Turning your attention to things that are happening right now around you—the feeling of a warm bath, the sweetness of a perfectly ripe peach, the sound of a mournful violin, the smell of a lover’s neck—is powerful and immediate. That’s what my instructor was drawing me to when she asked us to stretch to the point of discomfort and then narrowed our attention with laser focus to that sensation of oh-so-good pain. That’s why lying there, feeling my arms and legs and chest exist in the world, felt so relaxing. Because it also completely shut up the voice that constantly edits and punishes me.
And there’s another advantage to shutting the DMN down. When our ego is silenced, there is a dissolution of the relationship between self and other. We more easily enter a state of interconnectedness, a feeling that we belong to something—a society, a world that is bigger than us, that shares our essential humanity. That’s why it was so much easier for me to engage in visualizations where I was breathing loving energy out of my lungs and into the universe itself. This wasn’t just me submitting to hippie-dippie hypnotism. This openness was based in very real science.
Restorative yoga is just one way to slow down the DMN. Once you start searching, there are plenty of good mindfulness exercises that can “ground” you—get you out of your damn head and into the world. I started trying all of them out and asking friends what worked for them.
For some people, popping an ice cube into their mouth or eating a big bite of wasabi helps shock their systems into paying attention to a sensory experience. A journalist I knew had a lot of success tapping his face and hands. Lacey loves to focus on the rhythmic feeling of her feet hitting the pavement during a long walk or taking a swim in icy water. Another friend melts into a happy puddle when she covers herself with her weighted blanket.
Most of these exercises didn’t quite hit the spot for me, but I started to find ones that did. One of my favorites was mindful eating. In the past, I had always worked through lunch, my food magically disappearing between drafts. But now, I was slowing down and focusing on each bite. I paid close attention to texture and flavor, savoring it slowly. The item that unlocked the magic of this experience was, of all things, a chicken parmesan wrap from Pret a Manger. Not even a sandwich! The saddest vehicle of foods—a skimpy, cold, overpriced bodega wrap! But on this day, I was able to narrow my focus, laser-like, on the taste. In one bite, the sweet tang of tomato sauce. In another, ooh, creamy cheese. In another, the light crunch of breaded chicken. Every bite, with its new proportions of textures and flavors, was thrilling. With a little attention, that shitty Pret wrap morphed into the sweet nectar of the gods.
And there was one mindfulness trick that was like a giant emergency button I could whack in a crisis. While I was fighting with Joey about household chores one day, he slammed a lid down onto a dirty pot, and my triggered ass went from zero to a thousand and twelve. I hurled a spoon into the sink and yelled that it wasn’t my fault if he was an anal-retentive neat freak. As we started hollering at each other, a tiny part of my brain suggested I try a grounding technique I’d recently read about: counting colors. I whirled around the room and counted all the red things: a book cover, a board game, a flowerpot, a dress in a painting, a flower on a cushion. When I ran out of red things, I switched to blue. It seemed like a kindergarten technique, something to calm a toddler out of a tantrum, but I was shocked to find my brain clearing after just a few seconds. It was like turning a knob down on a speaker. Two minutes later, my virtuous rage had quieted somewhat. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Apologizing seemed like a decent option, also maybe washing the damn pot.
I had expected that curing my trauma would be like climbing a sixth-floor walk-up while hauling a suitcase: hard-won and painful. This revelation proved that second chances did not always have to be fought for—they could be taken in handfuls for free like after-dinner mints. Could I truly clear the fetid swamp of a past like mine with dandelions and butterfly stretches? Was it really that simple?
No, not exactly. But it was a start.
CHAPTER 21
The first restorative yoga classes I scheduled were blissful—an almost drug-like respite from my constant, vicious pain. So I scheduled more mindfulness classes. A generous, accessible meditation teacher at the Brooklyn Zen Center insisted to me that even the most practiced monks sometimes got lost and stressed during their meditations, too. I went to classes taught by a punk ex-addict covered head to toe in tattoos who wove brain science with ancient Buddhist thought. I even tried out fancy high-tech meditation pods, where I’d sit on ergonomically designed cushions in acoustically treated rooms while ambient music and electronic guided meditations played.
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These were all useful in some way, so I researched more and more services and activities I’d heard could help—anything nearby that I could afford.
First, I visited a friend who was an acupuncturist. She looked at the color of my tongue and told me I had too much heat.
“Should I drink…more water?”
“It’s not that you’re actually hot,” she said. “You just have too much heat in your liver. It’s not something I can explain in Western science. Just trust me on this one. How are you feeling?”
“I feel like I can’t concentrate. I have no energy. But I’m also anxious.”
She nodded and told me that she’d prick me in ways that would give me energy and peace. She wrote down a brand of Chinese herbal pills I could buy online, then stuck needles in my forehead and ears. She put one pin in my toe, and my thighs started to hum with a strange heat. “Whoa,” I squeaked. “My legs are on fire!”
“Yeah, that pin connects to your thigh chakras,” she assured me. “Now close your eyes and relax.” I tried to take deep, even breaths, but when I inhaled, it irritated the pin right under my rib cage.
The rest of that day I felt a little buzzed, as if I’d had a cup of coffee but with no comedown. Though I was extra focused, the effects of the acupuncture didn’t do much to puncture my mental pain. In the end, I visited her twice and appreciated her talent, but it just wasn’t enough.
Then there was the swanky sound-vibration studio in Tribeca where I went to experience a workshop on breathwork. Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist who guided thousands of LSD-laced psychiatric sessions, developed breathwork after the drug was declared illegal in 1968 and he needed an alternative for his patients. His invention, holotropic breathwork, is a fancy term for “hyperventilating until the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body are so whacked-up that you hallucinate.” Some people report having intensely cathartic experiences afterward, akin to those associated with hallucinogens. I’ve read accounts of people seeing images of dead family members or reliving their deepest traumas and walking away cleansed.
I sat in a large square with about a dozen other people, and we breathed in and out rhythmically for about ten minutes. After our instructor told us to resume breathing normally, I had a physical hallucination—like my body was floating off the ground. I savored this strange sensation as someone played a didgeridoo near my head. But I did not have a psychic breakthrough or meet dead people.
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