Panic often arrives like a creature of smoke and heat — sudden, overwhelming, difficult to predict. Many describe it as being taken over by something larger than themselves, a dragon waking in the chest. The mistake is believing the dragon is the enemy. In depth psychology, intense fear often signals the psyche trying to speak in its oldest language — sensation, alarm, urgency — when words have not yet been formed.
Panic is not only a malfunction of the nervous system. It is also a message delivered without vocabulary. A summons without a sentence. Something in the interior world becomes frightened of collapse, abandonment, expectation, change, exposure, intimacy, or failure. The body rushes in before meaning arrives.
Fear of the panic often becomes more disruptive than the panic itself. People begin to shrink their life to match the edges of safety. The world becomes smaller. Rooms, conversations, risks, relationships — all negotiated around escape routes.
The turning point is subtle but profound:
instead of fighting the dragon or building walls to keep it contained, turn toward it with curiosity. Fear often transforms when given audience rather than opposition.
Three Deep Practices
These are not techniques as much as postures of attention:
Witness
Notice the surge of sensation without quickly naming it as danger.
“I feel the heat rising in my chest.”
Simple witnessing interrupts the reflex to fuse identity with fear.
Name, without story
Naming is not the same as explaining.
“I notice panic.”
This small statement reclaims authorship. The dragon is present, but so are you.
Return to the present body
Anxiety pulls us into imagined futures.
The body anchors us in what is real — feet on the floor, breath moving, the chair holding weight.
Panic cannot fully rule when the present moment is felt directly.
Why Panic Arrives
Some panic traces back to unresolved shock or trauma. Some to internalized demands. Some to the psyche rebelling against a life too tight for its spirit. Some to the body holding stories the mind has not yet read.
Often panic comes because something in you refuses to stay silent.
Because life is asking for change in a language we don’t yet understand.
Because the old way of coping has reached its threshold.
A Different Relationship to the Dragon
In many Eastern stories, dragons are not beasts to be slain but guardians of thresholds, protectors of transformation. They appear when the path is changing shape. They test the capacity to breathe, to stay, to endure ambiguity. The dragon is not blocked exit but unclaimed entrance.
Working with panic is less about conquering and more about apprenticing.
Learning its rhythm.
Understanding its warning without obeying its command.
Letting its arrival become information instead of identity.
The real mastery is not eliminating panic.
It is recognizing that the heat belongs to you, and that you can hold it.