Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Ancient Solutions for Anxiety

In the Buddhist tradition, the first step on the path to enlightenment is recognizing that suffering is an unavoidable part of life. This is a lesson that I have had a hard time learning. We want to believe that we are one right step away from a life free from pain and insecurity. I do, at least. I remember reading about Buddhism as a student in undergrad. It sounded depressing. And maybe it is a depressing idea that life will always  have suffering. But maybe its also true. 

Learning about Buddhism for a second time, it hit me how very true it is that life is always drawing me back into the suffering, into what the Buddhists call the samsara.  

Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham describes samsara as the wheel that is endlessly spinning. It is a circle of illusion in which we are always being brought back to the same struggles and pains. We believe that life progresses in a line towards improvement but samsara is always bringing us back to the beginning again.

Mipham asks you to imagine that your mind is a bowl of water. Our thoughts are the steam rising off the top. To take the metaphor a step further, as the water heats, and the molecules speed up, more steam begins rise.

This is just how anxiety feels. A boiling mind that won’t slow down. You don’t want to be thinking about anything, but slowing the tide of worries and dissatisfactions seems like an impossibility. It always feels as if you are one change away from things being right, but you never seem to reach the imagined place of satisfaction and security. 

To free ourselves from anxiety, we must learn to slow down and stop the churning mind. You cannot will boiling water to stop producing steam. You must take it away from the heat. You must let it cool, settle, and release energy.

Similarly we cannot simply stop a mind in its tracks. We must take it off the heat. We must allow it to settle, to cool, to release energy. To do this, we must take our minds away from the activity and bustle of our everyday lives. While we will always get sucked back into the day to day suffering of samsara, we can allow ourselves a gap. A space where we needn’t pay attention to our thoughts because there is no urgent necessity pulling for action. This is the purpose of meditation. To create a gap. To take the pot off the stove and let heat vent. To remember that we can be still - even if its just for a moment.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Getting Older, Getting Happier

People like to complain about getting old. I’m 25 and all my friends have been doing it for ages. It started to really stick out at 20, when all my friends complained that they were leaving teenage-hood behind but where still woefully unable to buy alcohol. At 22 crises began to emerge that there were “no good birthdays left” and suddenly people stopped talking so much about age. It wasn’t really in good taste to keep counting.
People like to blame all kinds of things on age; bad memory; achey limbs; wandering into a room only to find you have no no idea why you went in there. If there is one thing that stands out as a universal truth of pop culture, it’s that nobody wants to get older.

Still -- psychologists report that people actually get happier with age. For me, this has been incredibly true.

The older I get, the better my life seems to get. I find myself with new skills and talents, I never thought I would possess. Practice suddenly makes sense as I can finally see the rewards of so many repeated iterations of the same task. I have gained information. I have gained wisdom. I have gained friends and networks.

The older I get, the more knowledgeable I become. This is true in my areas of research, but also in other areas of life, where I have finally lived long enough to meaningfully comment. I am better at making friends. I am better at taking care of myself. I am better at negotiating relationships.

In undergrad, I spent some time playing Dungeons and Dragons. In D&D, and similar role-playing games, characters level. As they act, fight, cast spells, and complete tasks they gain new abilities and increase in power. Games like this have been designed to reflect our ability to grow and improve - simply by striving for our goals. I use the leveling metaphor everywhere in life. When things get challenging and you have to push hard to keep going, remember that you are leveling. When the encounter has ended, and you are catching your breath, remember to check your experience points. They have probably gone up. While aging can be challenging, we shouldn’t ignore the perks, and getting happier, more skilled and more powerful is definitely a perk.