Sitting on the streetcar recently I felt a tightening in my stomach. I breathed into the sensation and recognised it immediately – anxiety. I sat with the sensation, stayed connected to my breath, allowed myself to simply be with the anxiety without attachment or mental drama carrying me away. I attuned to the sensation with openness and curiosity and my attention revealed its source: an Alice in Wonderland feeling I have experienced several times before.
My life for more than a decade has been somewhat nomadic. We move every couple of years to a new city/country/continent and each time I start over again from scratch – I build a new community, make new friends, find new jobs, explore my new surroundings. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, the view before me is sometimes dark, hazy and unclear. I am moving forward but I do not know where I’m going, where or when I’ll land, will there be solid ground when I get to the other side? Sometimes uncertainty can be exciting, exhilarating, filling us with anticipation; other times it can be deeply stressful, even frightening. For me, the trick to managing things like uncertainty is remembering to ground myself in the present moment. I find stillness, I connect to my breath, I listen to my body and the rise and fall of sensation with compassion, with kindness, with a willingness to open myself up to whatever lies ahead.
Fear, anger, anxiety, sorrow – they are as much a part of our experience as joy, love, happiness and peace. Mindfulness pioneer Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn calls it ‘the full catastrophe’, the richness of life and the inevitability of all the challenges and triumphs, joys and sorrows that entails. Mindfulness will not make our challenges magically disappear. What it will do is allow us to look at them head on. When we acknowledge our fear, our anxiety, our uncertainty, we give that experience a name and shine a light on it. In the light of day it begins to lose its power over us. We can observe it from a place of calm curiosity without attaching any particular story, meaning or drama to it. When we attend to ourselves without judgment, in an open and compassionate way, we can learn to accept the full catastrophe, we can even welcome and embrace its highs and lows as an integral part of our extraordinary human experience.