My shrink asked me yesterday what I thought might help me with all of the chatter in my head.
“Learning how to breathe,” I said.
This was after telling her about flashing on some other taxi driver the night before, where I had the right of way and the guy blocked me anyways and then refused to move. He had all the room in the world to pass me even though he was in my lane and yet refused, screaming “asshole” out his window repeatedly until I finally backed up and let him through. In the moment, I thought I might actually just hit the gas and crash into him head on, but I took a breath long enough to just back up and be the less stubborn of the two of us instead of committing vehicular assault and effectively ending my job as a taxi driver.
It took a moment, but I hit reverse instead. When he finally passed me, I drove a couple of blocks and pulled over for a moment to breathe as I was shaking so badly in anger that I physically couldn’t drive until I managed to exhale some of the fire in my belly out of my nose.
I really need to learn how to meditate. I manage to do a decent job of clearing my mind when I go to yoga by focusing on stretching but I need some sort of practice I can do sitting in my apartment. I could roll out the yoga mat in my studio, but I still don’t have enough experience with poses to be able to do it effectively on my own and even then, I can’t do that everywhere. I need to learn how to effectively clear my mind anywhere that I’m at so that the thoughts that come to me don’t get seized on by my brain, where it’s far more likely that I will act on them and have them affect my mood and behavior.
There’s always the Zen Center, which is a short walk from my house and offers meditation workshops. The idea of infusing a little mindfulness and some Buddhist practice into my life has always been appealing, and I’ve been inside the center before when I volunteered at Hayes Valley Farm. They used to give us their scraps for composting and a few of us would cart a wheelbarrow apiece over to the kitchen and load up on buckets of vegetable scraps. The inside of the place was serene and the people we dealt with were very nice.
I just want a way to separate my mind from my thoughts, which for a while have been twisting my mind into corners that make me uncomfortable and causing me actual physical symptoms. I want to be able to sit in my apartment and tune out the world for thirty minutes every day, push reset and go about my life without having to take all of the noise and the voices to heart.
Is that too much to ask?
I hope not.
