Practicing Mindfulness

I unfurl my lilac mat onto the vinyl flooring of the studio, centering it perfectly between my two neighbors. I move to one side to plop down and take a seat, only to get right back up when I notice that I have miscalculated the distance between my mat and the mirror in front of me. Too far. Shift it forward a bit. I exhale and sit back down. I go on as normal, talking to my friends who have seemingly not noticed my peculiarity. We have come here today, as we do every Tuesday, to practice yoga and engage in mindfulness, but sometimes, I fear that the last thing that I need is to be more immersed in my mind.

The instructor directs us to lie flat on our backs and allow our bodies to sink into the floor, imagining our mats are as form-fitting and comfortable as our bedroom mattresses. I recline back, releasing my arms to my sides and my palms to the sky, shutting my eyelids as if to go to sleep. We start our session, as always, with Pranayama, breathwork exercises and cycles of inhaling and exhaling to gain control and awareness of our bodies and minds. I inhale through the nose. I exhale through my mouth. I inhale to fill my belly. I hold my breath at the top of my chest for five seconds. I release to let my chest and then my belly fall. This sometimes works to keep my mind occupied, but today it does not. My mind jumps from thought to thought

What homework do I have to complete by the end of the week?

I’m going to be too busy this week to see my friends

They’ll have fun without me there

They all secretly hate me.

I attempt to stop the spiral in its tracks, to recenter my focus to my breath, but the idea nags at me.

Nobody loves you.

The O in OCD stands for obsessive. Obsessions may come in the form of “unwanted thoughts, urges, or mental images that you have over and over again” (WebMD). When I was younger, I believed that everyone thought this way, the same way I did — in never-ending circles. Thoughts ruminating through my head, sneaking up on me in any setting, inconsiderate of what I’m doing, who I’m with, or how it may affect me. “You may try to ignore them or stop yourself from having them, but you can’t” (WebMD). In my experience, the more I attempt to silence them, the more they pester.

“Now bring your knees to your chest and start rocking on your back for a massage.” The command brings me back to the present. As I draw my knees in and begin to rock in a circle, I become acutely aware of a pain in my lower back. When did that get there? I roll on the spot over and over, attempting to dig my lower back deeper into the ground for some relief. It persists, so something must be wrong. Seriously wrong. It’s early-onset arthritis.

I will live a miserable life, losing everything I care about until I die, and everyone I love will mourn me. Or will they?

I make a mental note to visit my favorite website after class, WebMD, to look up: “Lower back pain causes and treatments”.

We shift into our next pose, allowing our knees to settle to one side of our body, our arms to T out, and our heads to look over the opposite shoulder for optimal stretch. I modify the pose as usual, but not in a way that makes it easier for me. To avoid letting any of my limbs touch the bare ground rather than my mat, I hover my knees and my open arms an inch over the ground. If anyone takes notice, I’ll lie and say that I am working on building my core strength.

It's hard to single out precisely when my germaphobia developed. Whether it was innate or learned. I don’t remember it ever being this persistent though.

As we flip the same pose to the other side of our bodies for symmetry, which I greatly appreciate, my elbow briefly kisses the floor. I falter and let in a stark inhale, my eyes lock directly onto the exact spot where my elbow came in contact with the sticky vinyl. I collapse my pose and bring my arms to my side, where they can rest on the mat. The pose is over. I’m not doing it anymore. I use my thumb to press hard onto the contaminated spot on my elbow, an attempt to leave an imprint so that I know exactly where to scrub extra hard when I’m cleaning myself off later.

I glance down at my red, irritated hands, cracked and scaly like a reptile’s skin. So ugly. So unladylike. I stretch my fingers apart, and my knuckles begin to bleed in several tiny locations. Ouch. I know that my hands are one of the clearest visual indicators of my OCD, and yet I have found a way to hide that, too. “I have really dry skin,” I typically say as a half-truth when someone asks why my hands look this way. Full truth: my hands have been drained of their natural moisture as a result of the sheer amount of handwashing a day that I perform.

I don’t know whether it’s a cultural practice or a ritual started in my own household, but handwashing was drilled into my brain from a young age. You’re coming home from outside? You wash your hands. You’re about to cook? You wash your hands. You’re about to eat? You wash your hands. You just finished eating? You wash your hands. The habit was a good one to instill in a young child; It was definitely not intended to go this far. At some point in my life, something just switched in my brain. I started displaying the C.

The C in OCD stands for compulsive. Compulsions are “physical or mental acts you feel like you have to do, even though you don't want to” (WebMD). I probably spend about 30 minutes every day just washing my hands. I used to sing the ABCs as I hand-washed because I had heard that it takes that amount of time for a person’s hands to get fully cleaned. But over the years, as I sang it in my head, the ABC song became distorted. I’d often lose my place, having to start over again. Now, I don’t sing the ABCs; I just get lost in the motions while I handwash. In the time it takes me now, I could probably sing the ABCs three times. I do so without even thinking about it. It is routine. “They're usually related to an obsession; you may believe that by doing them you'll stop the unwanted thoughts or keep something bad from happening.” If I scrub my hands enough, I can scrub out the germs completely.

At some point during my time working as a counselor at a sleepaway summer camp, before leaving the cabin for mealtime, one of the children I looked after walked into the shared bathroom where I was. We began to have a conversation, locking eyes through the mirror as I stood facing the sink. The whole time we talked, I scrubbed my hands. In between my fingers, under my nails, up to my wrists, for the length of our 2-minute conversation. She interrupted herself, “Wow, you must have touched something really dirty.” I hadn’t. I chuckled in response, “Yeah.”

