Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

Anyone who has been to my yoga or meditation classes has heard me reference the Buddhist concept of "monkey mind," that ongoing internal dialogue from the ego that constantly demands our attention.  Anyone who has known me for longer than ten minutes knows that "monkey mind" is the bane of my existence.  Like Daniel Smith in his funny and honest memoir about living with this demanding beast, I have found discipline and self-awareness to be the only tools that really deliver consistent results (with the occasional mind-altering pharmaceutical or visit to the therapist's office thrown in for good measure). 

 

          "I didn't yet realize that there is no cure for anxiety, just perpetual treatment."  (p. 206)

Smith spends most of the book recounting his teen years and shaky twenties and how anxiety was (and still is) the evil companion that accompanied his romantic relationships, professional successes and failures, and day-to-day living.  I like how he breaks the neurotic down into two categories: those who think they are dying when they are having a panic attack and those who think they are going crazy.  Every anxious person I know (and I know a lot of them) falls into one of those two pathetic, sweaty holes when panic strikes, every time, without fail.  The latter has always been my specialty.  I guess I figured out at an early age there are worse things than death.  I remember asking my father one night before bed (I was probably five), "Dad, how do you know if you are crazy?"  He sighed at my constant need for reassurance and replied, "If you were crazy you wouldn't be asking me."  From then on I decided constant vigilance was the only way to keep madness at bay.  For my death-obsessed brethren, it is much the same fight, only they arm themselves with antibacterial hand-soap instead of treatises on logic.  Either way, the intellectualization of something horribly felt in the body and perceived as uncontrollable by the mind always ends in chaos.  Yoga and meditation have taught me we need to get OUT of the mind and into the body in order to establish emotional equilibrium.

 

Anxiety is always about control.  Or rather, our lack of it.  Smith talks about the times in his life when he felt most out of control (going to a college of his mother's choosing, having sex when he didn't really want to, being criticized for an article he wrote, being unable to express himself in a relationship) and they almost always centered on pushing himself to do something he didn't really want to do but not having enough self-awareness to know what he really wanted and not enough guts to say, "I don't know what I want, but it's not this."  This lack of trust in our own intuition is a hallmark of relying on the monkey mind.  When we don't know who we really are or what we really want we assume someone else must know better, while the crazy animal in our head bashes away at his cymbals and we do our best to drown him out.  We are afraid to say, "I don't know."  We are terrified of uncertainty.

 

There's a Zen saying that life is 10,000 sorrows and 10,000 joys.  We don't get to decide how those are delivered or when.  They are not evenly distributed.  They do not come with explanations.  All we can do is react when they arrive.  We can deal with things as they happen, in this moment.  Humans are stubbornly resistant to discomfort.  We will make ourselves miserable rather than admit we don't know what is going to happen next.  We somehow make a habit out of our obsessive fearfulness.  Loss is a lecherous old friend, seducing us to believe that it is better to be miserable and pretend we are in control than free.  Freedom is not for the faint of heart or the thin-skinned.  It has little to do with your social or economic status and everything to do with opening yourself to the unknown.  When you are calm on the inside you can handle almost anything that is happening on the outside.  I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Charles Bukowski, who was himself no stranger to the monkey mind:

 

"I have met free men in the strangest of places and at ALL ages - as janitors, car thieves, car washers, and some free women too - mostly as nurses or waitresses, and at ALL ages, the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them."  Tales of Ordinary Madness