One moment I was making a sandwich, the next I struggled to catch my breath. Heart pounding, I gripped the edge of the counter, knuckles white against the cream laminate, vision blurred by fat tears that streaked my fresh eye make-up. It was a random morning and I was getting ready for work. Preparing my lunch, anxiety struck. Thankfully, I’ve since learned how to mange my anxiety.

Anxiety wasn’t an unusual thing. Anxiety attacks have brought me to my knees, seemingly out of nowhere. All I could manage was to wrap my arms around myself, rock gently and cry until it passed, whispering to myself, “sshhh, it’s okay.”

Understanding Why I Was So Anxious

The thing is though, my anxiety attacks didn’t come out of nowhere. I know now that they were invited by my stress and imagination; created by my overactive mind that worried incessantly about the future.

That morning in my kitchen, a thought burst through the chaos in my brain, loud and clear.

All you have to do right now is make a sandwich. Just make the sandwich, sweetie.

I took a deep breath, looked down at my partially made sandwich and continued its assembly, letting my tears do the seasoning as I grew calmer. I made my way back to the present.

Managing My Anxiety

I haven’t had an anxiety attack since I made that sandwich. Not because my problems have gone away – far from it. But because I know that no life decisions need to be made at 7 am on a weekday; that the conversations I have in my head never turn out in real life the way I imagine them; because I cannot tell the future; because I am learning to trust that things happen when they are meant to; that they have a way of working out in the end, for better or for worse and no amount of mental agony on my part is going to change that.

Life happens one thing at a time.

My dear friend, Kathy shared with me that one morning she was helping her three year-old go potty when he got very upset and sobbed that he didn’t want to go to school. “Right now,” she said, “we’re just going potty. That’s all.” He immediately calmed down.

I still worry and feel anxious sometimes. But now I have the tools to not let it get out of hand to the point that I am not in control of my body. I catch myself getting worked up and I say to myself, “Just make the sandwich.”

One thing at a time. Whether you’re making a sandwich, or just going potty, that is all that requires your attention at that moment.

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The Holidays are a tough time of year for most due to the high level of expectations and inevitable disappointments. It is almost impossible not to compare, with all the television commercials and catalogs assaulting us with images of what Christmas is supposed to look like. Roaring fires, bountiful buffets gorgeously garnished, caroling families, perfect gifts in perfect wrappings, lovers cuddling by the tree watching the snow fall, hot beverages dusted with freshly shaven chocolate in their hands.

This is an illusion carefully crafted to set the bar so high that we will spend great sums of money in order to try to achieve it. Even if the catalog Christmas does exist in some homes, the perfection is more than likely only on the surface. Forget to use a coaster and the mom of the house is sneaking away, unhinging her gritted teeth only long enough to slug some blackberry brandy and pop a Xanax.

For most of us, Christmas is chaos. It’s a race to get everything decorated, purchased, wrapped, mailed, and baked in time. The day itself involves obligations, lots of traveling, and enduring people you really rather not spend such a special day with. It is smiling at sarcastic comments clearly stemming from passive aggression, eating food that isn’t very good, adorning your best fake smile and exclaiming that yes, you really do like the [hideous] sweater.

The calmest and happiest are those who don’t sweat it. They take joy in their favorite traditions and rituals, and monitor their expectations. They seek out the good stuff, like a good chat in the corner with that awesome cousin they haven’t seen in a year, they know to bring their own craft beer, and they smile and endure the bullshit, because they know the secret of Christmas. And that is: Christmas is just a day. It is a day to make the best of, and to practice patience and love and compassion in the spirit of the season.

Over the years, I have lowered my expectations of Christmas to all-time lows and somehow still found myself being profoundly disappointed. I think the disappointment was worse because my expectations were so low that I couldn’t get my head around why they weren’t met. It was incredibly saddening and left me with a gauntlet of emotions to work my way through.

When my negative emotions I feel about the holiday season were being triggered back in October, I realized something had to change. And that ‘something’ was the only thing I actually had any control over. Me.

In a moment of wonderful clarity, I decided to expect nothing good or bad this Christmas and to relinquish all attachments regarding what I think Christmas should be. Like a snowy winter night, calm came over me.

With zero expectations, I cannot be disappointed on Christmas. Neither am I bracing myself for negativity and poor behavior. If I feel sad about it, I am living in the past. If I am worried about it, I am living in the future. My vision of this Christmas is only a blank canvas that will be painted as each moment unfolds.

And in the spirit of compassion, I think it’s important we all remember that everyone is going through something on Christmas; missing a deceased loved one, wishing they were somewhere else or with someone else, wondering if their estranged parent or sibling is thinking about them. I know that my mom tries so hard every year to make up for past years that she literally falls apart under the pressure and carries so much guilt that she can barely function come Christmas. This will be the year that her daughter will not be disappointed in her. I will not give her, or anyone else, the gift of additional suffering. And I will not be accepting that gift from anyone, either.

