatever the world is, what we actually contact is our mental map, our brain’s map of the world. And so when we go deeper and deeper into meditation, those images, those ideas, those assumptions, all of those maps, they start to go into the background. And what comes into the foreground is just raw experience. And by definition, raw experience is not what we think it is. What we think it is the map. So like, we think, oh yeah, this is where I [00:19:00] stopped. This is where the world starts. But when we let go of those maps, we have a more immediate experience that is actually the deeper we go into it, quite shocking. It starts with like exactly what you described. It’s a common report that like I don’t know how to describe it. Like my, you said my limbs felt big, right?
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: I felt big. But actually that is a description when people have classic awakening experiences. They’re just like, all of a sudden I felt big ’cause they’re no longer in their mental model of who they think they are, their direct experiences like, oh I’m, everything. I’m connected to everything. There’s no beginning or end to me, but that really confuses my brain ’cause that’s not how I usually think about myself.
So that process, the deeper we go into meditation, the weirder our experience of the self will be. Eventually
Emma: Yeah, it is weird. It is [00:20:00] weird but calming like, weird but calming for me.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. It takes some getting used to.
Emma: I would describe it as that, I would say this feels this like, different, but not in a bad way.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes you get such a big glimpse of something so weird that your impulse is to pull back and say, what just happened? And sometimes experiences like that, if they’re weird enough, they can take months and years to get used to, but that’s okay too.
Emma: I’m sure I’m just dipping my toe in this far. Yeah. Huh.
Navigating Anxiety: A Counter-Intuitive Approach
Emma: What would you say to someone who would say perhaps they’re experiencing some anxiety and you’re inviting them to do this experience where they observe it and sit with it?
Thomas McConkie: Yeah
Emma: And they say, “But I don’t want to, I don’t want to feel anxiety. I wanna feel calm right now.”[00:21:00]
Thomas McConkie: It is really normal, anxiety, especially the way I think we’re taught to think about it and relate to it, it’s uncomfortable in the body. We don’t usually, most of us, maybe some of us, but most of us don’t like how anxiety feels in the body, and because the body’s prime directive is to always feel comfortable, it’s really natural to, okay, I feel anxiety. Make it go away. But if we can make a counter-instinctual move, if we can open up to it like you were just describing, not bring our ideas to it, not even bring our resistance to the raw experience of anxiety, if we look at it nakedly, without interpretation, I’ll just speak from my own experience. Some surprising discoveries we make are that, oh, this anxiety, it’s actually just life force. I’m just, I’m alive. This anxiety just telling me I’m alive. That’s not a bad thing. [00:22:00] And if I stay with it, like in my mind, I might, I’ll probably make a problem of anxiety if I let go of my mind and just escape into the raw experience of anxiety.
I realized that I can’t find any evidence of a problem. Is there something at the level of sensation right now that tells me like things aren’t okay? And sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the building’s on fire, sometimes we’re like on a street that’s not safe. I feel anxious ’cause I’m in a dangerous situation.
But for most of us, most of the time in the modern world, the anxiety is generated by the mind. And when we go beneath the mind and the body, we realize actually there’s no evidence that there’s a problem. So in that moment when I realized there’s no problem, I access a deeper space of relaxation and curiosity where it’s oh, this thing that I felt was a problem is [00:23:00] actually just, it’s just experience. And the more we, when we do that 10 times, once we do that a hundred times, we consciously start to get the message like, oh, like this anxiety is actually inviting me deeper into the experience of being alive. And so I totally changed my orientation to it.
I start to act differently in my life. I’m avoiding less. And I’m actually just, I feel more resourced. I feel more embodied, I feel more confident, just moment to live my daily life. That’s a transformative process that starts by doing something as simple as what we just did.
Oh, I can trust myself to stay present for this. So it’s anxiety is incredibly good news disguised as a problem
Clinical Perspectives on Anxiety
Thomas McConkie: And I’m speaking–again, let me be clear there. Anxiety disorder is real, right?
Emma: Sure.
Thomas McConkie: There, there’s a, let’s say, a pathological level of anxiety that requires certain interventions depending on the [00:24:00] person.
Emma: Yeah
Thomas McConkie: What I’m speaking to right now is everyday anxiety that all human beings experience, much of which, most of which we can actually take as an opportunity to come deeper into the body. So I want to be clear here. I’m not saying any person anywhere at all times can just go into the body and everything’s fine.
Emma: Sure
Thomas McConkie: But even for those who have clinical levels of an anxiety disorder, I would argue there’s still a huge amount of room to reclaim the body and stay more present from moment to moment experience.
Emma: I absolutely would agree. I would be less likely to make a distinction in that area of like clinical versus normal anxiety in that the way we respond to it leads to those more severe clinical outcomes, which we usually see as avoidance, right?
So obsessive compulsive disorder is when you engage [00:25:00] in behaviors to avoid compulsive thinking and the treatment is generally learning to approach those thoughts and sensations without avoidant behaviors, and that’s the treatment. Panic disorder is avoiding sensations in your body and generalized anxiety disorder is using worry as an attempt to prevent bad things from happening.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah
Emma: They’re just a more desperate form or a more behaviorally habitual form that exacerbates the anxiety cycle in the long run. That is, it requires more support and resourcing to get out of. I’m not trying to say they aren’t real disorders. But the root of them is still experiential avoidance.
Thomas McConkie: There you go. Fascinating. I love that clinical perspective. I tend to be teaching from a Buddhist and a Christian contemplative perspective where I’m interested in soul work. I’m interested in spiritual fulfillment, but it is intimately related to mental health and well-being. So [00:26:00] it’s lovely to hear that perspective.
Emma: And of course, other professionals take different approaches. I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is based a lot on mindfulness approaches.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, absolutely.
Committing to Embodied Awareness and Experience
Emma: That’s really cool. I think it’s really empowering. I think what you’re teaching is really empowering and when we start with a foundation of acceptance and openness, we can add on other skills that are helpful.
But if we’re only using those skills to try and control or suppress our sensations, then we’re often trapped in a struggle.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. Absolutely. When you said that, it actually gave me an idea for another [inaudible], like another way to do this all, but there are countless ways, there are countless ways to practice this.
What we just did was like one example of countless examples to just help shift our thinking about intense experience in the body enough where we can commit, like really commit to embodied [00:27:00] experience.
Emma: Yeah. I love it. Thank you so much. I really, appreciate you sharing your experience and your wisdom with that.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. For sure, Emma.
Emma: Okay.
Thomas McConkie: Awesome.
Emma: Thank you. Really appreciate your time.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, totally. Good to be with you, Emma. Bye! Bye!
Emma: Yep, [00:28:00] bye!
