Iam sitting in the large conference room when I feel the panic slowly rise like a wave in my chest. A person is talking, but I can’t focus on their words. I focus solely on the muscles of my face; I must not show my colleagues that I’m seconds away from having a full melt down, gotta keep it cool. I smile and quietly excuse myself. As I make my way to the lobby elevators of the 30-something-story high rise, I concentrate on my gait — gotta look relaxed and cool just in case anyone is watching me. I enter the elevators and begin taking deep, labored breaths. I check my pulse and count while looking at the stopwatch app on my cell phone. 120 bpm, something must be wrong.

I’m desperate for the elevators to reach the bottom. After an eternity, I reach the ground floor. The doors open. I begin praying that I don’t run into someone I might know, a colleague who may be returning from a late lunch around the corner. With my last shred of will, I put on my calm-face, but walk swiftly out the doors into the streets of midtown NYC. I hurry across the crosswalk to Bryant Park where I can disappear into the crowd and safely begin hyperventilating.

I call an Uber and a feeling of shame washes over me and mixes with the panic, a bitter cocktail of suffering. I know where I’m going to go and I know how foolish it is to go there: New York Presbyterian Hospital where I can spend the next six hours finding out that 1)I’m not actually having a heart attack and 2) I’m just having another panic attack. On a rational level, I’m aware of this because I’ve done this six times in the past nine months. And yet, the panic does not abate in the face of such facts; maybe they missed something last time, I just know I’m going to die, I can feel it.

My six hours in purgatory go exactly as my rational brain expected. No heart attack. No reason for concern. Just another day dealing with my secret anxiety disorder. I arrive home late and sink into despair. I am a hostage of my own mind and there appears to be no escape.

I hope to illustrate with the above that I know what anxiety and panic are. I battled my own mind for nearly two grueling years while managing to hide what I was going through from everyone I knew, except my wife and one close friend. I know what it’s like to be functional yet disordered and the unique sense of isolation that dynamic causes that is almost as bad as the anxiety itself.

I’m writing this piece now because my recovery story doesn’t sound like popular recovery stories I read about, at least not those with origins in the The West and I think I have a perspective to share that might actually help someone who may be wired similarly to me.

(Before I begin the next part my story, however, I want to be clear, I am in no way, shape, or form advising people against forms of treatment that feel right for them. That includes taking medication, in-patient/out-patient programs, CBT, or any other mainstream medical techniques that help people deal with and/or overcome their mental health issues. I speak from my experience alone and do not assume that what works for me works for everyone. There is plenty of mental health stigma as it is and I do not wish to add to it. )

Some of the details of my recovery are common: I did go to therapy, I did start a meditation practice, I did employ some common CBT coping methods. But my recovery really began when my fundamental orientation towards my anxiety shifted, when I allowed it to become a part of my spiritual journey, and when, yes, I allowed things to get a little woo-woo. The seed of my recovery was not a psychological technique, a medication, a prayer, or a meditation. It was listening to an intuition coming from my depths, which urged me to find meaning in my suffering.

In my opinion, meaning is tragically undervalued in the West in general, but especially when it comes to mental healthcare. At least from my perspective, the culture was always encouraging me to erase my anxiety through medication (I feel the need to stress, again, there is nothing wrong with taking medication) or through psychological techniques that emphasized erasing anxiety symptoms. Even deep trauma work was sometimes framed in such a way that suggested the primary benefit was diminished anxiety, not learning something profound about who or what I was. The orientation towards symptom relief is fine, I’m not judging it, it just didn’t work for me.

Because I couldn’t find myself exclusively in mainstream methods I retreated into the woo-woo that many secular intellectuals scoff at: Jung’s Liber Novus, Abdi Assadi’s fantastic self-published autobiography exploring the relationship between psychology and spirituality, YouTube videos about spiritual non-duality, and others. Here I found my kindred spirits, a lineage of wise souls pointing at true Freedom, not simply the abatement of symptoms. Eventually I knew, intuitively, that my spiritual quest went through anxiety, not around it, that the way towards the Light was through the darkest cloud.