And if you need a few extra glasses of nog or another bottle of wine to keep a smile on your face, go for it! I hear calories don’t count on Christmas.

Thank you for reading.I wish you a very Merry Christmas, full of peace in your heart.

Heatherash Amara writes that we all carry the seeds of self-sabotage within our minds in the form of two negative voices; siblings of the same parents, fear and self-rejection. One voice is the judge. The other is the victim.

The voice of the judge looks for what you or others aren’t doing right. My judge is a loud-mouth, the dominant voice in my head. The volume stems from the incredibly high level of my expectations, which branch from my strong attachments to how I think things should be. My judge doesn’t have high standards; it has impossible standards, of myself and others. It is this dominant voice that has kept me in a near-constant cycle of comparison, disappointment and frustration – with myself and others.

The victim, on the other hand, looks for validation, which it never gets. The victim’s voice is the broken record repeating you-can’t-do-it-you’re-not-enough. The victim looks to an internal or external judge to prove its unworthiness. For example, my judge never fails to do just that when speaking to my mom’s victim, her dominant voice. When listening to the voice of the victim, you spend your days feeling powerless and hopeless.

Have you ever known someone who experienced a trauma and blames it for the depression they suffer as a result? Have you ever thought they should get over it or were seeking attention? This is a very simple example of your judge, and the person’s victim at work. Chances are, you have also been on the reverse of this in some way. We all judge. We have all been judged.

The soothing voice of compassion is what can quiet these two bickering children. We need to stop viewing ourselves as victims; broken, misunderstood, not loveable and not good enough. We need to stop judging ourselves and others. The judge and victim are siblings because remember, when we are judging others, it is because we see something in them that we don’t like in ourselves.

I have believed for a very long time that heaven may be comprised of many levels, and that we make our way up through those levels the more compassionate we become. To do so, we are reincarnated over and over until we experience everything: being male, female, animal, poor, wealthy, straight, homosexual, murdered, the murderer, raped, the rapist, and so on and so on. Only through these experiences can we be truly compassionate to all living beings on earth, never judge, and finally rest in peace in the highest level of heaven.

Whether that sounds crazy to you or not, we do know that empathy and compassion lead to patience and understanding. Rather than judging, we can seek out the best in one another, which somehow seems to bring out the best in ourselves.

And if finding the best in someone seems damn near impossible, we can shift our judgment to discernment. Judgment results in messes caused by blame and rejection. Discernment does not stem from emotion, but from clarity. So using the example of my mother, rather than judging her shortcomings and acting out in frustration and ultimately making her feel even more powerless and hopeless, I can try to quiet the voice of my judge and choose instead to remember that the voice of her victim is speaking. This would be an act of discernment and compassion. And maybe over time, the voice of her victim won’t speak so loudly, at least when she is speaking to me.

“The root of suffering is attachment.” – The Buddha

My mom has been depressed and ill most of my life. The little girl that spent her childhood waiting and hoping and expecting her mom to be something more still lives inside of me, and she is still waiting and hoping.

Heatherash Amara explains in “Warrior Goddess Training” that whenever we have an expectation for how people, things, or events should be, that we are forming an attachment. “The stronger the expectation, the deeper the attachment, and the more we suffer when it is not met…” (xxiii). My attachment to who I want my mom to be has led to a lifetime of disappointment. I am only beginning to understand that I want her to be someone that she might just be incapable of being.

The fault is all mine. I have been unable to accept her for who she is, limitations and all.

Detachment, gentleness and compassion on my part is the silver bullet to put an end to my constant disappointment and resentments. But it’s so damn hard, because the little girl inside of me still just wants a mom, and the adult in me struggles so much to understand and be patient with her.

I have to learn to release this expectation of what I want my mom to be, this vision that I am so attached to, for both our sakes, and accept her for who she is. I have the tools and the knowledge, but the little girl inside of me is still longing for a mother…

For most of my life I have taken my suffering out on others, mainly the ones who love me most, like my mother for a very long time, and then my husband, as well. We hurt the people closest to us; they are the only ones who tend to take it. I didn’t really know this until this past year. Only recently have I become aware just how much I have made others suffer for my emotional turmoil.

Just because I became aware of this doesn’t mean I stopped doing it, regrettably. However, I did become more aware of the aftermath; it was exhausting. The hurt feelings, the damaging words, the guilt and shame, followed by regret. I was feeling more and more like a monster, and not at all like the gentle woman that I longed to be. But I couldn’t seem to help myself. That was until I read the following sentence by Byron Katie:

Your suffering is never caused by the person you’re blaming.

