Learning to Meditate Through Difficulty

Stomach churning. Shoulders locked. Fingers trembling. Teeth clenched tight. Heat and cold at once. Agony and panic in the chest, the heart pounding fast and hard. Rage, like a scream rising from the belly. A hard shell of depression wrapped around the skin, protecting the body from the outside world. Thoughts circling and spinning, the same ruminations repeated over and over: "Why am I trapped like this? Will this ever end? Why can't I be more like other people? Why can't I handle this? What's wrong with me? I hate this, I hate this. I'm scared, still scared after all this time. This will never work. I'm never going to get better. It's useless. Useless. Useless!"

I am learning to meditate. Perched on top of a hard square cushion in the corner of my room, trying to pay attention to the movement of my breath, and this is what I'm noticing. It's the same kind of anguish that accompanies every waking hour of the last two and a half years. The fear, the rage, the helplessness. But there's a subtle difference now. I'm beginning to observe these patterns of thought and feeling from a different place, from a place I didn't know existed. Instead of feeling completely caught up in the mental noise, the exhaustion, the tension, I'm starting to observe what's happening. Perhaps not yet with equanimity, as might be possible with enough practice, but at least without feeling that my life is nothing but pain. A bit of space is opening up between "me" and the thoughts and sensations that are arising through "me." Hmm, that's interesting. . .

I've been practicing for a few months now, daily doses of five or ten minutes, as agreed with my meditation teacher. At first, even that seemed like too much. The invitation to experience just a little quietness, and its implicit tolerance for anxiety, was more than I could manage. So we started with mindful tea drinking. My task was to drink one cup a day, paying attention to all the sensations of taste, touch, and smell, and returning to them whenever I noticed my mind descending into tangles of thought while desperately trying to solve the problem of "What's happening to me and why? And what can I do about it?"

What was happening to me? Before depression began, life seemed to be and felt like something very good. In my mid-twenties I was deputy editor of one of Europe's best-selling magazines, having graduated with distinction from what is generally considered a top-tier university. I had good friends, sometimes girlfriends, and the kind of lifestyle that many people my age would have envied. I worked long hours, but that included traveling to fancy hotels in exotic locations to organize photo shoots, attending parties with free drinks, interviewing actors and actresses, sports stars and musicians, and dreaming up ideas for silly stories to amuse young readers. Between games of pool, I'd convince writers to produce the features my colleagues and I had fantasized about on a whim, whatever pleased our cynical and dismissive sense of humor. This was in the late nineties, when men's lifestyle magazines were at the height of their popularity, and there was a kind of thoughtless fun among those who worked in them. But while the free clothes and watches, the glamour and prestige, the careless laughter, the buzz of chasing thrills satisfied a certain surface hunger for pleasure, underneath the surface, my life wasn't so pleasant.

I had a series of romantic relationships, but they rarely lasted more than a few months. I had an apparently fabulous career, but it masked an undercurrent of longing for something more, though I had no idea what that something might be. I often avoided feelings of emptiness and melancholy, as well as vague premonitions of a fearful future. I was lonely, and when the parties ended I tried to keep worry at bay by playing darts, drinking vodka, and watching sports on TV. But the more I tried to fill the days and nights with pleasure, the more darkness hovered at the edges of my mind. Questions about the meaning of existence began to surface, accompanied by nervous rumblings in my gut, especially during rare moments of silence, which I tried to keep to a minimum.

I seemed to function well enough most of the time, surviving on the surface. Only occasionally did the veneer crack, usually after a girlfriend rejected me. Whenever that happened, rage and fear would shoot through my body, along with the sudden rush of a mind screaming in pain, desperately searching for a way out of the suffering. This sudden, frightening automatic reaction would usually last a few weeks or months, during which I barely ate or slept, consumed by obsessive thoughts about how to fix things. The volcano of emotions would eventually subside, sometimes as a result of a new relationship, or resurrecting an old one. Or there might be another form of distraction, perhaps a promotion or a holiday in the sun.

But distractions couldn't solve the problem. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, another budding relationship came to an abrupt end, and this time my escape tactics couldn't divert me from the pain. There was no one new on the horizon. Attempts to throw myself into work projects didn't satisfy; the treadmill of gadgets, models, and childish jokes was beginning to lose its appeal, something in me was asking for heartfelt engagement. A comfortable, flat friendship with an old friend was also coming to an end, and I was secretly afraid of living alone.

Loss of a girlfriend, loss of companionship, loss of professional identity. Combined, it all seemed too much to bear. It was as if I had been tied to a helicopter spinning out of control; my stomach lurched up and down with catastrophic thoughts ("You're going crazy. This is a disaster...") shaking my head in a repeating loop of madness. My muscles froze with terror, my fingers trembled, and my breathing hardened into something shallow.

