Mental Health Awareness Month

Meditation can help you recognize anxiety a little bit faster, and develop a more intimate relationship with it, rather than simply wishing it would disappear.

Most of us are unaware of the extent of the fear that we carry. Fear builds upon itself, or more precisely, fear creates more fear. As a result, our accumulated fear becomes a deep-seated terror that is challenging to uproot. We constantly speak of terrorism in the world, but we don't necessarily acknowledge the terror that has invaded our inner worlds. Many of us are afraid of fear, and afraid of admitting, even to ourselves, that we feel it. We push back the visceral, embodied experience of fear so effectively we think we have eliminated the fear itself.

A couple years ago I defended my dissertation. Now, as anyone who has ever defended a dissertation will tell you, the whole process is a stress-inducing imbroglio, a veritable blitzkrieg of queries and provocations hosted by a stone-faced faculty tribunal intent on punching holes in the drywall of your thesis, which you've just spent one or two or three years building up out of a combination of blood, sweat, and far too many obscure academic citations.