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).
As far as I can remember, I was a pretty anxious child. One time, in school, we did a martial arts class and the teacher “volunteered” me for an exercise: “try to get past me”, he said. The space delineated for this exercise made it so I could not run around him without touching him, which would have been my preferred method. Instead, I would have to wrestle with him if I wanted to get to the other side. The thing is: I couldn’t bring myself to even try. No matter how many times he said “Just try”, I just stood there doing nothing, as if there was an invisible force-field preventing me from even attempting to make contact and wrestle. In my mind, the situation was crushingly simple: he is a grown-up, you do not mess with grown-ups, and so he is a literally insurmountable obstacle. I was afraid of vague and terrible repercussions that I cannot quite articulate. I also thought: what is the point of trying, when failure is guaranteed? The teacher did not try to help me through this mental obstacle. He simply asked for another volunteer. (if memory serves)
In retrospect, I find my behaviour to be very similar to another form of shyness I regularly witnessed in school (though at the time, I could not relate to it at all). It is the shyness of the students who spoke so quietly that teachers would have to ask them to “please, speak up” “please, speak louder when you read, for the entire class to hear”. They were usually girls. Most of the time, these shy students would start speaking again, exactly as quietly as they did before! Or louder in a way that was barely noticeable. They were simply unable to take up that space. I bet that when they spoke quietly but slightly-louder, they felt like they were shouting. And the teachers had no idea how to coach these kids out of this false perception. (in the comedic movie Nos Jours Heureux, a camp counselor starts yelling furiously at a young woman who fails to get over her shyness in this way, and I thought that portrayal was both horrifying and very true to the dynamic at play in those awkward moments. I couldn’t help but feel some sick satisfaction when seeing a teacher finally snap at this particular brand of delusion but, obviously, far from being a solution, this reveals something rotten about our culture).
I was not too shy to speak loud enough but I can relate with how anxiety gives us a completely warped view of what is and what is not possible to achieve. How it highlights the risks inherent to trying something, and downplays the risks inherent to not-trying.
As a very anxious person, there are many things that I never attempted until quite late in early adulthood. Things as simple as getting out of the house on my own. Thankfully, I now know how to do that, and many other things. But to this day (32 years old), there are still many things that I have never done and would find quite difficult to do: I have never been to a restaurant without my parents, never been to a music concert, never learned how to drive, never been abroad... Those things, somehow, fell through the cracks of potential education & mentorship, and anxiety got the best of me.
My father noted how strange it was that the boys of my generation were on the computer all day, instead of playing outside of the house, without parental supervision, like he used to do as a child. But at the same time, he himself was on the computer all day by this point, and he was very clearly of the generation of parents who feared that letting children play outside by themselves would make them vulnerable to kidnappers. He wasn’t pushing for an alternative. On the contrary. So I stayed inside. And the fear of the outside grew and grew.
To give only a second example, teachers at school were noting how strange it was that children like me seemed like they were going to the gallows when there were any exams. “It’s not the end of the world, what do you have to be so fearful about?” But at the same time, they took academic failure very personally (someone who didn’t do their homework was someone who challenged their authority, they thought), which was very scary to us (being scolded feels extremely dangerous when you are young) and at no point did they challenge the “career-decision” model of education. No alternative. Again, the potential mentor bemoaned the results of the status quo that they actively participated in.
I was not lucky enough to receive proper mentorship, or to have a level of anxiety low enough as to make these matters trivial when I took them up as a late-bloomer.
Mindfulness meditation, which I learned about through the internet, was a crucial turning point in my life. With this extremely simple philosophical exercise, which asks of you to pay attention to the present moment without following your every train of thought, you can defuse a lot of maladaptive patterns of thinking. You create space between what you notice and how you react. And in that space you can reclaim your life. Archimedes said something to the effect of “give me a single point of leverage and I shall lift up the whole world”. In the same way, this humble, non-judgemental, present-focused, psychosomatic approach of mindfulness is enough to upend the entire life-world of the anxious mind. If anxiety is a hydra, mindfulness is the trick that consists in cauterizing its wounds with fire so that its heads may not multiply when you fight against the monster. It is highly effective.
Anyway, many people, all over the internet, and in many useful books, have explained what mindfulness can do against anxiety and how it can lay a proper foundation for a non-superstitious spiritual life. I don’t want to rehash that sort of description right now. All I cared about was to approach the issue in a way that people might not have thought of.
It may strike you as strange that I talk about “mentorship”. Nobody ever talks about “mentorship” as far as I can see! Teachers, parents… I had those. But I never had a mentor to snap me out of anything. There is something weird about our culture. So, yes, in that vacuum, I find myself issuing a fervent warning about lifestyles. The warning is simple: it is possible to completely waste our lives on an excessive amount of fear, sadness, and anger. In an ideal world, somebody around you would steer you in a better direction. We call that Help. When mentorship fails, people turn to the internet, where they start learning things in private, to be able to cope with the world. We call that Self-Help. That self-help can be incredibly toxic: it can present problems as solutions and solutions as problems. Take a look at the manosphere to convince yourself of that. But what good does it do to dismiss “self-help” as a whole? As if it were inherently flawed, inherently individualistic and misguided? Self-help is all you have, when people around you fail to help because society has failed to properly set up traditions of education and mentorship. In those conditions, it is a thousand times better that the people who need self-help receive proper philosophical exercises, rather than whatever intensifies their feelings of fear, sadness, and anger. I count myself among the lucky ones who received something actually useful. As close to a silver bullet as you are ever going to get.
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, last time, we explored the wonders of bird-watching. Another time, we experimented with learning wise sayings by heart, for example the Sermon on the Mount. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!
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(01/04/2026)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
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Twitter: @PhiloTranquille
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