It occurred to me about 48 hours into my 8 day silent retreat that I had probably made a mistake. My father had died just 2 weeks before, and here I was on my first ever silent retreat, in a place I’d never been, with a spiritual director I’d never met, surrounded by strangers, in a religious tradition that was not my own. I felt very far from home. My general approach on the spiritual journey is to try to meet whatever arises with love. When I first heard my dad had died, and a wave of grief arose, I was able to meet it with love, watch it move through me and eventually ebb. I could be present to that feeling with compassion for myself, and just observe it as it came and went. But 2 days into my retreat, I just couldn’t find that loving feeling. I tried all my usual practices and approaches. Finally I remembered a suggestion from a podcast I listen to a lot called “bliss and grit;” sometimes on the spiritual journey you meet anxiety, and anxiety needs to be addressed separately from the regular search for clarity and meaning. Anxiety arises when our amygdala, the part of our brain evolved to help us locate threats and fight or flee, has been activated. What does it feel like your amygdala is firing? It can feel physical- heart beating, blood pressure increasing, muscles tensed. More subtle is the effect on our thinking- it can feel like your mind is running in circles trying to find the solution to an unsolvable problem. It can feel like there is no space for clarity and objectivity. It can feel like a knot that gets tighter the more you fuss with it. Emotions like sadness or happiness on their own have a natural ebb and flow, even when they are big, even when they are painful. But anxiety seems to grow and take over once it gets turned on.
An anxious mind wants to find a tiger to run from. Reason and logic will not convince your amygdala that there is no tiger, because once anxiety and fear are triggered, real physical effects on the body are also triggered. So when anxiety rises, it’s not just the mind that needs to be convinced, we need to remind the body what it feels like to be safe. The two best ways to do this I know are to breathe and to ground.
I’m going to offer you a few techniques for this today. Let me assure you that everything I offer today is totally optional. If you have a history of trauma or PTSD in your life, please do whatever you need to do to feel safe, and let me know later if you need a referral to a professional who works with trauma. Today while we all (hopefully) feel like we are in a relatively safe space I invite you to practice and experiment. I invite you to notice if any of these practices resonate with you, and take whatever is useful, so that the next time we feel triggered we might remember them.
First we turn to the breath. Just notice your breath, in, and out. Don’t try to change it, just notice, in and out.
Now see if you can allow the breath to slow down. To receive a deeper breath.
If you like you can put your hand on your belly and feel it rise and fall. Gently.
Now let’s try grounding. When we get triggered it is often because we are worried about the future, or because we are replaying something difficult that happened in the past. So the advice from people who work with anxiety is to arrive in the present. If we notice our minds spinning in the future or the past, we can ground ourselves in the present moment. We can simply say, silently to ourselves, our name, and where and when we are. I’m Darcey Laine, it is Sunday May 12 and I’m at church.
then we begin to notice what is around is
- 5 things you can see
- 4 things you can touch
- 3 things you can hear
- 2 things you can smell
- 1 thing you can taste
Just notice. How does it feel now?
Breathe in and out.
Another grounding technique I really like is to notice all the parts of the body that are resting on the ground; the souls of the feet on the floor, the back of the thighs on the chair. Feel the support of the floor, of the chair. Really give your weight to those surfaces. Allow them to hold you.
If you are in a private place when doing this, you can just lay down, and feel the floor, or your bed holding you, supporting you.
Notice your breath. In and out. Notice the way those surfaces support the breath...
