In which I indulge in shameless autobiography in an effort to suggest to those whose suffering comes from inside themselves that I used to suffer a lot, and now suffer less.

I always thought meditation sounded dumb. Like, really dumb. How on earth could sitting and focusing on your breathing do effing anything? I had plenty of experience with people telling me that when I’m upset, I should take a deep breath, or count to 10, or any of that other nonsense, and it seemed like trying to stop a gale force wind with a blade of grass. Totally inadequate to meet the needs of my personal crisis. And with a deep breath being the only suggestion on offer, and it never seeming to help, that only reinforced my sense that my emotional life was beyond help – that nothing would help, and I was just stuck with inner torment. 

What no one ever really explained to me is that one way to think of meditation is to use it proactively and preventatively. Lots of meditation teachers can advise on the preventative benefits of meditation, and my experience has been that it establishes a much higher threshold for stress – I can tolerate a lot more upset because I’ve been building up my prefrontal cortex or whatever the brain scientists say is happening in your brain when you meditate.

As a crisis response, admittedly, taking breaths feels woefully unhelpful if you don’t know much about relating to your breathing. A regular meditation practice, when things are good and relaxed and not scary, builds a safe place over time. When you’ve built a safe place, and know how to get there within the space of just a breath or two, then you really do have an effective crisis response. The parallels to exercise are many, and here’s one: If you’re having a heart attack, you don’t go for a run. But if you’ve been jogging a long time, the idea is you’ll have fewer heart attacks, and if you do have one, your heart will be stronger and you may be more likely to survive.  

I came to meditation skeptically, and with the gift of desperation. I’ve always been a stress case. If I could worry about it, I would – and obsessively. I was a ruminator. If it had the hook of being something I could feel bad about, I would stew and stew on those negative thoughts. That was a feature of my entire life. 

In 2018, I’d had a job for the past couple of years that I considered extremely stressful. In a lot of ways, it was not that stressful – I was on the phone listening to people complain, and trying to help them through a crisis, not experiencing a crisis myself. But I was ill-suited to it, and poorly equipped, and we were understaffed, and I second-guessed my every move. I was wearing my stress on my face, running around the office looking every day like I was about to be deposed in a massive lawsuit. Strangers in the elevator asked if I was okay – I had Resting Worry-Face. It started to become a job performance issue – in every coaching conversation I had with my lovely and well-meaning boss, she would express concern for how stressed I seemed all the time. She would try to reassure me that I was doing a good job and didn’t need to be fearful, but my stress continued despite her best efforts.

Finally, seeing that pretty much her whole team was succumbing to stress, my boss got us access to Mindful Life for the workplace. In it were recordings of a very short meditation, and a 10-minute meditation. I was so desperate, and so devoid of any other ideas for what might help, that I resolved to do these stupid meditations. Much as I thought it was dumb, this was literally the only thing anyone had ever suggested that might help. I was suffering. I had nothing to lose. 

So I acted as if, as they say in the recovery community. I acted as if it would help. And dammit, it did. Being able to focus on the meditation instructions, instead of my racing thoughts and self-doubt, was a welcome relief from the mental hamster wheel. After a while, I started playing around with it – when I was too wound up to meditate with the recording, I would breathe in “Calm,” visualizing the hot sparking thoughts washed over with cool water, and breathe out, “Stress,” imagining that I was blowing out all that intensity from the day. Minutes of this every day started to create that safe space. Relief from stress and anxiety – I would not have thought it possible, but here it was. It was very welcome.

The relief was reason enough to keep it going. Given the small investment and exceptional returns, it was easy to keep momentum. But the strongest test was when my beloved cat Barnacle Pete died in August of 2019 after a short and sudden illness. I’ve lost pets before, and it’s always been a sh!tshow. Usually my coping involved lots of drinking. I had a good amount of sobriety at that time, and much to my surprise, I had only a modest struggle (not a mighty struggle) to stay sober. I handled his loss with healthy sadness and appropriate grieving, for once in my freakin’ life.

So I started meditating for momentary relief from racing thoughts (worked), and ended with a much-expanded capacity for managing even very difficult feelings (worked even more). I meditated, and handled things better. I suppose some may doubt that it’s meditation that has brought all these changes on, or may, as I did, doubt whether the same change is possible for them. Does correlation equal causation here? I have only two pieces of evidence: Lots of people smarter than me say it works. Also, I’m suffering a lot less now that I did before I started meditating. I know, it seems like nonsense, but if it does for you half what it did for me – well, I am very grateful to be doing so much better.