How to Be With How You Feel
In winter 2021, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, my husband felt a pain in his chest while at work that sent him to the hospital in an ambulance. I drove immediately to join him in the emergency room, only to discover that I wasn’t allowed to even enter the building. My husband’s health issue, compounded with COVID restrictions, led me to a period of anxiety unlike any I’d ever felt. (Thankfully, he recovered and is healthy.) Since then, I’ve experienced intense bouts of emotion—from sadness and anger to fear and grief—due to reasons both personal and global, provoked by war, raging domestic politics, the lagging pandemic, and the climate emergency.
If you, too, have had these sorts of varied and challenging feelings and are looking for some wisdom, please read on. Outside of my family’s support, my reliable superpower is my mindfulness practice.
“There is a lot to be depressed and anxious about and these are legitimate emotions,” says Dr. Chris Willard, a psychologist and author of the forthcoming book How We Grow Through What We Go Through. In the midst of both mundane and extraordinary struggles, Willard says, “Mindfulness can help you learn to tolerate, manage, and respond, rather than react, to negative emotions, but it will not get rid of them. We want to have our emotions be useful to us, not be overwhelming or destructive.”
So how can you use your mindfulness practice to navigate the challenges and pain that accompany difficult emotions, causing
