What Thich Nhat Hanh taught me about mindfulness

In the fall of 2017, I moved into a delicate green Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. I recently left Chicago after a year of work, even though I felt like I had escaped.

At the time, I was struggling with an overwhelming battle with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder that I desperately wanted to solve. I had hoped that San Francisco, with its views of the Pacific, endless green parks, and people from almost everywhere, would give me the space to steer my life in a sunnier direction.

I left my suitcases in the modern apartment and decided to go outside. But as I walked around the neighborhood, passing a enormous purple mural of Jimi Hendrix, I couldn’t appreciate my modern home. I was too focused on wanting my intrusive thoughts to stop.

My OCD is not what you see in the movies. I don’t check the door or wash my hands eight times before leaving the house. For many OCD sufferers, including myself, it is a more internal phenomenon: irrational thoughts enter the mind and remain there, festering.

The circular thought I experienced before this mural was absurd: that I would never live the life I wanted because I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything except… well, worrying.

But in this vintage Victorian house, I met Nate and we quickly grew from roommates to friends. We played guitar in the living room, prepared homemade hummus desserts, and explored our ongoing departures from the Judeo-Christian faith in which we grew up. Moreover, Nate was a meditation teacher and gradually he became mine.

Early on, he introduced me to the book “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh, the overdue Vietnamese Zen master who popularized Buddhist meditation and mindfulness in the West. The classic, his second of more than 100 titles, is celebrating 50 years in circulation.

Thay (the Vietnamese word for “teacher” and as Thich Nhat Hanh is often called) offers plain steps to inner harmony in the midst of uncertainty and discord. His teachings are based on mindfully appreciating the present moment, no matter the circumstances. In “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” he wrote: “Meditation is not avoidance; it is a serene encounter with reality.” When I first read this, every day felt like one endless trial of avoidance. I tried to control the intrusive thoughts – that I would drive into oncoming traffic; or that if I didn’t pray before eating, I made a moral mistake – using logic, facts and statistics. But doing so only perpetuated the anxiety.

Now I know many people have these thoughts. The difference is that for people without OCD, these thoughts are fleeting. However, for people like me, especially those who have not undergone treatment, these thoughts persist, even though we often understand that they make no sense.

OCD took away the joy from the smallest and purest moments in life. My anxious mind didn’t allow for a tranquil morning coffee with Grandma, the jovial celebration of a winning touchdown, or the peace of reading a book in bed.

OCD makes you intolerant of any uncertainty. If something terrible is likely to happen, your mind tells you that it probably will. This feeling is like beating the drum of an imperceptible army, promising to stop its advance only when all unpredictability has been quelled.

One afternoon I was sitting in Nate’s radiant room and he told me that Thich Nhat Hanh had taught me how to be present by focusing on my breathing. The breath connects our body with our mind, he wrote in “The Miracle of Mindfulness.”

So we started there together. One crisp and foggy morning, Nate and I woke up early before work and sat on the back steps in hoodies and sweatpants. He told me to close my still watery eyes and he did the same.

“OK,” he said. “Start focusing your attention on your forehead.”

I did. I waited. A sea gull squawked in the distance. “Refocus,” Nate said. “Notice how this feels.” I did. I slowly scanned each part of my body, with Nate’s guidance, focusing my attention on my torso, inflexibleto my arms soreuntil my hands chilledthen legs, toastyand finally my feet, grounded.

After a few days, I began to feel a space opening up, a millisecond of clarity between the thought and my reaction. “It’s not about chasing it away, hating it, worrying about it, or fearing it,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh in The Miracle of Mindfulness. “So what exactly should you do about these thoughts and feelings? Just confirm their presence.

The more consistently I practiced, the more I began to notice that the peace carried over to my inner dialogue as well. I felt like, for the first time in years, I could imagine a future that I thought was normal. Often in the evenings, lying in bed, I would listen to Thay’s speeches on YouTube and fall asleep to his voice. “The seed of suffering within you may be forceful,” he says in one, “but don’t wait until you’re no longer suffering before you allow yourself to be elated.”

I was waiting for my life to turn from black to white. I waited until I could date and find a girlfriend to finally take the step towards a fulfilling career and book trips to see vintage friends until I felt completely healed.

But Thay taught that happiness can be found in the gray. In “The Nook” – the closet that Nate and I had transformed into a comfortable meditation space – I continued to follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s voice: “As I breathe in, I know there is anxiety within me. As I exhale, I smile at my anxiety,” he said.

It’s been eight years since Nate first introduced me to The Miracle of Mindfulness, and my practice – combined with a consistent schedule of therapy and medication – has changed the way I experience the world every day. My mindfulness meditation never ends and most likely my OCD won’t either, but the former has dramatically alleviated the latter.

Last month I spent an afternoon at Deer Park Monastery, an enclave founded by Thay 25 years ago in the hills of Escondido, California. Together with my dad, uncle and cousin, I met Brother Phap Luu, a monk from Novel England.

The five of us sat together and talked about Thay’s teachings. As it turned out, Brother Pap Luu started his own practice while struggling with existential despair. He told me that Thay himself discovered the age-old practice of mindfulness during his own experiences with depression.

As I was leaving the monastery, Thay’s words came to my mind: “A lotus will never grow without mud.” Then my excitement gave way to anxiety. I wondered if I could do a retreat in Novel York, how I could expand my daily meditations, how many Thich Nhat Hanh books I should read. But then I remembered what had led me to this moment: taking each moment at a time, one breath at a time.