I let that sit with me for a moment, then cried tears of shame, regret and sadness for how I had made my husband and mother suffer for so many things that they were in no way responsible for. I realized I had been blaming or taking out my pain on them for 90% of my suffering, when in reality they were responsible for far less.

The statement stayed with me and I spent more time thinking about the true causes of my suffering, which is a difficult thing to do. Then one day I was really upset; I was feeling great sadness and fear and confusion and I couldn’t stop crying. My husband wrapped his arms around me and this would usually be the moment I would lash out at him. Even in that moment, I pinpointed it; I felt the heat rise within me and tasted the tinge of insults on my tongue. But instead of blaming and attacking him; instead of projecting my pain onto him, I let him hold me and I cried into his chest and let my body wrack with sobs.

When my sobs subsided and I felt all cried out and tired, I sat down on my bed. I had a private moment and I realized that for perhaps the very first time I had owned my suffering.

I wasn’t left sitting there feeling the need to apologize for hurtful words, or feeling guilty, or left with an angry husband in the other room. There was no hurricane of rage and therefore no aftermath. I owned my pain, and I actually felt better having owned it and cried it out. It was a tremendous empowering, enlightening moment.

But change is slow, and these things take practice. It is amazing when you can see that practice pay off little by little. Already, my world is a more peaceful place at times, since I am learning to keep the storm contained within and not blame others for my suffering.

Welcome to my journey of self-discovery and healing.

After years of keeping busy, living in a near constant state of fight or flight, operating on cortisol and adrenaline, things have slowed down. I finally graduated college in May, the book I spent a year co-editing was published in late September, and I do not foresee another work promotion anytime soon, amongst other stressful and time-consuming things.

After years of obligations and stresses, I took inventory of my life. A lot has suffered the past several years, and I see now it was because I was suffering. I thought I was overwhelmed and exhausted. That’s what everyone told me, anyway, along with “you take on too much.” There was so much going on, so I blamed my anger, frustration and fatigue on all of it.

Once the deadlines, suffocating workload and other variables were eliminated, I felt worse. Without the constant stream of distractions, I contemplated how I was feeling. I questioned why. This was a difficult thing to do. Unbeknownst to me, I started on a journey as soon as I looked inward. It was a startling and heartbreaking realization when I came to the conclusion that I had been profoundly unhappy for a very long time.

As all of my attention and energy was elsewhere these past few years, something was happening to me. A hard, cold, rough shell grew around me, comprised of a multitude of layers of pain and suffering. It protected me in the sense that I didn’t really feel anything. All my emotions lay deep inside of me. But I realize now that I used this shell not in defense, but in attack, hiding behind a strong exterior and launching all my explosive anger and pain outwardly.

Inside, I was completely vulnerable; an emotional mess of complicated feelings.

Outside, I was a hard-working professional and student; a commencement speaker with a 3.98 GPA.

Inside, I was growing weaker day by day under the weight of my sorrow.

Outside, I was taking pleasure in the joys of life and my achievements only on an extrinsic level.

Inside I suffered, as if there was a dead, rotted seed deep within me.

This realization resulted in the creation of a deep chasm within me. There was no dead, rotted seed within me. I was the dead, rotted seed within a nut of my own making. This fracture inside of me was so intense that it created the first minuscule crack in my exterior.

Once I cracked the nut of my suffering, the tiniest sliver of light permeated my soul and it shined on the realization that I didn’t like myself or my behavior, and that I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I began to think hard about who that person was that I wanted to become. This journey became not a quest for self-fulfillment, but of self-discovery. Because we can’t be anything until we first understand who we are. And we cannot even begin to understand who we are until we crack the nut on our suffering. I have been sad and angry for a long time. I am only beginning to comprehend what the sources of these emotions are, and discover and learn the tools to manage them.

In the book “The Art of Happiness,” Howard Cutler quotes His Holiness The Dalai Lama who believes that our underlying or fundamental nature is gentleness. If human ability and intelligence develops in an unbalanced way without being properly counterbalanced with compassion, it can become destructive and can lead to disaster. Aggression and negativity is not innate; but influenced by a variety of biological, social, situational and environmental factors.

I am not rotten at my core. My conflicts are a result of those factors and my human intellect – misuse of an unbalanced intellect and imaginative faculty. Knowing this brings me a tremendous sense of relief and hope; hope that I may be able to find my way back to my underlying human nature, that I may someday be the person I want to be.

This is my journey. A journey of self-understanding as I continue to crack the nut on my suffering and work toward reclaiming my innate state of happiness; returning to my basic nature; which is gentle and compassionate.

I invite you to share this journey with me as I continue to learn and use my newly discovered tools to grow and work to end my suffering.