Meditation for social anxiety.

Meditation is not going to help much with social anxiety. Social anxiety is deeply rooted in repressed fear, meditation mainly deals with the abstract misunderstanding that gives rise to the idea of "self".

Getting rid of social anxiety is simple, but it is a terrible process. Sometime in your life, likely in childhood, a figure or authority or similar imprinted you with a very strong emotion of fear, which you being a child, felt overwhelmed by and instead of processing you repressed it, and your mind created some belief to avoid it happening again such as "I am a bother to people" etc.

The belief is held in place by the emotion, which means the emotion is the problem. In meditation you will rarely trigger social anxiety unless you can think of certain things and thus awaken the emotion, but this is rare.

Many people try to overcome social anxiety by training themselves to talk to people, but although they are able to cope better, the fundamental fear inside stays, making social settings never truly relaxing and thus enjoyable.

There is only one way to get rid of it completely, and I regret that you have to go through it, but you will grow in more ways than one by doing it. Basically we have to dissolve the repressed fear inside you. When the trauma was created, you repressed the fear instead of feeling it, as children often do, and a deep imprint was left on you emotionally and physically. Now you must release the emotion.

The only way to do that is to put yourself in situations where the social anxiety arises, try with something small first if you can. Now when the emotion of fear arises and your brain starts screaming and begging for you to get out of there, you will have to simply sit and feel the fear as totally as you can. This will feel worse than dying because your mind will think that the fear will rip it apart.

It does not take very long depending on how often and how intensely you do it, a few months or so all in all. It will be the most terrible thing you have ever done, and afterwards you will realize how stupid it was and how the fear was totally irrational, but only after. During it will feel like slowly putting your hand into a bonfire and keeping it there. I wish you good luck, facing one's fear is one of the requirements of calling yourself s human being and finding peace in yourself.

/r/Meditation Thread