So there I was, on the retreat that was a probably a big mistake, breathing and grounding. I had many days left in my retreat, I was far from home, so what was I going to do about it? “This is hard, I need help!” I declared. I realized I had brought with me some expectations of what a brave spiritual warrior would do, and maybe it was time to let them go. I decided I was going to use every crutch I
knew. First I got out my colored pencils and made a sign that said “breathe and ground” and put it up in my room where I could see it. I was going to stop reading my scary Buddhist book about non-being and sit under a blanket reading my nice science fiction novel with a mug of warm peppermint tea. I was going to do whatever I needed to do to restore a baseline sense of safety in my own mind and body, even if I felt a bit foolish doing it. Fortunately in this retreat center, almost every arm chair had a blanket folded over the back of the chair as if I was not the first person to face some difficult things in that sanctuary. One particularly cozy nook was a sun-room with a beautiful view of the sunrise, and a particularly cozy wool blanket. As I sat in the sun-room looking at a beautiful statue of Mary holding a small child, I remembered what it was like to hold my son when he was that age, how precious he was to me. Maybe I needed to call on that mothering energy that comforted us when we were small and is still available to us our whole lives. The energy of compassion. The energy of love. This compassionate energy is so helpful as we meet what arises. This compassionate energy is available to us when whenever we realize that we are not really in control of our lives. We need compassion to meet the places in ourselves that feel weak, that feel powerless, To ask for help and then be open to receiving it. That was the promise I made to myself as I folded the blanket and headed off to breakfast, that I would be open to help, because I didn’t want to do this alone. As I walked to the cafeteria, a woman I had sat with at dinner gestured me aside- she had a quart of fresh organic strawberries, and offered them to me. My first thought was to decline- she only had a quart to get her through the whole week, but as a symbol to myself that I was going to accept help from everywhere and anywhere it came, I took the strawberry, and I felt loved.
When the soul grows, when it is in transition, it is like a caterpillar in the chrysalis. It is like a crab casting off the old shell and emerging soft and vulnerable in its soft new shell. To be that open and vulnerable, a sense of fundamental trust is a prerequisite. The soul grows best when held with compassion, and is reminded that it is never alone. Here I was in a warm, dry place whose entire mission was to be a safe place for the work of the soul. It was up to me to receive that, to allow that.
Easier said than done. So let’s try something else together. Return to your breath. In and out. Feel yourself in this time and place
feel yourself held by the chair and the floor
Remember, the main job of this building and this community is to hold you, to hold us, and to give us space to grow spiritually.
Now I invite you to call to mind someone or something who is easy to love. Maybe you are lucky enough to have a brand new grand-baby. Who is easy for you to love? A cat? Your faithful dog? a dear friend? Call to mind any time in your life when you have felt love for someone- and see if you can remember the texture of that feeling. [pause]
Could you meet yourself from that place when you are hurting? Could you allow some of that tenderness and compassion for yourself?
[pause]
Sometimes the answer to that question is going to be “no.”
Sometimes we are too angry, too hurt, too frightened to remember that kind of tenderness.
That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Go back to the breath, in and out. Just breathe and ground.
Whatever feeling is arising, just meet that with the breath, in and out.
[pause]
Let’s try something else.
Hold your fists in front of you. clench them as hard as you can.To open a clenched fist you are allowing the muscles to soften, just a little bit. Could you soften just that much around whatever difficult thing you are holding?
Now allow them to open.Shake your hands out a little bit if they still feel clenched.
When I was on the retreat, each time I could soften even a minuscule amount I imagined giving myself a gold star. Then I was judging myself that that was dorky, so I decided to give myself a gold star for allowing myself to be dorky. Eventually I marched myself down to the art cabinet and chose a nice gold pen and drew myself a whole bunch of gold stars- which was so dorky that I started cracking myself up. Eventually I was laughing so hard I had to go outside so I wouldn’t disrupt the other silent retreatants. It turns out it’s hard to be anxious when you are laughing that hard. That day of breathing and grounding and finally meeting myself with compassion, that was an important turning point for me.
But I wanted to remember and make a map of my path out of anxiety so that when I get stuck in that place again, I would have an escape route. So I encourage you now to consider- when you are anxious, what helps you find a doorway out of that constricted space? What simple instructions would you give yourself?
My map is pretty simple
Breathe
Ground
and breathe and ground
until we can
Meet whatever arises with compassion
*This title comes from the great Science Fiction classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which features a fictional electronic travel encyclopedia by the same name with the words "Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."
No comments:
Post a Comment