In the fall of 2017, I moved into a pale green Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. I’d recently left Chicago after a one-year stint — though it felt as if I had escaped.
At the time, I was in the midst of an all-consuming battle with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, one that I was desperate to figure out. San Francisco, I hoped, with its Pacific vistas, endlessly green parks and people from just about everywhere, would give me the space to shift my life in a sunnier direction.
I dropped my suitcases at my new apartment and decided to head outside. But as I walked around the neighborhood, passing a large purple mural of Jimi Hendrix, I couldn’t appreciate my new home. I was too focused on willing my intrusive thoughts to stop.
My O.C.D. is not like the one you see in movies. I don’t check doors or wash my hands eight times before leaving the house. For many people with O.C.D., including me, it’s more internal: Irrational thoughts enter the mind and remain there, festering.
The circular thought I experienced in front of that mural was absurd: that I would never live the life I wanted because I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything except, well, worrying.
But in that old Victorian house, I met Nate, and we quickly morphed from roommates into friends. We played guitar in the living room, prepared homemade dessert hummus and dissected our ongoing exoduses from the Judeo-Christian faiths in which we’d grown up. Not only that, Nate was a meditation teacher and he gradually became mine.
Early on, he introduced me to “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, the late Vietnamese Zen master who popularized Buddhist meditation and mindfulness in the West. The classic, his second of more than 100 titles, celebrates its 50th year in circulation.
In it, Thay (the Vietnamese word for “teacher” and what Thich Nhat Hanh is often called) offers simple steps to internal harmony amid uncertainty and discord. His teachings are rooted in mindful appreciation of the present moment, no matter its circumstances. In “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” he wrote: “Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” When I first read that line, every day seemed like one endless attempt at evasion.I was trying to temper my intrusive thoughts — that I’d swerve into oncoming traffic; or that if I didn’t pray before a meal, I was morally at fault — by using logic, facts and statistics. But doing that only perpetuated the worrying.
I know now that many people have thoughts like these. The difference is that for people without O.C.D., these thoughts are fleeting. For people like me though, especially those who haven’t undergone treatment, these ruminations stick, even though we often understand that they make no sense.
O.C.D. took the joy out of the smallest, purest moments in life. My worrying mind didn’t allow for a calm morning coffee with my grandma, the rapturous celebration of a game-winning touchdown or the peace of reading a book in bed.
O.C.D. makes you intolerant to any amount of uncertainty. If something terrible could happen, your mind tells you it probably will. The feeling is like a drumbeat from an unseen army, promising to halt its advance only when all unpredictability is quashed.
I sat in Nate’s sunlit room one afternoon, and he told me that Thich Nhat Hanh had taught how to be present by focusing on the breath. Breath is what connects our body to our mind, he wrote in “The Miracle of Mindfulness.”
So together, we started there. One crisp and misty morning, Nate and I woke up early before work and sat on the back stairs in hoodies and sweatpants. He instructed me to close my still-crusty eyes as he did the same.
“OK,” he said, “Start to shift your attention to your forehead.”
I did. I waited. A sea gull squawked in the distance. “Refocus,” Nate said. “Notice how it feels.” I did. Slowly, I scanned each part of my body, with Nate’s guidance, descending my focus from my torso, stiff, to my arms, sore, down to my hands, chilled, then legs, warm, and finally my feet, grounded.
After a few days, I started to feel a space opening, a millisecond of clarity, between a thought and my reaction. “The intention isn’t to chase it away, hate it, worry about it, or be frightened by it,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in “The Miracle of Mindfulness.” “So what exactly should you be doing concerning such thoughts and feelings? Simply acknowledge their presence.”
The more consistently I practiced, the more I began to see the calmness carry over into my inner dialogue, too. I felt that I could, for the first time in years, picture a future I deemed normal. Often, at night as I lay in bed, I listened to Thay’s talks on YouTube and drifted off to sleep to his voice. “The seed of suffering in you may be strong,” he says in one, “but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”
I was waiting for my life to turn from black to white. I was waiting to go on dates and find a girlfriend, to finally make the move into a fulfilling career and to book trips to see old friends until I felt completely cured.
But Thay taught that there was happiness to be found in the gray. In “The Nook” — a closet that Nate and I transformed into a comfortable space set apart for meditation — I continued to follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s voice: “Breathing in, I know that anxiety is in me. Breathing out, I smile to my anxiety,” he said.
Eight years have passed since Nate first introduced me to “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” and my practice — combined with a consistent schedule of therapy and medication — has changed how I experience the world each day. My mindfulness meditation never ends and neither, most likely, will O.C.D., but the former has dramatically eased the latter.
Last month, I spent an afternoon at Deer Park Monastery, an enclave Thay founded 25 years ago in the hills of Escondido, Calif. With my dad, uncle and cousin in tow, I met with Brother Phap Luu, a monk originally from New England.
The five of us sat together and talked about Thay’s teachings. As it turned out, Brother Phap Luu began his own practice during a struggle with existential despair. And, he told me, Thay himself uncovered the age-old practice of mindfulness during his own experience with depression.
On the drive out of the monastery, Thay’s words came to mind: “A lotus can never grow without mud.” Then, my excitement gave way to worry. I wondered about whether there were retreats I could take in New York, how I could extend my daily meditations, how many of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books I should read. But then I remembered what had gotten me to this moment: taking each moment at a time, breath by breath by breath.
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