I see her coming, feeling her closing in like a wave, drawing near little by little. I think she’s small, but turns out to be a frantic tsunami when she hits—incapable of listening, incapable of stopping.
I remembered what my meditation mentor told me when I consulted him about a recurring struggle. That day, he spoke softly and shared a secret.
“Do you remember Rumi’s poem, The Guest House?” Bert asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s the poem that has taught me the most.”
He gave me a knowing smile.
“After the demons strip the house of its furniture, a few linger behind. You serve them food and they soon depart. But there is one that does not leave. No matter what you do, it stays and wanders the house—not as a guest, but as a resident,” Bert smiled again. “With that demon, you sit down and have a cup of tea.”
I return to my meditation cushion. Seconds later, she comes back—raw, swift, volatile. She appears with an image of the place where the pain of my disorder began—my parents’ dining room table. I feel her crawling up my nervous system like a creeping nettle vine—stinging, yet yearning to climb toward the light. I began to believe I could sit down and have tea with her.
“Hello, anxiety,” I say, surrounded by silence, listening to my breath.
I am curious to see what she looks like, and suddenly, a rebellion of energy ignites before me, bouncing at full speed in every direction. Then, she is no longer in my childhood dining room. She ricochets off the walls of the apartment in Santurce I sold years ago, the place where I used to suffer panic attacks.
I watch her from a distance. For the first time, I realize that I am not the desperation.
“Hello, anxiety. I want to see you.”
Blurred and disorganized, she takes the form of many white bolts of lightning, and then, a massive, thick mane of hair whipped by high-speed winds, scattered across the space.
“Hello, anxiety,” I keep breathing, seated on my cushion.
I see her head buried in a thicket of hair, and closer now, her face. Her skin iss the color of computer paper; her eyes large and vacant, her cheekbones sharp, her lips full and parted. At times, rainbow lightning storms flash inside her eyes. Suddenly her head begins bouncing again, because anxiety has no body to anchor itself—it is a head driven by a tumultuous wind. She is made of air, of nothing. I invite her to sit with me in that dining room where we first met, and I serve her an imaginary tea.
Anxiety looks at me, then at her cup, which floats up to her face—since she has no hands to hold it—and she sips the tea. The cup floats back down to the table. She remains a hurricane, but around me, there is stability. I stare at her until I feel her chaos.
“Hello, anxiety,” I repeat.
She looks at me with those eyes of psychedelic absence, says nothing, and leaves…
I open my eyes. There is only a white wall in front of me. I feel only tranquility and the absence of something that had occupied my body for a long time.
I smile.
Bert had helped me identify her. During a meditation retreat, he realized that my body had begun to float off the cushion—not because I was enlightened, but because I was trapped by the anxious Medusa. My mind was detaching from my body in a whirlwind of anguish.
“Stay inside your body!” Bert told me, his voice firm and compassionate.
My body landed back on the cushion, and the tidal surge calmed. I learned to find an anchor within myself, and to ask: “What is happening right now?” And when I saw her, I learned to ask: “Can I sit with this emotion?” With the first question, I am present within myself. With the second, I am able to make space, opening my heart as wide as I can so the demons of The Guest House can pass through and find the exit toward their own liberation.
A Mystic Writer 