I haven’t had a full-blown panic attack in a minute. I had one last Thursday. The prior one was over a year ago. There was a month—June of 2022—where I had panic attacks every day. Right after I recovered memories of being angrily sodomized by my grandfather’s friend and business partner, while at the Austin regional Burn. Even the thought of that month makes me yawn—my body’s first line of defense against dissociative impulses. I allow myself to yawn a lot. Open mouthed, wherever I am. Because if I don’t, I would dissociate. It is quite sad that we live in a culture where the body’s natural mechanisms to release what doesn’t serve a connected life, are often looked down upon.

We have come a long way from June of 2022.

I have had plenty of opportunities to experiment with navigating panic attacks and to sit with the experience after, attempting to make meaning out of it beyond this simplistic fearful labeling.

For as long as I can remember, I have lived with underlying anxiety. I just didn’t know it as that most of my life, because my life was a rat race chasing external goals with numbing breaks for food, alcohol and porn.

Anxiety has this subtle persistent background vibration. The increase in the amplitude of the anxiety vibrations is the prelude to a panic attack.

While the anxiety is in the background, it is accompanied by a sense of uncertainty of what is causing it. Folks who are young at working with anxiety tend to make serial failed attempts at controlling their environment, hoping to quell the tremors. But that’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole. And there are no moles.

With the panic attack, anxiety takes center stage. Now, the mind finally has clarity of what’s going on. The panic attack is what’s going on. As it takes the center stage, it pushes out the question of what it’s about. It is no longer about something else. It is what it is.

With the launch of the panic attack, all of my senses get completely absorbed into the beating of my heart. Thud, thud, thud.

There is a brief stretched-out period of just the pure somatic terror of the experience followed by awareness dawning upon the mind—oh, we are in a panic attack.

The mind seems to come online once I am firmly in the experience. Perhaps because of the particular manner in which my psyche practiced repression of the horror that I experienced as a kid when I was being abused? Perhaps those repression mechanisms support a protective turning away from what is—denial? Perhaps that’s just the essence of being in the human body as Goenka describes in the Vipassana trainings—sensation first, followed by mental meaning-making?

Once the mental awareness dawns, I suppose, things could go in two directions. An escalation born out of the fear of the panic attack. The cycle of panicking at being in a panic attack.

Or, as I have found more recently, a sense of peace that comes with labeling the panic attack. Labeling is one of the simplest meditation techniques that exists. Sit still, tune inwards, breathe and label what you notice moment by moment, and notice how your internal experience and what your mind attends to is in a constant state of change. Anicca as Goenka says. Impermanent.

“I am feeling sad”
“I am feeling pain in my knee”
“I am feeling discomfort”
“I notice this thought about what I’d like to eat”
“I am in a panic attack”

Was I trafficked? I don’t know. My grandfather raped me at a farmhouse that he owned with his friend and business partner, amongst other places and other acts. His friend raped me—I can’t recall where. Was there money exchanged? Is it worse if there was no money exchanged? Was I not worth some money? I don’t know. Was I shared with the friend as a part of the business partnership? What did they do exactly at that farmhouse? I don’t know.

The Epstein saga brought up a lot and finally landed fully in my body with this panic attack. I was heartened to learn I wasn’t the only one.

I ended up reaching out to a woman I had been intimate with eight years ago that I most certainly crossed sexual boundaries with. It did not strike me then when we were being intimate, but it has become pretty evident since. It especially landed over the week leading up to this panic attack. I reached out to offer her an apology. After I did that, my brain spiraled into fears about what might happen if she lodged a criminal complaint and and if that’d put me on the ICE list.

Then, I had the panic attack.

It gave me some new insights about what a panic attack might be at the energetic level and I’m sitting with the following frame.

A panic attack is the ripping off of a protective sheath around the heart. A particular proclivity of the heart to close up and become protective, is being ripped off.

The heart is freed from the ripping off of this sheath, but while it is being ripped off, it feels like hell.

In a sense, it is literally hell in that the protective sheath is filled with a particular flavor of demons and in releasing them, I vividly experience the hell realms that they belong to.

This sheath can only be ripped off to free the heart if you have the capacity to say No to what the demons are asking of you. If you say No to their protective proclivities. That’s always the first thing that demons seem to ask of humans. “Protect yourself by closing your heart”. Once you close your heart, you are disconnected from the rest of the human. The demons have successfully isolated you and then they can work on you to fulfill their never ending desire for food and sex.

That is the spiritual battle.

As the battle accelerates, I hold space for their hell so that they can be fully released. As I bid them farewell, I experience their hell.

The key turning point seems to be firstly, labeling the panic attack and secondly, striving to not become self-protective.

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. Luke 9:24

The first time I had this shift was a year ago. In the midst of the thud-thudding panic attack, I had walked myself over to a yard sign and sat down in the grass. I remember encountering a profoundly peaceful clarity: oh, this could be how I come to an end. I wonder now: is this what happens when people die of a heart attack? The protective sheathes that they have cultivated so strongly all their lives to avoid the pain of heartbreak are getting ripped off, but the sheathes are so deep that their hearts get ripped off too in the process.

As I sat in the grass, I was expanding my senses to take in more of my environment. Embodying the mantra I had practiced over years of navigating the release of repressed sexual trauma: none of it is happening right now.

This time I created an Epsom salt soak for myself and sat in it, feeling the comforting womb-like warmth around me. Recognizing that I could die, which is quite the Truth, no? You could die any moment. And just like that, the panic attack completed itself.

It came to a close. That was it.

I’ll close this with an invitation to those of you who suffer from panic attacks and are attempting to address those through physical interventions, to just consider in those moments that you are not your body. Isn’t that an essential Truth?

We are more than our bodies. And Death is not what it appears to be, truly. There is a common way people orient towards Death, which is ensconced in a perpetually fearful orientation towards it. But how could you possibly get to know something if you fear it?

The core call of Christianity is to not fear Death, because Death has been fully defeated with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. With the manner in which he embraced his fateful crucifixion, Jesus allowed the forces of Death the material victory they so desire while conquering them in spirit, where they operate!

Through him, we are all collectively victorious over Death.

Death is not what it appears to be, and a panic attack is truly the best opportunity to know that Truth.

It is truly a test of faith because you are fighting societally accepted notions about what we truly don’t know. When we connect with complex phenomena, it is important to recognize that the accepted meaning-making of these phenomena is just one of the many frames that you could hold towards them. If the mainstream frame does not liberate us, we are at agency to choose another frame. A phenomenon can burden us only to the extent that you hold onto the burdensome meaning you have associated with it.

The burden of a panic attack comes from excess fear, and fear is not real in the sense that it’s a rigidized, particular posture towards what really exists in the multitudinal Unknown. And when wrapped up in it, one often forgets one has agency in releasing the posture. Once you let go of the posture of fear, you are flooded with surrender and love. And then the burdensome phenomena comes to an end.

All fears stem from the fear of Death. If you hold faith that Jesus has achieved that victory for you, then by your faith, you are healed. You will see material miracles through the energetic channels that the posture of faith opens up. Give it a shot.

Once you see a handful of miracles, it is not difficult to adopt that frame instead. It is, truly, your agentic holding onto frames that do not make space for miracles that rob you from experiencing miracles.

In the truly mighty name of Jesus Christ, may you, my dear reader, be fully released from anxiety, panic attacks, and all fear including the greatest one, of Death itself.