To solve a problem you must know what it is. I spent five years trying to overcome social anxiety without knowing what it was. I thought it was a problem in my head, caused by my incorrect thinking and poor view of people. So I took control of my thoughts and tried to picture people in a more positive light, as friendly and non-threatening.

But something deeper inside me never bought it. My emotional and hind brain refused to let me relax around people. My body continued to give me reason to keep being afraid even though I tried to convince myself other people weren’t a threat to me.

That’s because the problem wasn’t in my mind.

The problem was in my body.

The problem was in old feelings, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded/overwhelmed/shamed/made to not feel good.

It wasn’t about any sort of cognitive reframing or convincing myself others weren’t a threat.

It was about resolving old feelings that were subconsciously affecting my view of others.

A Shocking Realization

It blew my mind when I learned just how much emotion and tension I was holding in my body. I had gone through life always feeling heavy and fearful for the most part and I thought that’s just how it was. I thought it was the way my mind was wired, to make me chronically tense and afraid. I had no idea there was all this “stuff” living in my body at a mostly unconscious level.

But on a Vipassana retreat, where I learned a body scanning technique to become aware of sensations on my body, I was able to start to become so much more conscious of the internal position of my body and how much emotion and tension I was holding all throughout the muscles in my body.

I finally connected this internal situation with my past and all the things that had happened to me over my life. Painful events around people where I’d been teased, humiliated, embarrassed, overwhelmed. Living with an overbearing mom who never let me be my own person – I had to be this perfect kid. I had no idea just how much anger and sadness and other emotions that were living in my body – in my subconscious mind. I had stuffed all this emotion away and never gotten the chance to feel it or express it. So it had lived inside me and been accumulating over the course of my life.

I had become more and more tense until I was close to popping.

This is what my “social anxiety disorder” was all about. It wasn’t so much of a “mental issue”. It was a physical issue in my body of carrying all this emotion and tension from times I’d been hurt. Call it trauma or whatever you want, I was deeply burdened at the level of my body and nervous system. I was carrying so much stress and tension inside.

It’s no wonder I was chronically anxious of people!

Letting Go and Healing the Past

It only took 10 days of intensive meditation on a Vipassana retreat to majorly resolve a big chunk of this emotion / fear inside. I remember on day 10 when we could speak again to the other retreat attendees, the first person I made eye contact with felt fundamentally easy. There was no tension or uncomfortable sensations stirring in my body. There was just a peace and an easy feeling that carried me easily through this interaction.

At last I had found out what my social anxiety was all about and why the last five years of trying to overcome it hadn’t solved the problem. I had to move attention out of my head and away from my thinking mind because I couldn’t solve my social anxiety by changing my thoughts. I could only solve it by getting into my body and feeling all the shit I held down there, releasing the tension and emotion that was residing all throughout my body from stressful times in life. That’s how the problem dissipated.

What do you think of all this? Am I crazy? Does this sound too good to be true that I could cure my social anxiety in meditation? Share your comments below.