I joined a mindfulness meditation group put on by an anxiety clinic. The clinic itself seems to be overwhelmed with demand for psychotherapy. But this free weekly class only has one or two participants. This suggests an underutilized path to getting the help and connection that people need so badly nowadays.

The leader

The leader is a smart, gentle psychology intern. She welcomes you in and offers tea. She reminds me of the hosts of the Anxiety Slayer podcast: calm and methodical, and ready to bring precise tools to bear in cutting off the head of anxiety and hacking at the limbs.

We sit. We walk. We hear a poem.

For the practice we sit through a guided meditation. This might involve a body scan, a visualization or a sustained focus on the breath. It lasts 20-30 minutes.

We get up and do a walking meditation and quietly pace in a circle around the room.

We sit again for a loving-kindness meditation and send thoughts of peace and compassion to a loved one, and then extend that to ourselves and to the world. Sometimes in life you yourself are the person you extend the least compassion to.

I brought my own cloth square to sit on. I like to follow Job Kabat-Zinn’s advice to get on the floor at least once a day.

The leader reads a poem, something for us to contemplate after so much wordlessness. I can’t call it silence, because the windows are open to Seattle’s Third Avenue, where crazed mentally ill drug addicts, sirens and deadly shootings are frequent. The class is free, but somehow I have access to it and those badly suffering people do not.

We have several minutes at the end to voice our own thoughts and reactions

I always share my gratitude up front and at the end to the organizer.

Covid has been going on for so long and I never want to use Zoom again. When I attend an in-person group like this that’s been on hold, I thank the organizer for helping people get what they need: connection, exchange, shared experiences.

I am there to help with my social anxiety. When we discuss, I avoid the temptation to soothe my own anxious brain by filling each moment with more talk. When there is a pause, I take a deep breath and let others think, speak, or do nothing at all.

My desire to make my meditation practice NOT a solo pursuit

I read, write, walk nature paths, and look at birds. I do not need any more solitary pursuits. As I try to better understand the mind, I want others alongside me to hasten my learning and share discoveries. It’s possibly I can even help them.

The monkey brain versus the elevated perspective

There is an automatic, wandering part of the mind that goes elsewhere, follows tangents, generates stories and frequently dominates one’s experience. I shared my appreciation for the Buddhists’ humorous name for this: they sometimes call it “monkey brain.”

I like this label, and I also like the elevated perspective outlined in the book, “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life” and “Why Buddhism is True”: the human mind is extremely powerful and sophisticated, but its automatic verbal relations can lead to suffering if we don’t practice awareness of this thought machinery. I have great respect for the automatic categorizing, predicting, explaining, comparing, worrying and judging. But I want to be aware of these processes and judge from a critical distance whether those processes are useful. Meditation helps me do that.

The evolutionary perspective gives you deep appreciation for the power of the human mind and an equal appreciation for how it can be turned on itself with maladaptive results. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy takes evolution into account and links it to the best of the meditative traditions.

Physical discomfort from sitting

When sitting for half an hour, physical discomfort can arise. When this comes up, you have a choice on how to respond. Consciousness itself does not get anxious or tired or pained. This points to the inherent choice and freedom of consciousness. Viktor Frankl described how the inner choice of how to react is there even when in impossible circumstances. A small thing such as my leg slowly going numb while sitting leads me to reflect on this kind of supreme freedom, one of many pearls that can come up in a half hour of practice.

Labeling psychological content

The most useful and powerful thing I have learned is simply to label psychological content. When I sit for half an hour, it’s amazing what the mind serves up. I travel back in time to distant regrets. I travel forward in time and plan my day, my week, my life. All automatically and before realizing it. I find I can now label a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and a memory, whereas previously this kind of experience would fog over me in a diffuse cloud without awareness.

I especially like the nature metaphors: I like when the leader suggests we sit by the stream of thought and watch the leaves drifting past, without grasping after them or assuming they say something true about us. I picture sitting in a deep forest next to a small stream and watching these leaves with writing on them. One might be a painful memory from work, another might be a regret over my latest online dating rejection, another might be a worry about a call I need to make, and another might be a painful self-judgement about why it’s so difficult for me to make a simple call. I watch each leaf and I slowly develop the skill of cognitive defusion, where I employ the detachment I so value elsewhere in life by acknowledging the thought without being the thought.

I love ACT and pursuing a practice

It led me to meditation and a values-driven life. It instructed me in moving toward valued goals with thoughts, memories and feelings of failure, conflict, disappointment and pain. It has helped me confront my life’s central pattern of avoidance, to stop reinforcing this pattern and to replace it with a deliberately chosen path.

Everything I need for my meditation practice is in “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Everything I need to abandon the futile war with psychological pain and recommit to a values-driven life is in “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life” by Hayes and Smith.

Groups like this mindfulness class provide the third, vital, social component: connecting with people in real life who are making similar discoveries and who speak the language of meditation, mindfulness, and ACT.

About the photo

Coots gathering in large numbers in Lake Washington. Lately they are out there every day in the hundreds, bobbing, diving and squabbling.