My heart goes out to the anxious ones.

On the lying mind, a panic attack, and becoming the ocean.

Online Breathwork Tonight, April 30th, at 8pm ET.

In-person Breathork in Troy, MI, May 4th at 2pm.

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Hi Friends,

I have felt out of sorts the past couple days, especially anxious and ungrounded, unable to find a home in my body. I don’t like this feeling, and though my mind wants me to believe this is the new, always anxious me, I know it will pass. Soon please.

Anxiety has rarely been my go-to, and I’m grateful for this. I think it has something to do with my mastery for disassociation, I don’t know. I have watched loved ones suffer panic attacks, have driven them to emergency rooms as they were certain they were having a heart attack or in some other way about to die. Years ago my dear friend bit into an apple that tasted, to her, a little funny. From there she became convinced she had been poisoned and might die. It took several hours of genuine hysteria and sobbing before she accepted the fact that she was fine; that she would live. I called my sister after this experience and sobbed to her about how hard it was to watch a friend go through this. I felt entirely powerless. Imagine what my friend felt.

The closest I have come to experiencing what I imagine to be a panic attack has always been pot induced. Maybe five or six times in my life, when I’ve gotten too high and too paranoid and believed I might really die. Shortness of breath, pounding heart, no belief in this too shall pass. They have been of the scariest experiences in my life.

I had one of those experiences last week.

I had agreed to an 11pm ET live radio interview with a west coast broadcaster and, though I checked my calendar in the morning and set a 10:05pm alarm, I had completely forgotten about the interview as the day progressed. Around 8pm, my manfriend Rob and I split a pot gummy and proceeded to get joyfully high. We lay in bed, chatting and laughing and making out, a Dessert Dwellers playlist fueling our euphoria, when my 10:05 alarm went off. Holy shit, I said, immediately aware of what that alarm represented.

I spent the next 45 minutes trying to talk myself into a state of calm, even as I continued to get higher, growing increasingly convinced that the interview was going to be a disaster, that I would sound incoherent and ridiculous. Had it been a podcast interview, I would have lied and said I was sick and cancelled. But this was live radio and I was the guest, so cancelling didn’t feel like an option.

I prayed to Great Spirit and Mother Earth and my ancestors and angels and the cannabis gods to help me come down fast. Please. I paced around the house and disregarded Rob’s gentle and supportive attempts to comfort me. You’re much more coherent than you realize when you’re high. Sure, whatever. I practiced the lie I would tell the host if things started to go off the rails, that I had a terrible headache and was unable to stay present and focus on our conversation. I’m so sorry. Mostly I just panicked, heart pounding, full body sweats, imagining myself unable to follow her train of thought and my train of thought and really any train of thought. Short-term memory had left the station.

All of this because I was stoned and about to be interviewed. Not really the end of the world, but my mind sure sold me the apocalypse.

I felt wholly out of control of my mind and body, and like something in me might crack, break, if I couldn’t figure out how to calm down. As this panic was peaking, as my breath became shorter and more constricted, as I was just about to burst into tears, my phone rang. Show time. I took a deep breath, put on my headphones and answered.

We are delighted to have on our show, author and love advocate, Scott Stabile. Welcome Scott.

Hi Margaret. It’s great to be here with you.

The instant our 35-minute conversation started, I relaxed (somewhat), at least enough to feel confident I wouldn’t need to use my headache excuse. I imagined myself as a character performing, which allowed me to create some distance between high as balls Scott and radio show guest Scott. To my great dismay, the host did a very thorough reading of Big Love and was intent on discussing, in detail, the most traumatic experiences of my life.

Tell us about the horror you experienced when your parents were brutally murdered.

Walk us through seeing your heroin-addicted brother shackled to a pole in your basement.

Um…

Of course this is what she wanted to discuss when I could barely remember my name. In truth, the part of me that was able to step outside of myself entirely and observe this interview as nothing more than entertainment was laughing at the absurdity of it all. I also found myself quite skillful at steering the conversation away from subjects my high mind didn’t want to pursue and toward ones that still felt entirely relevant to my work, and to the conversation. Hmmm, maybe this getting interviewed while stoned thing has some advantages.

