Writing & anxiety
At a meditation retreat recently I discovered that even when all sorts of events were going on in my body and mind—physical pain or tension, intrusive thoughts, uncomfortable emotions—I could inhabit a place of stillness, where I was aware of these things but unaffected by them. To get to that place, though, I had first to experience fully each disagreeable detail. This was new: I realized that previously I’d let my mind jump away from the really unpleasant sensations. Plus, instead of accepting their presence enough to get that complete experience, I’d been very subtly trying to get rid of them.
- Example: constant tension at the base of my throat, most intense during the pause between the out breath and the in breath. My mind would fly out through that little gap and start generating thoughts. But as I made the effort to track every single moment of the out-pause-in sequence, the stillness appeared.
"Anxious face," photo by Wrote
What’s the connection with writing? Think of the unpleasant events that go on while you’re trying to write—like anxiety. As noted before, I learned a long time ago that being anxious about writing something doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It means you do it while you’re anxious. I may use my trick of pretending I’m just doing a first draft that doesn’t count. Or I simply summon up some determination and grit my teeth. In either case the anxiety becomes like those distracting body/mind events: I can coexist with it while staying focused on the job at hand.
The key is to change how you relate to the presence of anxiety: instead of feeling victimized by it, or making heroic efforts to ignore it, make peace with the fact that it exists. It’s just there. So?
A great benefit of meditation practice is learning to handle negative emotions. One teacher I sat with remarked, “If you’re not afraid to feel a feeling, there’s nothing else it can do to you—it has no power over you.” It’s very liberating to find that these mood states—fear, anger, whatever—don’t have to control you. For sure they’re unpleasant, but that’s all.
September 8th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Interesting. I realize that mistakes I’ve made in writing–such as not going deep enough during a revision–resulted from the avoidance of anxiety. Really grappling with the material was uncomfortable so I convinced myself I didn’t have to go there.