Mindfulness meditation made it possible for me to live, when nobody helped
By nature, I am a very anxious person. By training, I am pretty chill. I credit mindfulness meditation for giving me the option to live a different life. A life that is not completely consumed by my fears. I write this blog post with the same urgency I felt when I wrote “Fighting anxiety like my life depends on it” or my mindfulness-related 2025 New Year’s resolutions : the sense that I ought to convey, as explicitly and plainly as possible, how vital it is for some of us to rely on mindfulness in order to not waste our lives on fear. And I write with the hope that even those who do not struggle with a full-blown anxiety disorder might find it useful to reflect on their “sad passions” (as Spinoza would say). Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine, Gobolinks, or Shadow Pictures for Young and Old (New York: The Century Co., 1896). A bottle of ink falls to the ground and spills out ink patterns, in which one can see goblin-monsters. As far as I can remember,...