A counterintuitive trick to calming anxiety
Loving-kindness, suffering, psychedelic mushrooms, and trail races in southern Ohio
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It’s difficult to announce with a straight face and a calculated humility that you’re the winner of the 2024 Summer Sasquatch 10-Miler. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as, say, “National Book Award” or “MacArthur Genius Grant.”
People squint and say the what and you have to clarify that it’s a ten-mile trail race in southeastern Ohio which is very challenging and involves 2,000 feet of elevation change, and perhaps you’ll gesture at your T-shirt, which features a neon yellow Bigfoot, or hold up your plastic plaque, which also features a neon yellow Bigfoot and says Number One Female Overall.
The night before the Summer Sasquatch 10-Miler, I lay in bed in my parents’ Ohio cabin worrying. Worrying about all things imaginable. Worrying into panic attack territory, where the heart starts to gallop and all of a sudden the worry becomes a big, fanged, uncontrollable creature.
I did not want to get up, because for some reason I had paid $60 to wake at 5 a.m. and run as fast as I could through the Ohio woods. I tried breathing exercises and that failed. I tried counting and that failed.
Out of desperation, I turned to loving-kindness meditation. Loving-kindness meditation is one of those things that can appear suspect and perhaps a little cringe to non-meditators. Explaining it doesn’t help. “You send loving-kindness first to a loved one, then to a neutral person, then to a difficult person, then to yourself, then to all beings, with phrases like may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be free from suffering…” At a party the other person is already scanning the room, help, help.
But listen. It feels really freaking good. Scientific research and all that, yeah yeah, but if we go by the ultimate metric – how does it feel in the body? – it feels good.
That night, I sent it to myself. I felt ridiculous. I felt like a spoiled child. Couldn’t I even bother to send it to my dog and my mail carrier first? I mean, c’mon. But I needed it. And I needed it from myself.
It feels incredibly anathema, like driving on the wrong side of the road, to love oneself when one is being a neurotic, stressed-out, whiny, panicked little being. The overwhelming urge is to give a smackdown: Stop it! Snap out of it! Get with it! Just freaking go to sleep already! But it just doesn’t work.
Through the first few cycles, the loving-kindness is challenged by self-loathing. May you be happy YOU ARE RIDICULOUS may you be safe GET OVER YOURSELF may you be free from suffering YOU ARE ANNOYING EVERYONE.
But then after a while the harsh voice quiets. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. The voice offering these gifts is no longer the same voice as the one reprimanding. It becomes something else. Something bigger. Beyond the fear and the shivering ego is this big self, speaking to the small one, with no agenda at all: May you be free from suffering.
At the end of last year, Jorge and I did psychedelic mushrooms for the second time (bet you didn’t see that one coming!). We did it not with the wild abandon of youth but with the deep searching of forty-year-old artists and parents looking for answers to very boring quotidian questions about purpose and balance.
Of course, in the way of what I came to affectionately call “those little guys,” they didn’t answer a single one of our questions. They just exploded the whole field of questioning so that any sort of question-answer response became amusing and absurd. It would be like asking, “Should I apply for tenure-track jobs?” to ten million cranes taking flight before a wild sunset.
One moment stuck with me from that experience. I was struggling a bit, trying not to get overwhelmed, when suddenly a person popped into my head. This person is not someone I know very well or see often. They’re fairly peripheral. They could be considered a somewhat challenging person when I do encounter them.
There they were, at the forefront of my spinning consciousness. And suddenly I could see their suffering. See back through their childhood: see the rooms they worried in, feel their pain and loss and longing, and see how they carried that with them. I could see their vulnerable soul within all those dark forces, doing the best it could.
An intense empathy flooded me. It is not too much to say, and I’m sorry but you’ll just have to buckle up for this Very Spiritual and Earnest Truth, that their suffering was my suffering. That it was part of a giant pool of human suffering from which we all sip, all the time, in our own unique ways.
It was similar to sending out loving-kindness, repeating may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, and understanding that this wish is the same whether you send it to yourself or your mom or your dog or the mail carrier or the difficult neighbor.
