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.