Mindful Moment

Posted on April 18, 2011 in Anxiety Imagination

Hands open, palms upward as I call the paradise within to mind. Oh that it were tangible, real! A gentle hill green with grass slopes away from me. My line of sight is clear in all directions. Blue sky swells above. A layer of clouds at my feet obscures that frantic world of freeways and streets and appointments. Wisps of these clouds break away and give substance to the empty firmament. Cool breezes and warm sunlight decompress my anxieties. There is no Internet here, no television, no reason to fear the intrusion of politics or aggressive media. You are not oppressed by the vexations of daily life. This place is away, beyond. The grasses stroke your tense limbs, neck, and scalp. The creak of mental torment gets sucked away into their roots and dissipates into the ground.

Here, I can be free and true to my own person. ((I’ve been suffering greatly from anxiety these last several days. The chief cause has been uncertainty about the economy and about the future of my health care. I failed to write this yesterday because an attack of nausea prostrated me. I took my anti-nausea meds and experienced a several hours long bout of diarrhea. Nothing that I ate seems to have precipitated this. When I set my mind to relaxation, I started feeling better. Nausea, they say, is a product of the brain, but new research suggests that a lot of our emotive processes lie in the gut. Could this be the reason why we eat food to calm ourselves and throw up when our fears shake us?))

This post is in response to Day 17 of the Health Activist Writers Challenge: “Mindful Moment”.