Seeing no way out, I collapsed. Or rather, the fragile facade I thought was "me" crumbled. After several weeks at work trying to pretend everything was fine, I called in sick, unable to face another week of going to the bathroom every twenty minutes to cry, futilely scolding myself to "get it together." But at home, things only got worse. Now I had all day to lie in bed or pace back and forth, thinking about what was going wrong and how I could fix it. I spent time smoking one cigarette after another, another futile distraction technique, and calling friends, family, and even the Samaritans, hoping someone could offer an antidote to the poison eating me alive. Was I suicidal? No, but I desperately wanted the pain to stop.

It didn't stop for a long time. Over the two and a half years that followed, I made a frantic search to discover the cause of my symptoms and how to rid myself of them. Yet the more I focused on the problem, the worse it became. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't change. I entered therapy, attended support groups, took antidepressants, tried alternative treatments like acupuncture and biodynamic massage, and tinkered with lifestyle changes, moving house or switching friends. I couldn't see that every time I rushed to the next support group, therapy session, or self-help book, I was actually pushing away the peace I wanted. I was trying to force myself into a future state of calm, but the effort itself kept the tension in place. The more I tried to fight or flee from fear and rumination, the more I fed a pattern of aversion, a hatred of the present that made me feel worse, driving me to fight or run even more. No matter what I changed in my external life, no matter what I tried to change in my psyche, I remained stuck in a pattern of resisting the moment. I woke up every morning and went to bed every night depressed, frightened, frustrated, and exhausted.

Finally, in yet another desperate attempt to find happiness, I came to mindfulness meditation. Recognizing that his student was extremely stressed, my first teacher proposed a very gentle regimen. I followed it to the letter and, for the first time since falling into depression, I felt that something might be changing. Of course, the darkness didn't lift immediately, but I could feel my mindset beginning to shift. Instead of always trying to improve a situation through struggle or avoidance, I began to understand that perhaps there was no need for much to happen. Perhaps my challenge wasn't to push forward with courage and determination, but to learn to be with what was happening, to allow anxiety, helplessness, and racing thoughts, rather than trying to push them out of awareness.

And so I continued, first with more cups of mindful tea, then with two, five, ten, or even fifteen minutes of sitting meditation a day. I tried to allow whatever thoughts and feelings were present, using the breath as an anchor to which I could return whenever the mind wandered. I tried to remember that there was no goal, so it was impossible to fail. All I needed to do was return to the breath, with gentleness and patience, noticing what was happening without judgment, seeing the experience as neither good nor bad.

All the other approaches I had tried seemed to be about someone offering a solution or about me learning to fix myself. Here, the view was that nothing was really wrong, so there was no problem to solve. At worst, I was simply confused about how to live well; and the first step out of that confusion was to see how it worked, through the practice of mindfulness.

Mindfulness Practice: Turning Toward Difficulty

When practicing mindfulness, returning focus when the mind wanders, we are training in presence, regardless of whether our experience is pleasant. It's normal to feel some discomfort while meditating, whether physical pain, a difficult emotion, or an unpleasant thought. By gently returning attention to the breath or to the whole body, we learn to work with these experiences wisely, consciously directing attention to a centered place of steady presence, rather than reacting automatically.

And in the practice described below, we take the next step in undoing the habits of attachment and aversion, gently shifting attention toward the unpleasant experience. We practice this by "being with it," neither getting pulled into the stories that drag us into rumination, nor trying to stop or avoid the feeling of what's bothering us. Instead, we move attention compassionately toward the experience. Remember to be gentle. If what comes up feels overwhelming, this may not be the best practice for you right now. When in doubt, seek guidance from an experienced mindfulness teacher.

A Practice for Being With What Is

1) Adopt an upright, dignified, and relaxed posture, and practice mindfulness of the breath for a few minutes. Follow this with a period of mindfulness of the body, opening awareness to bodily sensations as they arise.

2) Do you notice any unpleasant aspect of the experience that is present right now? Are you feeling discomfort or pain anywhere in your body? If so, where? What about difficult emotions? If there are any, ask yourself where they are and what sensations appear. Be aware of any tightness, pressure, restlessness, heat, throbbing, and so on. Bring attention gently to the thoughts in your mind. Are these pleasant or unpleasant? Observe any reaction to sensations or thoughts that arise. Are you tending to pull away from them, get irritated with them, think about them, or are you reacting in some other way? Without buying into them or trying to stop them, simply observe these reactions with kindness and interest.

3) Now, direct your attention to an unpleasant sensation, a region of intensity in the body. It might be a subtle sensation or a more pronounced one. With gentleness, turn the mind's eye toward that area and tune in to what you find there. Allow yourself to feel whatever sensation is there, gently.

You might imagine breathing into the sensation as you inhale and breathing out as you exhale, allowing it to be experienced with the rhythm and flow of your breath. Without trying to change it in any way; simply offer it space to happen. See if you can let go of any attempt to eliminate it or distract yourself from it. Just offer your curiosity, being with it, moment by moment. Is the sensation moving, changing in location, intensity, or quality? Notice any thoughts that arise in relation to the feeling and let them pass into the background of awareness, without trying to follow them or stop them. Stop trying to think your way out of the difficult experience. Just let it be, embracing it as compassionately as you can.

Originally published at Mindful