A wrong mind turns into a prison. And I've lived most of my life in a perpetual battle bound by myself—a prisoner, a slave. A few years ago, when I believed I had a cardiac attack, that became most evident to me. Everything started when I had a drink of energy before I worked out. I felt like oxygen didn't come into my lungs after my first set and I battled to breathes fully and my heartbeat. I sat down and struggled for good breathing, and I felt normal again after about half an hour. The encounter brought me a new fear: a fear of death.



 

Before that day, I never thought much about death. It was like abstraction in my mind as something that will happen one day as something I knew, not as something I felt in my everyday existence. Now, however, death wasn't far away in the future in my calendar. My mind wanted to find the death number to told him that this was not a good time now. I felt that our meeting was approaching soon.


But the reaper doesn't compromise, everybody knows. His reunions are finished. The same symptoms took place over the next few weeks, including shortness of breath, a high heart rate, and the addition of some. Pain in the thorn. I was vividly aware of my own heartbeat, I felt it beat on my chest when I was sleeping quickly or slowly.



And one day I reached a pinnacle with my symptoms and felt I might have a heart attack. After several tests, the doctor decided that it would be a panic attack. I rushed to the emergency department. But he noticed in my heart a murmur and sent me to be tested further. I felt that imminent calamity was perceived. I was not aware of my perception of doom. I shrank out of the world and fought hard to leave my home, fearful that another attack might trigger. I was paranoid in my thinking. Was something missed by the doctors? Is there something wrong with my follow-up tests? The results came after a few weeks.


There was nothing wrong. Nothing was wrong.




I've been in good health. But there were still panic attacks. Life was less colorful, less exciting. My comfort zone reduced to the point and the fear of death still appeared even in that place. In my own body, I felt like an inmate. And it was in the teachings of Epictetus, an old stoic philosopher that I required wisdom to free myself. He knew about freedom and jail as a former slave.


Epictetus felt that liberty arose when only things that he could control were concentrated on in life and incarceration came about when he focused himself on things he could not control in life. This concept is commonly referred to as the dichotomy of control. I've got something I can't control: death hooked on. The day that I worked out after an energy drink, a certain anomaly in my body, I suspected something had happened. And that anomaly brought me to my sudden fear of death. And I surreptitiously trapped myself in a mental prison in an attempt to control the uncontrollable, in trying to control death. And the jail of my imagination was manifested physically as I fell into my own trappings.


Whether or not I left the comfort of my own house and whether or not I got my own health checked out I could have controlled my eating choices and exercises. But I could not control death. But I could not control death And the more I attempted to control, the more I threw my life away. I hit the lower rock. I decided that I had sufficient. I would have been living a brief, fulfilled life rather than a lengthy, empty one confined within my home. I had to let go and I only accomplished this in the way I knew how to control death.





He returned to the point where everything began: exercise. It's been better to challenge my fear than to allow it to devour all my life. I decided to go a run and decided that if I died in this race if my heart gave up, it would be OK. I ended up not dying on the run, not unexpectedly and since I was constantly challenging fear, it started to retreat. I concentrated more on control items like my breathing, eating, and practice regimen—the restoration of my body to normal. I normally breathed again, my chest aches went, and soon afterward I ceased being attacked by terror. I find when I want things that I can't control I'm a prisoner for my own thinking, such as death, aging. On the other hand, I become the ruler of my own mind when I give up control over destiny and concentrate on things that I can manage.