Faith Used to Fuel My Anxiety. Now Meditation Eases My OCD

I was in college when I made my first appointment with a therapist. My anxiety was out of control, and I needed help. It was also a point in my life where I found much meaning from the Desert Mothers and Fathers, a group of ascetics who would form the first monastic communities in Christianity. Here was a group of people that logged and cataloged their every thought, often thought they were damned, were swarmed by demons day and night, and yet still could offer a glimmer of hope.

There was one passage that always fascinated me. Abba Joseph raises his hands and tells one of his followers, “If you will you can become all flame,” and Joseph’s fingertips glow like 10 lamps of fire. It seemed like a reward for all that time being anxious in the desert. Yes, life was unbearable and you kept a constant catalog of every mistake, every disaster, but if you stick it out, there is a moment of mystical power, where your very being can touch God. That gave me hope, but it also made me wonder, where was my 10-lamps-of-fire moment? 

If you think about it, religion gives you plenty to be anxious about. The first time that I felt truly anxious was around 7 years old. My church had been preaching a lot about hell and the rapture, and I had been listening a little too closely. I remember crying to my Sunday School teachers that there was no way to know if you were going to heaven or hell. They told me that you would know you are saved by what your heart told you; my heart was full of fear. Worse, I had picked up a habit that would follow me into adulthood: Like those monks in the desert, I was encouraged to scan my thoughts for sin, and I found plenty of it.

I don’t remember a me before anxiety. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t tried to address it — I spent the past 10 years cycling through therapists and considering medication before I finally found a specialist in cognitive behavioral therapy that was able to help, but only after I finally got a diagnosis that surprised me: obsessive-compulsive disorder.

What little I knew about the disorder came from an episode of King of the Hill in which one of Hank’s employees declares that he has OCD to get out of work by claiming a disability: “If I get out of this chair Garth Brooks is gonna die,” he says to a skeptical Hank.

There also exists a cultural idea of the disorder as focused on organization and cleanliness, and, reader, I am neither. Instead, my form of the disease has me replaying each worst-case scenario over and over and checking multiple times to make sure that I have navigated a situation appropriately in order to avoid a negative consequence. 

That doesn’t seem so bad until you consider that I was spending hours each day in an endless loop of checking. When I drove the car, I would have to circle back around to make sure I hadn’t hit anyone. When I read a text, I would have to read it again to make sure I fully understood it. When I talked to someone, I had to replay the conversation several times to make sure that I had been as compassionate, good, or kind as possible. When I woke up in the morning, I had to review the previous day to see if everything was OK; not once did my worst-case scenarios ever play out in real life, but they still held me captive.

For those 10 years, I prayed a lot and never found a bit of relief. It always felt that God was completely absent from my struggle with anxiety. One bit of scripture that did offer some solace was Paul’s “thorn in the flesh.” He asks God to heal this ailment — whether spiritual, physical or mental, we are not told — but God refuses. The text concludes with an enigmatic but comforting note: “Power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). What probably helped me the most was abandoning the idea of hell, or at least eternal conscious torment. With that out of the way, I at least didn’t have anxiety about eternity. Yet on the whole, my faith didn’t initially play an important role in my pursuit of healing.

But a shift began to happen as mental space opened up where a constant whir of worry and doubt had once resided. I began to feel more connected to God. When I was praying, I didn’t feel out of control — I felt held in warmth and light. That might not sound like a lot, but, after 10 years of keeping the secret of my anxiety from anyone, it was important to be accompanied by something bigger than me.

I had been doing therapy for a decade with little results, but things really began to change when I started meditating. I had always said that meditation was not for me. I didn’t understand the point. To this day, it is infuriating that sitting silently and trying to think of nothing is effective — it has no right to work, but it did for me. It turns out that emptying your mind as much as possible is a powerful remedy to the constant anxious activity that was persistently trying to hijack my life. 

Meditation helped me observe my own thoughts. As you meditate, there are steady distractions — your nose gets itchy, for instance. How, I wondered, do I deal with those interruptions? It only made sense to take advice from the religious group that practices meditation the most: Buddhists. If you look online in Buddhist community groups, there is plenty of talk about what to do when you feel itchy during meditation, and while there are many different ways of tackling that issue, the one that made the most sense to me was to observe the itch. Observing helps put distance between you and the sensation, and for me, this central idea helped guide me to a place of curiosity about my own thoughts as they arose, as opposed to panic. When I felt the strong pull to turn around and verify that I hadn’t in fact hit anyone with my car, I instead tried to be curious about it — why did I think of this now and not earlier in the drive? What values does it convey that I’m worried about hitting others with my car? That curiosity helped me see my thoughts less as defining me as a person and more like spam emails that my brain was sending me.

As I journeyed toward mental health, I came to appreciate the teachings that are found in the Bible in new ways. It was only through letting go of the illusion of control and my need to manage every worry and obstacle that I found peace. Not to sound like my Sunday school teacher growing up, but it is exactly how Jesus said: Whatever we cling to in this life, we will lose, and whatever we give up, we will gain (Matthew 10:39, 16:26; Mark 8:35; John 12:25). Actually, that seems to be a point where the Buddha and Jesus overlap. Whether you call it attachment, anxiety, or being a control freak, the only path to wholeness lies in giving up what you most want.

For years, I thought that religion and my struggle with anxiety and search for wholeness were not very linked, but that turned out not to be the case. Managing my OCD helped me see scripture and prayer anew. There’s a temptation for me to feel as if the past decade of my life were wasted, but I am more deeply grounded and resilient in my spirituality than I’ve ever been, and that feels like a hard-won beauty in this messy world. Sometimes, I even think I can become all flame.