This merging of the spiritual and psychological was not a way to bypass the psychological work. I’ve discovered that’s it’s common for people to use spirituality to avoid facing squarely their own psychology — that is not what I’m suggesting, quite the opposite actually. To illustrate, my first task, prescribed by my friend Abdi, was to sit with my own anxiety and feel where it manifested in my body, without judgment, for just five minutes a day. Just five minutes of facing anxiety head-on, no distractions. How hard could it be? It was through this practice that I learned the difference between simple and easy. Almost immediately, I saw that my anxiety was ever-present and that my perceptual awareness of it during these short meditations was merely the tip of the iceberg. My panic attacks were not just symptoms of neurons going haywire or the wrong chemicals being released in my brain but were me bumping against the cold mountain deep below the surface of my awareness. Sitting with the immense heaviness of that fear for just a few minutes was nearly intolerable, but I persevered. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was actually practicing was a form of vipassana meditation, an ancient technique that puts the focus of awareness on bodily sensations, allowing them to arise and then pass on their own accord.

This simple technique of watching the anxiety in my body rise and fall (but mostly rise) led to the first of many humbling realizations: I was completely disconnected from my body at the level of feeling and that the prospect of being connected to it was so frightening, for some reason, that I couldn’t bear it without help — professional help.

One of the greatest graces of my life is that I found a good therapist, a person named Allison, who was willing to help me take the voyage on my own terms. She created a safe container for my trauma, but she also never coddled me, never lied, and never let me get away with lying to myself. She, perhaps more than any other person, helped me save myself. I know not everyone has been as lucky finding a good therapist as I was. Two years after our final session together, I still have not found a proper way to say “thank you”.

During my initial consultation with Allison, I explained to her that my reason for being there had deep spiritual significance to me and that I wasn’t interested in simply getting rid of the anxiety. I told her I had to know what was beneath it and that I was pretty sure we’d be exploring paradigms that deviated substantially from modern psychoanalytic theory. Rather than trying to dissuade me or push me into something more traditional, she agreed to trust what my guts were telling me — this was the first of many gifts from her that can never be repaid.

Therapy, especially the form in which I was called to engage, was slow and arduous. It was the most humbling process I’ve ever experienced. I learned that I was profoundly disassociated from my own body and, as a result, had the emotional IQ of a cardboard cutout. I felt inept in ways that challenged my self-concept, which forced me to face my own sense of unworthiness and ugliness. For the first year, before every session, I felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin, the anxiety was so intense. And, it certainly didn’t feel like a linear process. In the thick of it, it often felt like two steps forward, three steps back. Only looking back did I see it was the other way around.

Concurrent with the therapy, a meditation practice was organically emerging despite difficulties. It turns out, I wasn’t a “good meditator”. The peace and calm that all the self-help gurus and yoga teachers promised didn’t come at first. Instead it was waves upon waves of anxiety coursing through my upper back and through my neck. Sometimes it was near constant. But slowly, I learned to endure it and eventually for longer time periods than just five minutes.

Over time, there were moments between anxious thoughts and anxious energies, a gap. And within that gap was peace and silence and stillness. When I first noticed this, my immediate reaction was to grasp at it, which of course made it vanish immediately. Eventually, however, I started to realize that this gap — or rather, the noticing of this gap — was the pure awareness from which all my experiences, including the anxiety came from. Over the years, I’ve learned that spiritual practice can be seen almost entirely as a series of confrontations with paradoxes. This happened to be a big one: the source of my anxiety was peace.

It would be a neat and tidy story if this simple insight cured my anxiety instantly and that I never had another panic attack, but that’s not how it went for me. Sometimes spiritual insights have the quality of epiphany, a strong wind that blows away the storm, but, more often, they have the quality of a seed. In my case, the seed grew slowly, imperceptibly sinking its roots beneath the level of my conscious awareness before blossoming in an overt way where I could point to it and say “ah, there it is! that flower I’ve been growing”

If I’m honest, I’m only now beginning to appreciate the full fragrance of what I’ve grown. I am two years from my last panic attack and my relationship to anxiety looks a lot different than what it did five years ago. I look back on my anxiety disorder, not as an ailment, but as a gift, an invitation to turn inward, what the spiritualists call fierce grace.

“Grace” and especially “faith” are words that we secularists sometimes regard with mockery or even scorn. We may even be embarrassed to admit to ourselves or others that we perceive these things as playing roles in our lives. But for those who may be struggling who also have an unshakable yearning to find meaning through their suffering, I invite you to take a leap of faith, the biggest leap of faith you’ll ever take: trust yourself. Sometimes when it feels like you’re falling apart, it’s really you falling together.