The Word

I experienced vicious panic attacks as a teenager. I’d curl up on the floor—it felt like I was being stabbed in the gut with a knife.

My parents took me to our family doctor. After diagnostics… I can still remember the doctor’s face as he leaned on his desk and said: “There’s nothing physically wrong with you. The stomach pains are from worrying.”

Immediately after he said that, I experienced two feelings almost simultaneously. The first was shock and disbelief; but just after that, I knew, without knowing how I knew, that he was right.

Even when leaving his office I felt a little more at ease.

I’ll backtrack a little… Growing up, throughout my “education,” there was always a subtle background feeling that something was “missing.” That “learned knowledge” was just people repeating what they had been told. 

Then I heard what I had been unknowingly waiting to hear.

The word came in a magazine article. In an interview with John Denver, he said that he’d never been happier since he discovered Zen. (That was the first time I’d heard the word “Zen.”) When asked what Zen meant, he replied, “What is, is.”

I had no idea what that meant, but I put down the magazine, biked to the bookstore and returned with a stack of Zen books.

Reading and pondering those books daily put an end to the panic attacks.

Maybe forty years later, I realized with absolute certainty that all our problems are from mental resistance to “what is.” We want what cannot be changed to not be as it is.

“You are free once you understand that your bondage is of your own making and cease forging the chains that bind you.” 
-Nisargadatta Maharaj