This morning I was sitting in meditation.  I’d been softening to my experience again and again, opening up, allowing what was there.  Near the end of my sitting time, I was feeling pretty good, open and relaxed.  Then I heard my 13-year-old son get up in the room next door to me. 

Boom! He jumped down from his bunk bed.  Whoosh! He opened his bedroom door.  Thump, thump, thump, he padded into the bathroom, and Clang! lifted the toilet seat.  And bam! Just like that my chest tightened, my heart rate went up, I felt anxious again.

In these new times I have longed even more than before for quiet, for solitude, for stillness.  And I’ve been very supported by those things.  They make me feel better.  My son’s exuberant getting-up noises were not what I wanted in my experience this morning, and my armour quickly went up to protect me from them.  And with that armour, which felt like a reflex, came the fear.  

In the Attadanda Sutta, the Buddha says, “Fear is born of arming oneself.” In my experience up until now, the two have seemed to arrive so quickly, and simultaneously.  I’ve yet to be able to really see the armour coming first.  Sometimes I think that fear is a natural response to something like a sudden noise, and then armour, pushing away, would come after that.

It did occur to me this morning, though, that I wouldn’t have felt fear at my son’s noises had I been longing for something different.  For example, had it been a school day and had I been thinking that he’d better get up soon.  Then I expect the sounds would have been met by relief.  The sudden noises themselves wouldn’t have led to fear, I don’t think, had they not been preceded by the armour.

I’ve started wondering if I can apply this teaching to my overall experience with this new world we find ourselves in.  Anxiety has been a frequent companion of mine over these past couple of weeks, so I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with it and getting to know it a bit better.  It’s interesting to see how it moves and changes, what makes it tick. 

One thing that’s become clear is that my pushing away of my actual experience makes the anxiety stronger.

One of the areas where I’ve experienced a lot of anxiety lately is regarding food.  I got a new cookbook a couple of months ago and I’ve been making all my family’s dinners from that book.  I’ve really been enjoying it.  I’ve always ordered our groceries online, and I’ve happily been ordering whatever we need for those recipes I want to make.

Two weeks ago I went to place my regular order on a Monday, and you won’t be surprised what I found — no delivery slots for two weeks.  This was not what I wanted to see.  How would I make my good recipes? Over the next week I went to local shops nearly every day, trying like mad to find the ingredients that would make me happy.  With every empty shelf I saw, much as I tried to suppress it (because really, how embarrassing), I felt a bit more fear.

The empty shelves are not what I want to see.  The fear arising as I see the empty shelves is not what I want to feel.  I’m sure other things are also playing into my food anxiety, like the “contagion” of the fear I sense around me when I’m at the shops.  But the more I look at it, the more I notice that the pushing away of my experience, the not wanting what actually is, is a big contributor to my anxiety.  The armour is preceding the fear.  

So how can I dis-arm?  Not by wishing away or suppressing anything apparently — that’s just more armour!  What has helped me feel less anxious lately is simply softening toward my experience, WHATEVER it is.  Absolutely whatever it is.  Often that has meant softening toward fear.  Allowing it, greeting it as I might greet a scared friend.  

Softening toward the armour too.  It’s trying to do a good job.  

Something about the consistent softening is reassuring — something about learning more and more deeply, through experiencing it, that it’s really OK.  Whatever the world’s like, whatever I’m like, whatever I experience, it will be accepted.  I will be accepted, I will be treated with kindness. 

Rachel Woodburn