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| Image description: A small Buddha figurine seated among smooth stones and green plants. Photo by simardfrancois on Pixabay. |
When I was a child, I had no word to describe what anxiety was.
I knew that anxiety meant being nervous. I heard growing up that "Everyone gets anxious sometimes." and "It's normal to be a bit anxious."
But I had no words to describe the monster that lurked over my shoulder, ready to strike without warning.
I would be invited to a friend's birthday party. There would be cake, balloons, games, laughter. I couldn't wait to go.
Then suddenly, I would be sick. Horrible pains would seize my stomach, making me cry out in pain. Nauseated, I would run to the bathroom... again, and again, and again. I would feel dizzy. I would sweat. I would see black spots swarming in front of my eyes, and I would slump to the floor gasping for breath. All I wanted was to crawl into my bed, close my eyes, and rest.
My mom would pick up the phone. "I'm so sorry, Hannah won't be able to make it today. She's feeling sick."
Then she would tuck me into bed, bring me a drink, and offer some noodle soup or toast, which I always refused. When the sickness came on me, I couldn't even be in the same room as food.
Family trips became a torture. As much as I loved to travel, and have fond memories of visiting different provinces, a lot of my time was spent shivering by the roadside, sobbing as my stomach tried to rebel against whatever mouthful or two I'd managed to force down. My mom holding a raincoat over my head, holding a wad of tissues, offering comfort as best she could.
Finally, fearing something was wrong, they took me to a doctor. I was poked and prodded, sent to a neighboring hospital for an ultrasound. The ultrasound technician was overly hearty, and I inwardly squirmed, stoic on the outside as always. Even at the age of ten, I hated being talked to like I was a baby, and I could always tell when adults were being patronizing.
Test results came back clear: my parents and I heaved signs of relief.
"She probably just has anxiety," the doctor mused by way of explanation.
It didn't compute to me. Anxiety was the nervousness I felt before taking an English test. It wasn't the bone-jarring, stomach twisting sickness that would strike out of the blue whenever a routine would be changed or I was required to try something new.
But, seeing as there was nothing we could do, I learned to live with it.
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| Image Description: Wooden Scrabble tiles spelling out the word "Anxiety". Photo by WOKANDAPIX on Pixabay |
As a child, my family were churchgoers with one station on our rabbit-eared TV. So it was exciting when we bought a satellite dish, and found a plethora of Christian stations featuring prominent televangelists.
I was always a "good" child, very pious and eager to keep from displeasing God in any way. As an undiagnosed Autistic, I frequently developed intense interests and rituals around things that made me feel safe, and church was one of those things. Of course, these important men with three-piece suits, gold cuff links, smooth voices, educated views, and congregations numbering in the thousands, must be very close to God. With the innocent faith and trust of many Autistic people, it never occurred to me that people could lie, or be manipulative for their own gain. It certainly never crossed MY mind to do so, and I couldn't fathom anyone else doing so. So I took everything these preachers said at face value, and gobbled up every word they said.
"Jesus can heal sickness!" A preacher boomed. "You just have to ask!"
I listened attentively. So here then, was the answer! I simply had to ask, and my sickness would be gone!
Childlike, I wrote down my petition and tucked it away, thinking that if it was written down, maybe God could see it better and He would be sure not to forget.
And I waited.
And nothing happened.
"It's not enough to just ask," another preacher droned. "You must have FAITH."
"Faith," I said to myself, nodding wisely. I could do that. I would pray more. I would try, again, to start the habit of reading the Bible every day. That would show God I have faith.
And still, I clung to the toilet a few days later, stomach heaving.
"It doesn't require much faith," another white-coated speaker crooned. "Jesus said you just need faith 'as a grain of mustard seed'."
My mom had mustard seeds in her kitchen. They were extremely tiny.
Well, I reasoned, if THAT'S all the faith it takes, surely I have that much? But why am I still sick?
"The Children of Israel gave sacrifices!" a black-suited preacher yelled, waving his arms. "How can you expect God to give to you if you never give to Him?"
A-ha! Now here was something I could do! I counted out my precious coins that I been saving for years. The preacher said if I gave a "seed gift" I would be healed. Confidently, I sent my gift away, and waited. Any day now, I was sure. Any day.
"Claim your healing!" A jovial pastor exclaimed cheerfully. "Next time you have a cold, don't say, 'I'm sick', say 'I'm healed in Jesus' Name'!"
"I'm healed... I'm healed... I'm healed in Jesus' Name... I'm not sick, I'm healed..." I lay down in the middle of the bathroom floor and wondered if this would be the day the pain would finally kill me. "If I die, at least I'll be in Heaven with Jesus."
Or would I?
"Sickness is of Satan!" A preacher glared, with fiery eyes and voice. "You need to tell the devil to get behind you!"
My stomach lurched in protest. Did I have a demon? Is that why I was still sick? But if I had a demon, how did it get there? And how did I get it out?
Slowly, I became convinced that I must secretly be an awful person. I was full of sin and evil and absolutely worthless without God, just like the preachers said. If I wasn't healed, then it must be my fault. They insisted that Jesus WANTED to heal me, and if He didn't, it meant I either didn't have enough faith, or I wasn't trying hard enough.
Slowly, as I grew older, seeking healing from anxiety became an obsession... that ironically, caused me to spiral deeper into anxiety.
Every time I found myself on the bathroom floor at 2 in the morning, I would run through all the reasons I wasn't healed. I would babble Bible verses on healing until they lost all meaning. I would frantically confess every sin I could think of and even a few I don't think I'd ever committed, just to be sure. I would promise to read my Bible more. I would yell at the devil and tell him to get out. I would spend hours on my knees in prayer, hopeful that maybe THIS time, God would see the sacrifice I was making, and find it in His heart to heal me.
