From Agitation to Meditation: How Mindfulness Helped Me (Start to) Conquer My Anxiety
stock image by Joice Kelly
I think I was born anxious. My family likes to tell stories about how I was too scared to sleep during the annual fire prevention week when I was in elementary school. Every year, as I learned about new hazards and survival strategies, I begged my parents to cooperate with my plans and assuage my fears. I was livid and terrified because they wouldn't buy us those ladders that you hook onto the second-floor windowsills so you can climb to safety when the house is on fire. I did manage to cajole them into coming up with an evacuation plan (for which I naturally drew up a detailed diagram) with extra focus on getting the dog out of the house should there be a fire on the first floor while we slept upstairs. To add insult to anxious injury, I never received recognition in the annual fire prevention week art contest at my school, despite my furiously laboring over my creations. I felt betrayed that my sister won a trophy one year--this was something to which I had thoroughly dedicated my internal fear-scape, while she was blithely unconcerned. I shudder to think what I drew--I'm kind of glad I can't remember--but I'm certain my drawings captured my deepest (unfounded) fears of being burned alive in my own home.
I can clearly see, looking back over my life, that I've always been anxious, but no one ever used that word to describe me. I look at how protective my parents were and their rationales for not letting me do things I wanted to do--mostly, they feared my imminent danger out in a cruel world indifferent to my well-being--and I see how their worries multiplied in me and eventually turned into my near-constant fear of worst-case scenarios and my need to plan ahead accordingly. I read true crime books so that I would be sure to have every situation covered in my inner disaster manual. I mastered basic first aid in case of emergency. I learned about a laundry list of terminal diseases and debilitating conditions and the symptoms one could attribute to them so that I could self-diagnose any affliction at its earliest stages. (You may laugh at this, but I caught my appendicitis before my appendix burst and diagnosed my chicken pox at the first pock.) I stopped eating red meat and quit smoking. I stopped storing food in plastic containers and drinking bottled water. I ran from every chemical smell I encountered. I paid careful attention to my surroundings and to my body, sure that I would get a sign of danger at any moment.
In my 20s, I began dating a wonderful man who I eventually realized was an alcoholic. My anxiety suddenly had a concrete focus: making sure he was OK. For eight years, my priority was his well-being. I removed every consequence I could for every misstep he made. I made sure he got up for work on time, was fed, dressed appropriately, apologized for poor behavior that he did not remember, and went unnoticed for as long as possible in his excessive drinking. My anxiety was very busy, so I didn't even notice that it was there. There was always something for me to do to protect him from himself.
After he passed away in 2006, my anxiety had nowhere to go, and my grief redoubled it. I had been unable to protect him, and my anxiety decided I just hadn't done enough. I managed to hold myself together until April of 2007, when I had my first panic attack. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, and, while driving home from work, I was struck by how thoroughly his loss permated my life: not only was I living alone for the first time, existing in a terrifying present where I had been unable to protect him, but I was having to rewrite my future without him. We were never going to buy a house together, have kids together, travel to all the places we had planned to go, or even do routine things like fire up the grill on a beautiful spring evening and sit outside watching the dogs play in the yard. It was too much for me to process. My heart raced. I gasped for breath. I was dizzy and began to get tunnel vision. I sobbed. I managed to get myself home and went to the doctor the next day, having had little break from this hours-long panic attack. A low-dose Xanax later, I was functioning again, but I knew I needed bigger help.
I went to see a psychiatrist, hoping for a more long-term solution. She listened for nearly an hour while I told her my entire life story, culminating in my beloved husband's death. She quickly assessed me, announcing that she would be prescribing a trio of drugs to stabilize my anxiety. After her enumerating their combined side-effects, I refused the prescriptions. Not only did I not want to welcome a host of new challenges into my already challenging situation, I also did not want to numb my pain. My grief was my strongest connection to my husband, and I didn't want to drug it into submission--I only wanted a solution for my anxiety. The psychiatrist shook her head at me and let me know there was no way I would stop having panic attacks on my own, assuring me that I would have them for the rest of my life if I did not start taking medication. I got up and walked out of her office, determined to prove her wrong.
The first thing I did was to welcome my grief. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had been resisting it, causing my panic attacks. When the psychiatrist threatened to take it away entirely, I knew that I needed to feel it, so I did--hard. I would let a Xanax get me through my work day, then I would go home and settle into my grief again: I would put on his favorite hoodie that I'd saved, put on a playlist of his favorite songs that I'd made, and miss him with every cell in my body. I didn't do this every day, but I did it as often as I felt like I needed to, and it started to help. I see now that I was mindfully grieving, but at the time it just felt like surviving.
Having noticed how I felt grief in my body, I began searching for ways to connect more deeply with these feelings so that I could feel better. I rekindled my lapsed yoga practice. I tried to get more sleep and eat in a way that felt good, not just to my tastebuds. I listened to my body, and, when I felt that my grief needed attending to, I spent time with it, welcomed it, and allowed myself to feel all of the feelings that came with it. I stopped needing Xanax to get through the day. Eventually, I decided to up my game and try meditation. I knew little about it as a practice separate from yoga, only that I needed to sit perfectly still in absolute silence and clear my mind while breathing deeply and holding my hands in a particular position, which seemed to be different depending on who was telling me how to do it. I did some online research and read a book, figuring I knew all I needed to at that point, but I didn't know enough to realize I wasn't failing as miserably as I thought. I couldn't sit still, but I didn't know that was OK. I found the silence distracting, but I didn't know that was OK. I could never clear my head, but I didn't know that was OK. I thought there was "a way" to do it, and I never felt like I was doing it right. My anxiety, with nowhere to go, attached itself to whatever was around, in this case to my meditation practice. To help, I took a class, where I learned that all of my assumptions about mindfulness were wrong, allowing me to release my worries and learn to be patient with myself and my practice.
stock image by Ben White Photography
Freed from my anxiety about meditation, I was able to practice with fidelity a few times a week, but the turning point came when my friend Stephanie challenged me to meditate every day in 2017. Always up for a challenge that includes external accountability, I told her I was in. This was the beginning of my daily meditation practice. I have sat for at least a few minutes every day for the last 524 days. I have come back to my body, breathed deeply or just watched my breath, practiced not attaching to the flood of thoughts trying to crowd my head, and remembered to be here, now. I practice walking meditation, have taught whole classes while meditating, eat mindfully (when I remember), and listen to my body. My Reiki practice has allowed me an additional excuse to practice mindfulness, as my sessions are essentially meditation--at the very least, they necessitate my presence and awareness in the moment to best serve my clients. I have learned where in my body my anxiety lives, and I know what it feels like when I starts to bubble up. Instead of grabbing ahold of it and trying to yank it out by the roots, I feel it, breathe into it, and I remind myself to be right where I am, where everything is OK.
Don't get me wrong: I have not eradicated my anxiety, and I still have moments of deep sadness almost 12 years later, but I have not had a panic attack in 11 years. I am not the picture of calmness and serenity, but I have more and more moments in each day when I feel that way and not overcome with worry that some nameless terrible thing will happen to someone I love or to me. I have rebuilt my life, remarried, and am walking my path as a healer. Every day gets a little better as I continue to work to release resistance, and some days are nearly anxiety-free, something that a decade ago I could not have fathomed. I owe it all to mindfulness, though perhaps a little bit of credit needs to go to my stubbornness as well. Never underestimate your power to change your own life, however incrementally. You're absolutely worth the effort.