I was exhausted at 5 a.m. on the morning of the Summer Sasquatch. If I had not paid $60 for this ridiculous privilege and forced Jorge to do the same, I would not have done it.
I inhaled a bowl of oatmeal and sipped my coffee while Jorge drove the county roads, mist drifting over the hayfields of southern Ohio. Sunlight gleamed through spiderwebs in quiet meadows. Tidy hay bales made picturesque landscapes out of rolling green valleys.
At the race start runners in iridescent colors strutted and lifted their knees to their chests and rotated their hips in circles like so many exotic birds. The starting horn went off and there we were, running through the wet grass into the woods and then up and down muddy, gorgeous single-track beside the calm water of Salt Fork Lake.
I was nervous as I always am at the start of a race: will I keep it together? Vomit? Have to crawl off into the bush on the side of the trail? Walk? Finish in glory? It’s pretty unclear in the first mile or two. All you can do is run.
Around mile three I was a little shaky and nervous: this is when you start to feel the hard. Oh, I’ve chosen to run ten miles with 2,000 feet of elevation change on narrow, crazy trails through the forest! This is what that feels like!
There’s a make-or-break moment psychologically when you either start to fall apart or you shore up the ol’ mind and say just. keep. going. just keep going just keep going. I kept going.
Just after mile four, there’s a half-mile-long uphill to the road. When I say uphill, I mean uphill. Clambering out of the woods, it takes a minute to gather yourself and resume normal human speed. Then, there’s a glorious mile or so of flat pavement.
Here, Elena and my dad waited to cheer us on and offer Gatorade. Elena held up a sign that read “Keep running this way for burritos!” She was very proud of it. It had an asterisk in the corner that said “Approved.”
“Approved by who?” I asked.
“Approved by me,” she said.
It was lovely to run with Jorge. He is faster than me but had agreed to stay together during the race, and he paced me beautifully. I followed his sweaty blue T-shirt and his leaps over the creeks and mud flats.
Sometime around mile six, as we ran up and down rolling hills of high grasses, I was deluged with gratitude. Thank you, body, I found myself saying, thank you thank you. I felt the loving-kindness from the previous night held in my body. I felt it as energy, emanating from me.
As I clawed my way down muddy hills into miles eight and nine with searing legs I thought, it’s all energy, all of us composed of the same energy. It was an insight I’d had on the psychedelics and it returned now in force. Perhaps calming one’s brain with magical little guys and calming it by way of insane physical exertion produce a similar effect, destroying all the clingy ego bits and leaving you with the sheer enormity and vulnerability and wonder of it all.
I thanked all the mounted rangers on horses and they said “Great job!” and I almost cried each time. The energy was like fuel; I could almost eat it. Each time I gave it, I felt it bouncing back to me, and I ran on.
I ran with a rare, exquisite, tenderness. Toward the end of mile nine the runners doing the 20-miler and the 50k (yes, there are runners who do the ten-mile loop two or three more times) began looping back so that they passed us finishing.
Looking great, I said to each one, looking strong, and they replied, great job, keep it up. Simple things, dorky runner things, but I felt them as an energy so strong I ran up the last hill that almost everyone was walking and ran over the last grassy field and ran into the parking lot and passed two guys who said “Girl, you’re crushing it! Finish strong!” and sprinted to the end and won.
I got two waxy cups of water, a plastic plaque with a Sasquatch on it, a pin with a Sasquatch on it, and very sore legs. We drove home beneath the now-bright sky full of rabbit-tail clouds.
I thought of the urgency of those last few miles, giving and receiving energy. How palpable it was, edible almost, like the bright sticky gummy I chewed for sugar.
I thought of the loving-kindness meditation: how it allowed me to move beyond my small rigid self and the circles she gets trapped in, to see the big pool of all of our suffering and our interconnectedness, to remember the body, remember the world, remember other people and all that they carry.
How it opened me up so I could feel joy careening down a slope of pine needles on a crisp Ohio morning, marveling to myself here it is, I’m living it, I’m doing it, shouting to everyone I passed, “Thank you! Thank you!”
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