Not long after I started meditating, I was persuaded to spend a whole day at it. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly easy. I soon felt trapped in my own body, and since I had decided not to leave—a clear admission of defeat—I sat there wanting to climb out of my skin. My breath shortened. I was sweating in my palms, and all over really. My eyes darted around the room. Occasionally, we got up and walked around, but that didn’t make much difference. Something was going on that was about more than an inability to sit still.
During a break, I talked to the meditation instructor assigned to me, asking why I had these extreme feelings.
“That’s anxiety,” he said.
“What am I anxious about?” I asked, reaching for a lifeline.
“You tell me,” was the reply.
“Great,” I groaned.
As I considered what he said, I started to examine more closely what was happening—both when I was meditating and not. Even though I considered myself a pretty laid-back guy, I was aware that restlessness and anxiety were actually everyday companions. It wouldn’t necessarily be noticeable to anyone on the outside, but inside, man, those wheels were turning. There was a constant sense of anticipation, a subtle worry. I began to see that what presented itself to me as a gnarly ball of thoughts during meditation (on the order of “get me out of here,” “I can’t take it anymore!”) was simply revealing the agitation that was always there, whether in the background or very much in the foreground.
In the days following this first meditation marathon, I peered even more deeply into this experience. My restlessness, it seems, was borne of the fact that I saw lots of time stretching out before me—my entire life, in fact—and I didn’t know how to fill it. Nor did I know what calamities, disappointments, and heartbreaks it might be filled with. You don’t have to get too far along in life for the frailty of human life to be made crystal clear—people die, friendships and loves end, some great hope you had is dashed. By the time I was 25, I had already experienced my father’s sudden death, the “love of my life” had left me (several times), and the career I’d constructed in my imagination didn’t pan out. No wonder the future felt like a sketchy proposition.
Danger Lurking Everywhere
Apparently, the root of the word “anxiety” has to do with constriction and squeezing. They got that right. Anxiety can feel like being gripped or pushed or held down. In my mind’s eye, I see the “giant” Gulliver from the Jonathan Swift novel being tied down by the Lilliputians with hundreds of little ropes. Each of our worries is another Lilliputian manning a rope and a stake. We tug against it, but it pulls tighter.
Just think of all the many ropes these Lilliputians can get you with.
Someone close to you just lost her job. She’s in a lot of pain, scared about the future. So are you. The phone rings, at night. Is it bad news about your mother? Has she been rushed to the hospital?
Just turning on the news can make you anxious. Social unrest, war, environmental degradation; what kind of future lies ahead? And what about the world we’re leaving for our grandchildren? Maybe we should never have brought children into this nightmare…and down the rabbit hole we go.
If you’re like most of us, you can also get crazy anxious about your things. Your bike, clothes, car, house—they’re falling apart, need an upgrade, might get stolen or robbed. Or you get “pocket anxiety,” as a friend of mine calls it: you suddenly start reaching frantically into every pocket and patting yourself down to find your keys, your ID, your boarding pass, your train ticket, your phone. Having our things in place and accounted for makes us feel secure. We’re Boy Scouts, dutifully triple-checking that we have our trusty set of tools before venturing out into the dark and dangerous woods.
One of the worst things about anxiety is that its cause can sometimes be evasive and hidden.
It turns out, the present moment is not automatically a place of rest. It’s tilted slightly forward, perched on the edge of the future.
You wake up in the middle of the night with “free-floating” anxiety. Suddenly here you are, agitated for no reason you can identify, and unable to get back to sleep. Your thoughts turn to what a wreck you will be in the morning. Things go from bad to worse. You try counting sheep. They’re all black.
When faced with all the anxieties that emerge from deep in the mind—whether in broad daylight or in the dark of night—perhaps the best strategy would be to ignore them. When we do that, though, they don’t go away. Rather, it just becomes emotional Whack-A-Mole. The thoughts pop up and we push them down, and eventually they pop up again. Thwack!
That brings us back to meditation, and what it might have to do with anxiety. The aim of meditation is often described as being in the present moment, but we can so easily hear that to mean the present moment is like a vacation destination we can escape to, where we get away from those pesky alternatives: the past and the future. Before you know it, meditation has become a fight to the death, a struggle to set up shop in the present moment and never to stray from there.
As I experienced during that first day of practice, this effort feels anything but peaceful. In fact, it’s common for meditators—new or experienced—to come away from a session thinking, This didn’t make me more peaceful. It made me even more anxious!
We sometimes like to fantasize that life is not precarious and dodgy. But deep down, we know life is shifty.
Meditation itself does not make you anxious. Rather, meditation puts you in touch with what is making you anxious. It puts you in touch with life. And so, as you sit, with no apparent and immediate threats to your safety, the normal barrage of thoughts beginning to slow a bit, your deepest worries float to the surface: will your daughter find a job that pays enough, how mom’s failing health seems destined for a bad outcome, whether you took the pen out of your pants pocket before you started the washer.
It turns out the present moment is not automatically a place of rest. It’s tilted slightly forward, perched on the edge of