As a child I struggled with anxiety and fear, often catastrophizing. My mom would tell me that I was making a mountain out of a molehill. For example, I would wake up with a toothache and within seconds it became an abscess and the tooth would have to be pulled. Or, when the airplane took off, I was afraid the plane would crash.
Over the years, just remembering my mom’s phrase and her love and care for me would be helpful, though the catastrophizing did not totally go away.
How we make mountains
The psychology behind meditation helps us to see that the original discomfort or pain is always magnified by wanting it to go away. This was powerfully illustrated in a meditation workshop I took many years ago.
After the meditation, one participant said she noticed that she was sad.
The teacher asked “then what”?
The participant responded “then I noticed that I didn’t want to be sad.”
The teacher asked “then what?”
The participant said, “Then I felt even worse.”
The teacher then held up her fist and said her fist represented the initial feeling of sadness. She then made a circle with her arms to represent how much bigger the sadness became by wanting it to go away.
In one of my mindfulness courses, a college student was sharing how mad she had been when she had gotten home and her roommate had not done the dishes. This was an ongoing issue. The student stewed and thought, “I’m going to chew her out when she gets home.” Suddenly a thought arose in her head, “How big a deal is this going to be six months from now?" This mountain of anger suddenly became a molehill of irritation. While she did confront the roommate later, it became a conversation rather than a fight.
Pain at a meditation retreat
When I first began attending meditation retreats, I used a back jack floor chair, to support my back because I have a bad back (x-rays to prove it). One morning I got to the meditation hall and someone had taken the back jackI had been using. The molehill suddenly became Mt. Everest. There was no way I was going to make it through the 12 hours of meditation that day without back support. Fortunately, this was the ninth day of the retreat and I was able to bring mindful attention (curious and non-judgmental) to the pain that appeared in my lower back during the body scan meditation that was the standard practice at that retreat.
Because of the mindfulness, I was able to move from “pain,” which was simply a label, to the actual sensations which included: pressure, electrical energy, heat, a feeling of pulling, and an aching. As I brought a curious and non-judgmental attention to these sensations, they went from painful to unpleasant to simply strong sensations. During the next body scan, there was no pain in the lower back, just sensations. Since then I have not again sat with back support. While I occasionally have discomfort in the back while meditating, it’s pretty ordinary.
Thich Nhat Hahn’s first book was called The Miracle of Mindfulness. Almost every day we face things that are unwanted: a physical pain, an emotional pain, a task that we really don’t want to do, a situation that worries us. The miracle of mindfulness is that we can see the molehill growing into a mountain. With mindful awareness, we can see the mountain shrink back to a molehill, and sometimes actually vanish!
So I have found that mindfulness helps us to make molehills out of mountains.