Because, you see, God is perfect. And compassionate. And merciful.
So if I wasn't healed, it was all my fault.
All... my... fault.
I became twisted. I became so obsessed with my own guilt and shame that I could hardly hold my head up in public. I was so evil that even God wanted nothing to do with me. If people knew that I was such a bad person that God refused to heal me, they would want nothing to do with me.
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| Image Description: A backlit hand reaching up towards the light. Photo by Jackson David on Pixabay. |
Looking back, I wish I had never even heard of televangelists. Their well-meaning words, their sermons on healing, their advice that varied from day to day and station to station, almost succeeded in completely destroying the little bit of self-esteem I had left.
And then one day, I just.... gave up.
I was tired of yelling at the sky, at a God who apparently wanted nothing to do with me, and I gave up. Nothing I could do would induce Him to answer me anyway, so why even bother?
People think that leaving Christianity is a "crisis of faith." For me, my whole entire life was the crisis, and I was finally seeking escape from the madness.
Because at this point, I was tired.
The day I walked out of church and swore that I'd never go back, was also the day I was sure I could feel invisible chains snapping. Fetters falling off me. For the first time in my life, I felt truly free from the control. I felt like I could breathe.
Oh, there was so much more that drove me from Christianity. It wasn't just that I was never healed from what I knew, by that point, to be debilitating anxiety. If it was only that, I would never have left. I would have found a way to hang on, even then.
There is so much more to my story than that. I could write pages and pages and pages and never even come close. But this isn't the day for that.
I want to share, what finally helped to set me on the path of healing.
Therapy helped, of course. I learned to recognize anxiety for what it was, and better, to recognize what my triggers were.
But I was still floundering.
Even as a Christian, I had often joked that if I wasn't a Christian, I'd probably be a Buddhist. Something about their peaceful serenity called to me... me, a now almost 30 year old woman with a brain that seemed full of bees at the best of times. I now knew that I was Autistic, of course, which was a full journey to self-acceptance in itself, but I still wanted something more.
I wanted peace.
The peace I had been promised in Christianity, but which proved to be so very, very conditional. Peace, but only if you do this. Peace, but only if you give more. Peace, but only if you pray more. Peace, but only if you talk to God more.
Peace, that you had to fight for.
So, having decided that Christianity was no longer in the cards for me, and now with the freedom to explore any religion I chose, I decided to look into Buddhism a little deeper. I knew I wasn't willing to become a vegetarian, and I had no desire to join a monastery (although, to be fair, days spent in the mountains far away from people, chanting and being at one with nature, sounded pretty close to my idea of Heaven) but I wanted to know exactly what it was they taught and believed, and how exactly they obtained the peace they seemed to have so freely.
As I listened to different teachings by different people, I stumbled across a man by the name of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher. His warm smile, gentle humor, and soft-spoken ways appealed to me. Also, the fact that he, too, suffered severe and isolating panic attacks as a child, helped me connect with him immediately.
Mingyur Rinpoche explained that he asked his father, a great meditation teacher, to teach him to meditate in an effort to stave off his frequent panic attacks. As he was meditating, he would continue to experience panic attacks. He would mutter, "Go away, panic, I'm meditating!"
I chuckled and nodded when he told that story. It sounded like the Tibetan Buddhism version of "Get thee behind me Satan," that I learned as a child.
It was the advice that Mingyur Rinpoche gave next, however, that made my ears perk up with interest. He explained that after receiving advice from his father, he sat down to meditate the next day. And this time, when the inevitable panic attack occurred, he simply smiled and said, "Hello, panic. Welcome."
It seemed mind boggling to me that something so simple could work, but I tried it.
The next time I faced an anxiety attack at 2 in the morning, I inhaled.
And exhaled.
And inhaled.
The pain was intense, but familiar to me. It would pass. It always had. I was not a bad person.
I observed with interest what my body was doing. I noted the racing heart, the nausea, the clammy skin, the twisting stomach, with the calm and detached air of a doctor observing a patient's symptoms.
And for the first time, I didn't panic over my panic.
I was not a terrible person for experiencing sickness. I had not failed. I was not dying. God was not sending me to hell for some mistake that I was unaware I'd made, or for not being pious enough. I was no longer wracking my brains for whatever terrible thing I thought or said or did last week that could possibly be causing this, or silently cursing my ancestors for the "generational sin" that was causing me to wail in pain because my great-great-great grandfather smoked a pipe.
And I smiled.
"Hello, panic. You are here again. You are familiar to me... I know you well. But I am not afraid of you this time."
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| Image Description: The cupped hands of a Buddhist monk, folded in his lap. His is wearing an orange robe. Photo by kalyanayahaluwo on Pixabay. |
And then, I laughed. So simple... so very simple. I had been fighting my panic for years... but when I welcomed it, when I made friends with it, when I accepted it in my life and sat with it to listen to what it had to tell me... it left.
Not completely, of course. There are days that it still creeps in. But now I no longer beg and cry and blame and quote verses and make rash promises and beat myself up.
Now, I just smile and say, "Hello, panic, old friend. Here you are again, for a short time. You are here because I am human... but you will soon leave again."
And it always does.
Because it's always better to make peace with your enemy; sometimes, in fighting your enemy, you end up destroying yourself in the process.
And that is how Buddhism saved my life in a week, after more than twenty years of struggling.
