Saying Hello To My Ball of Anxiety

Some thoughts on a 5 day silent meditation retreat.

I recently went up to Barre, MA and did a 5 day silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. It was challenging and incredibly rewarding. Here are some thoughts on the experience. (The photo above is of me at 11 years old — sort of pretending to meditate)

Wake up. Run. Eat breakfast. Sitting meditation. Walking meditation. Sit. Drink tea then walk. Sit. Eat lunch. Wash pots in the kitchen. Go for a hike. Sit. Do yoga. Sit. Eat dinner. Sit. Walk. Sit. Drink tea. Chant. Sit. Sleep.

I never looked forward to the sittings. I saw them more as a chore than any thing else. It was always a struggle to sit through 45 minutes. It never got easier (though it did get more pleasant). Towards the end I started counting down. 5 more sittings. 4 more. 3. 2. 1. Phew!

One thing that I noticed while I was sitting was that I really wanted to get lost in thought. When I got lost in a series of thoughts, the time went quicker, and it was all over sooner.

Another aspect of thought was that felt so much better than being in the moment. Far, far more enjoyable. Being lost in thought felt like a warm cocoon floating gently on the softest clouds. The brief moments of awareness, when I came back to my body sitting in the hall, felt harsh, bright, painful. It felt like being flung out on a cliff under a cold, bright, clear day in the arctic. The present moment hurt, a lot.

I’ve always had a really hard time sitting still — as all of my grade school teachers could attest. My mom loves to tell this story about how when I was in first grade my teacher would say that I had no trouble getting my work done — as long as I could be walking around and around my desk as I was doing it. While I was sitting in meditation trying to sit still, I kept thinking about this funny weird game I used to play with myself when I was little: I’d lay in bed on my back for as long as I could, feeling the urge to move grow ever stronger. I’d hold it and hold it, staying as still as possible, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I’d move my body out in every direction.

That’s what meditation felt like at first.

On the second day I had a huge melt down. It was in the morning, towards the end of a 45 minute sit. I was really, really struggling. I couldn’t sit still, my thoughts were all over the place, I was in a ton of pain from the position I was in, I was thinking about how I had 4 more days of this retreat and I was really panicking. I was frustrated in a way that I had never felt before. I felt really helpless. The teacher rang the bell/gong/bowl thing and gave some final parting instructions and as he started talking I felt like I was about to lose it. I really didn’t want to cry in front of everyone in the hall, so I held it in as best I could and when it was time to go I sped out of the hall as fast I could, went back to my room and cried really hard for a good 15 minutes straight. I had never experienced such a violent emotional reaction before — much less without some kind of “obvious” mitigating factor (death, loss, etc). I was crying out of a general, overal feeling of complete frustration. This was new.

It’s interesting because even at that darkest point, I never once thought about giving up. I suppose having my pregnant wife there with me helped — I knew that if I went home, it would mean her going home and I didn’t want to do that to her. But more than that — even when it got as bad as it got — it just didn’t really occur to me to get in my car and drive away. The melt down, perhaps unsurprisingly, helped a lot. I decided that I was just going to stop trying completely. It seems like I had been at one extreme, trying really, really hard to make the process go some way that I thought it was supposed to go. So I just gave up. I stopped trying to sit still — I moved a lot while I was sitting (perhaps much to the chagrin of my more steady-bodied meditating neighbors). I gave my mind permission to wander as much as it wanted — go everywhere and think about everything.

Of course, this helped immensely. I just started to relax. Some moments of clarity came — and I started to really feel all the harsh feelings in my body and emotions. I discovered this tight, thick, dark Ball of Anxiety sitting directly below my rib cage in the center of my body. I can feel it there as I sit here typing this. I’d say it’s present about 85 percent of my day — though since noticing it and sitting with it at the retreat, I’ve felt it softening, melting.

But while at the retreat, that Ball of Anxiety was by far the most noticeable aspect of inhabiting my body. I’d be sitting there, trying to find my “anchor” (the sensation in the body that the teacher described as “neutral or slightly pleasant”, meant to be the thing I would come back to whenever I wound up back in the present moment) but it felt impossible in the face of this Ball of Anxiety. The anxiety was all I could feel. It drowned everything else out.

I’m not sure what I’m anxious about. (pause). On the other hand, I’m anxious about everything. Having a baby. My career. Doing too much. Not doing enough. Bees dying. Climate change. Fracking. Money. Brain aneurysms. I could go on.

I normally keep myself so, so busy and so dizzyingly distracted that I don’t really feel that anxiety. I certainly don’t show it to anyone or talk about it — with the exception of my wife. It’s weird because I think of myself as a really open person, but this Ball of Anxiety has been sitting there for quite sometime and I never acknowledged it — I hid it from myself.

