Three months ago, I could barely leave my house. Even at home, the anxiety and panic would overwhelm me at times, leaving me feeling pretty worthless, irritable, and probably not that much fun to be around. 

As I write this, my brain wants to just skip to the good part, but the messy middle is always where the gems lie. You have to root around in the muck to find the diamonds and pearls.

It was a long, slow descent and not wholly unexpected as we globally became more aware of words like "viral load" and ideas of contamination. For someone like me, diagnosed with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) more than ten years ago, the pandemic was both a blessing and a curse. Isolation brought me relief and control over my environment (it also brought its own brand of loneliness, new anxieties, a whole lot of reckoning, and some really, really good stuff, too).

When the world started opening up and I was feeling forced to adapt to life outside the confines of my bubble is when things...

Today, I am sitting with a combination of wonder, gratitude, and unease. This is a common duality that many of us hold. 

I practice seeing what's right in front of me, nurturing the mindful awareness of sights, sounds, and the divine energy of the people around me. It's how we get through the anxiety with a clear path of inviting in more joy and spending less time worried about the uncertainty of life as a whole.

I talk about the weather a lot. Sometimes I think it's a mundane habit, but actually I think it's more because it affects us all. We have had unusually warm temps here in the midwest this week. Beautiful, warm, sunny days and I've relished in the comfort of the air on my skin and the glow of sunshine on my face.

It won't last, though. Today, the clouds have begun to move in and the northern winds are sweeping down. Mix this in with a full moon lunar eclipse, the US midterm election, and changing our clocks, it's kinda been one hell of a transitional week. 

So what...

It is often a matter of simple inquiry. Dr. T would say to me: "What if..." and then I knew a shift in perspective would eventually come. 

"What if you just let it be there?"

"What if you could allow more space for it?"

"What if you stopped fighting so hard?"

The "it" of course, was the fear. It shows up as anxiety in the mind, fearful thoughts, and very real physical symptoms of panic that run the gamut between just a little uneasy to full a on dissociative sense of unreality, like Alice in Wonderland where the floor grows and shrinks underneath her.

What if... I just allowed it to be there, made more space for it to exist, rather than fighting it or wishing it would just go away? That simple shift created breathing room and a sense of self-compassion (instead of the "why am I this way" or "I need to fix this" thoughts and feelings that don't do anybody any good). 

I distinctly remember the moment when I realized that fear and anxiety was never going away. That nothing I...