No. Not really. Not for me.

I have since listened to the first twenty minutes of our talk and have to say, I sounded entirely normal, maybe even more charming than usual. It was good, helpful, important for me to see my capacity to shift, in an instant, from a state of panic to a state of composure. Important to see that, yet again, the fears my mind creates that send me into complete ungroundedness, borderline hysteria, almost never come to fruition.

My fear, my mind, is quite often just a liar.

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Another dear friend, not the apple one, used to suffer from debilitating panic attacks and went to the emergency room many times convinced she was dying. She spent a year of her life mostly housebound, her anxiety having turned her into an agoraphobic, her mind keeping her in a continuous state of irrational fear. And then, eventually, and with the help of medication initially, things started to shift. I asked her what changed and she answered, I kept not dying.

Damn that response hit me. I kept not dying.

Her mind lied to her, again and again, that she was dying, and she kept not dying. And eventually she recognized, even when her fear started her spinning in anxiety, that her mind was lying to her, and she stopped believing her mind’s lies. This took time, of course, and wasn’t as smooth and easy as writing a sentence about it suggests, but she did get to the other side of her intense anxiety and panic attacks. They are not a part of her life anymore.

I really do feel that’s the secret, or a least one secret, to more peace and less suffering: stop believing the mind’s lies. When I started to pay more attention to what my mind was telling me, to challenge rather than simply accept my thoughts as truth, I began to notice just how often my mind lied to me, about myself and others and everything.

You are not lovable. Lie.

You are not worthy unless… Lie.

He is evil. Lie. She is irredeemable. Lie

Everything is completely fucked. Lie.

Okay, that last one is a bit harder to refute these days, but everything is not fucked. A lot is fucked, but not everything. Some hope lives in that space between.

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I couldn’t get myself to not believe my mind last week before the radio interview. It’s not that my fear communicated to me that I was dying, but the way it inhabited my body sure felt like it. And then I did the interview, and kept not dying, and then collapsed onto Rob afterwards and we both laughed about the extremely unfunny panic attack I’d had just 40 minutes prior.

Life is so bizarre.

I understand that I am not my thoughts, that my thoughts only define me when I allow them to. I understand that my mind is as insane as every other human mind on the planet, mired in conditioning and insecurity and fear. This is, in part, how minds function. When I believe I am my thoughts, when I allow my mind to define me, I suffer. It’s that simple, and pretty brutal. But not required.

When I remember to be the observer of my thoughts without becoming them, I feel much more peaceful. When I see my thoughts as waves and myself as the ocean, I feel still, accepting, okay.

What I’ve come to discover is that the more I play with being the observer, the more naturally I become him, and the less often I am consumed by my mind’s irrational fears. And then, because life can be a nasty tyrant, I get consumed by my mind’s irrational fears yet again and believe terrible things about myself and others. This is the dance. I’m just grateful that the observer is taking the lead more often than ever, even if on some days that means for a mere 45 seconds. I will revel in those 45 seconds.

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To all of you who deal with regular anxiety, and to those of you who suffer through panic attacks, I’d like to send out a huge hug and some extra love. I won’t offer any platitudes, but I do have some very close loved ones who experienced the worst anxiety attacks I’ve ever seen, and they found their way to the other side of them. Anxiety no longer controls their lives. It’s not entirely gone, but it’s no longer in charge. I hold a deep prayer that you will find your way to the other side.

May we all come to understand that we are not our thoughts, that our mind lies to us oh so often, and that when we embody the observer, when we become the ocean, we stand to create a lot more peace in our lives.

With so much love,

xoxo…Scott

p.s. The pic is from this morning, on a walk in Indianapolis where Rob lives, reminding (kind of forcing) myself to give some attention to the beauty around me. Always a good choice.