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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.