At the retreat, I started to clearly see how the act of getting lost in thought was a way to not feel that Ball of Anxiety. Another way was to fall asleep. The first day and that second morning were completely filled with me falling in and out of sleep during meditation. Once I realized that this was a form escape, I found it easier to identify when I was sleepy because I was actually tired and when it was because I was just trying not to feel. I started taking naps when I really was tired and that helped. I really, really wanted to stay awake because I was sensing that I needed to sit with this anxiety — that it was something really important that I needed to do, and I was in the perfect place to do it.

Another way of staving off sleep was finding different positions to meditate in. I have varying states of back pain, so I started out in a chair — which almost always ended with me sleeping. It was just too comfortable. I moved to a floor pillow and sat cross legged. I still slept. Finally, I saw how other people were on their knees, usually also sitting with either a bench beneath them or a series of pillows and blankets. I settled into a bench. I found that sitting this way was painful in my back, ankles and knees — but manageable. Through experimenting, I found ways of minimizing one or another of these sore spots, but I never got rid of the pain completely. I found that the pain actually helped me stay in the present and even became weirdly enjoyable.

I also just enjoyed the idea of having a very, super specific way of sitting while practicing meditation. This is my posture, this is my position, this is me practicing. It was cool.

While the sits never got any easier, once a) I found my position, b) started to let myself feel the Ball of Anxiety, and c) gave up trying to be a “good” mediator, I found that the moments of awareness felt less and less painful. Even with the Ball of Anxiety still omnipresent. They even started to feel really good. Calming. Expansive. I started to experience a bit of the slower mind that I had always heard about. I was having one thought at a time and then coming back to my body. I could see my thoughts really clearly, name them even and just sort of laugh (sometimes a bit out loud) a the absurdity of some of them. The silence and simplicity of the retreat also contributed to feeling this state of relative quiet in my mind. When you don’t have to worry about talking to anyone else, or even acknowledging their existence, it frees up so much space in your mind.

(Athough eating meals silently in a room full of a 100 other people who are also eating silently always felt a little weird!)

Given that 95% of my day is spent thinking about, posting to, managing my presence on and putzing around the internet, I thought that 5 whole days of being disconnected was going to be really hard. I thought I was going to be so bored. This turned out to be totally false. I had no interest in my phone. I left it in the car and didn’t once feel tempted to turn it on. It was strangely easy for me. As for boredom, the first day felt really, really long, but I never felt bored exactly. I think being in a completely new setting, with completely new stimuli really helped. And once I really started to notice what was going on with myself, all those external distractions seemed irrelevant. This was way more important.

It turned out that the difficult thing on a day to day basis was keeping my words and hands off of my 8-months-pregnant wife! It felt really hard to have her so close, but so far. The idea of not talking to other people on the retreat is all about respecting others desire to be in solitude, and minimizing interactions as much as possible for this reason. I totally get the value of this — the slightest interaction can ripple out with thoughts and emotions in such a big way. But nonetheless, I found it really difficult to leave her alone. I spoke to her once on the first day when I warned her that the walk she was about to go on contained some icy patches in the road. I never went in her room, but occasionally I would peak inside and see what she was up to. I cleaned her dishes after dinner every night. I found myself staring at her across the room in the hall while the teacher was talking. I wanted to feel my boy kick!

In my talks on creativity, one of the things I’m constantly driving home is that the most important thing to do is just show up. Just sit down to write that song, draw the picture, make that cake. Do it every day if you can. Over and over and over. Don’t be concerned with the results — it’s the process that you have to have faith in. The process will always, always yield something worthwhile. The same turns out to be true with meditating. There were about 8 sits a day and I showed up to 7 of them. Everyday. The only one I missed was the 5:45 one — I was outside running instead. But by showing up again and again I started to see clearly some of the stuff I had been unable to see. I started to feel that Ball of Anxiety and just let it know that I know that it’s there — which was enough to help it start melting.

It’s only been about 5 days since the retreat ended, and we just arrived home last night after spending some time in Vermont. I’ve mediated every day — adding meditating to my daily practice. I’m doing my best to integrate what I learned. Here the internet is — still distracting me, still pulling me, still inspiring me, still making me feel jealous and full of rage and excited and connected/disconnected.

And here I am (slightly) more aware and grateful.

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Hi! I’m Jonathan Mann and I’ve been writing a song a day for over 1900 days. Follow me on Twitter: @songadaymann or on YouTube: youtube.com/therockcookiebottom

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