Finally, we get off our backs to begin our Sun Salutations. Everyone in the classroom pushes back into a downward dog from a plank position, lifting our butts to the air and moving through our breaths. I use my peripheral vision to match the speed of my friends next to me, though we are technically supposed to be focusing only on ourselves and our body’s personal needs. I find it satisfying to see our movements so in sync next to one another; it makes me feel closer to them. I meet their eyes in the mirror and we exchange a giggle, a reminder that maybe my friends do not, in fact, hate me. We walk our hands back to meet our feet and half lift our bodies into a flat back, table-top position. I adjust my spine, keeping in mind the corrections my instructor gave me last class. We reverse swan dive, our arms leading our bodies up to a standing position, where we set into our mountain poses for the next 30 or so seconds.

When I first started going to yoga, I didn’t understand the reasoning behind the mountain pose. What differentiated it as a yoga pose from just an upright standing position? Was it just a guided break incorporated into the middle of our session? I did not yet understand that the mountain pose is a challenge, one of the most difficult moments in the entire practice. It is active, not a designated time to rest, but a time to collect and harness one’s strength. Though it may look easy, connecting your mind and body while remaining perfectly still requires intense focus. The mind tends to wander most in moments of stillness, so successfully preventing it from doing so takes great willpower. While in the pose, you are prompted to think about every part of your stance, your body, and your energy. You pay close attention to your core, you release your jaw, drop all bodily tensions, and stand tall and firm like an immovable mountain. It makes you feel strong.

The mountain pose is now my favorite. I challenge myself most during this time to pause my brain’s endless loop. Today, instead of keeping my eyes closed in my mountain pose, I find a soft gaze at myself in the mirror in front of me. I look at myself, head to toe. I take in what I see but draw no conclusions. My frizzy hair, my double chin, my hip dips: all things that I would typically criticize and spiral about, in this moment, are nothing but a part of me.

30 seconds are up. I succeeded. We swan dive forward to return to our plank positions. It’s time to take our Chaturanga. I slowly lower my plank to my mat like a long-winded push-up, ending in a full-body hover over the ground before dropping my pelvis to enter an upward-facing dog position. My heart shines up toward the sky as if basking in sunlight. It is now at the forefront of both my mind and body. I begin to think about my relationship in the moment of stillness.

OCD, unfortunately, is not isolated in its impact. While it is felt most personally, loved ones and close relationships can also be deeply affected and impaired by it. ROCD, Relationship OCD, still features the obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior that define OCD, but they center around one’s relationship and partner.

My loving relationship of 5 years has weathered a lot as a result of my ROCD. It has been tried and tested by my mind a thousand times over. I constantly unwillingly interrogate myself, asking the same detrimental questions about my relationship: Is this the right relationship for me? Is this what true love feels like? This unbridled questioning has the potential to eat away at me for weeks at a time. From an outsider’s perspective, I may appear toxic: constantly doubting my partner and relationship, unsure, communicating perceived problems that may or may not exist. But I know this not to be a reflection of toxicity. It is just yet another occasion for my mind to play tricks and self-destruct with its intrusions and urges despite my own desires.

To add fuel to the fire, for 9 months out of the year, my partner lives 1,260 miles away from me. Therefore, I rely heavily on my memories of us to support our love, offering up the perfect opportunity for ROCD to strike and corrupt. When we are together in person, I am typically fully immersed in the present moment, unbothered and happy, but as soon as we are apart and I have time to dissect every second of our most recent interaction, the doubts creep in and problems materialize.

Like clockwork, before we are about to reunite, anxieties creep in, and I begin to feel uneasy. I forget how we are and how he makes me feel. Do we have fun when we’re together? Did he hold my hand the last time we were together? Have things changed since we last saw each other? I FaceTime him, attempting to concisely verbalize all my worrisome thoughts through my tears, shallow breaths, and panic. But he has learned this routine by now, he knows my concerns, my need for reassurance, and knows how to ease my mind. He exits the screen momentarily to return with a photo album in hand.

An anniversary present I compiled and gifted him as a souvenir of our love featuring some of our most special memories together. Taking a paddle boat out on a pond in the largest park in Madrid, surprising one another in our college towns, checking off our winter bucket list activities together, and learning to Salsa dance. Tears swell in my eyes and shame washes over me as I realize the ridiculousness of my questioning. How patient my partner is.

Coming out of our upward-facing dogs, the instructor walks us through the motions to reach our Warrior 2 poses. Both of my feet are planted firmly into the ground, my wide stance allowing for maximized balance. I always feel empowered while leaning into this position, maybe because of its encouraging name or because of the strength it musters in my body. I turn to face my reflection in the mirror once again. My thigh muscles bulging, my back straight with perfect posture, I look indestructible from the outside, yet my mind is capable of making me feel so helpless.

The D in OCD stands for disorder. Though it has been wrongfully misconstrued as a catchall label for a person who prefers their area tidy or has great organizational skills, OCD is not something to be trivialized or romanticized. It can permeate all areas of a person’s life and, unfortunately, can be a danger to it as well. OCD can appear differently in every person, resulting in different symptoms, and I count myself lucky. It truly takes a warrior to power through this.

I am suddenly made aware that 50 minutes have flown by as the instructor dims the lights to prepare us for the gradual return to our backs for Shavasana. I tuck my hair neatly behind my neck before lying down in my final resting position. Though it is rare, today, I find my comfortable relaxing position almost immediately. The gentle pitter-patter of rain landing on a glass window cuts in and out through the speaker as I begin to fall asleep.

Ten minutes feel like an hour. I wake up instinctively to the sound of the instructor’s soothing voice, half-consciously pushing myself into a seated butterfly position. She prompts us to gather all of the positive energy we summoned during our practice today and place it into our hearts. I’m glad to place it in my heart rather than my mind; my mind may feel overcrowded, but my heart can never run out of space. She leads us to bring our hands to our hearts and bow.

“Go in peace, namaste.”