What to Do When Anxiety Eclipses Joy
“Don’t let your throat tighten with fear. Take sips of breath all day and night, before death closes your mouth.” #Rumi
One of my beloved hobbies is foraging mushrooms, but last year I experienced a season where it was muddied with anxiety. I am confident in my identification and preparation of chanterelles, cinnabars, lion’s mane, and morels—all edible yummy shrooms. I had also heard of another type of edible, the lobster mushroom. It is a parasitic ascomycete fungus that grows on certain strains of mushrooms, turning them bright red, and when cooked fresh, is said to have a seafood like flavor. I was quite proud of myself for finding these mushrooms while out riding with a friend and gathered them in a bag and bringing them home on horseback. I was feeling like a true wild woman.
A friend and an elder mycological expert, the kind of expert who confirms mushrooms to the doctors in hospitals, let me know it was in fact an edible lobster mushroom. With her blessing, I sautéed them up in some garlic and herbs. My husband tried one bite and said, nope, not for me. I scoffed and started eating them, but quite quickly my throat started to be scratchy. I felt a burn. I wondered if the lobster mushroom had encrusted around a type of Russala mushroom that can taste peppery. Or, as I later researched, there have been other cases of food allergies to lobster mushrooms because of the quantity of iodine in the mushroom. Either way I started to panic. What had I done? I tossed out the mushrooms, felt my heart racing, got my epipen in hand (which is for bee stings) and paced around in an anxiety spiral that was not rational. I felt awful.
I took the dogs for two walks, one of which passed by some common death cap mushrooms growing in someone’s yard. Rather than pride myself on my ability to accurately identify (and not eat) the death cap mushroom, I panicked more, is this a sign I am dying, that I am seeing death cap mushrooms? So it is with anxiety, our thoughts become jumbled with false rationalizations, and it becomes challenging to hear the still, small voice of wisdom. After walking, I ended up doing all my go-to yoga therapy techniques, legs up the wall, rocking myself, rhythmic tapping, chanting and breathwork practices. It is amazing how one fear thought can work us into a dizzying tailspin. It can take laboring through many contractions and waves of anxiety before the peace gets birthed on the other side.
Once I settled down, still very much alive and kicking, I was in a self-doubt funk. I had experienced a rupture in my trust of myself, which is one of the cruelest side effects of perceived trauma and stress, even when the outcome is safety. Our brains often can’t tell the difference at times between a perceived trauma and an actual trauma. Even though I was completely fine, post mushroom mishap, my brain and body weren’t so sure. It took several weeks of getting back into my body, revisiting my daily practices, regulating and breathing to be able to rebuild a trust in my exploration of foraging and cooking.
I used to identify as being fearless and certainly engaged in some risky adventures in my late teens and early twenties. Ironically, being incredibly ill in the Amazon jungle and treated for a medical crisis in the middle of the rainforest where I didn’t speak the language, and thinking I was going to die on my first international trip hadn’t launched me into the same level of anxiety as this perceived threat. Sometimes our imagination of the unknown, and the story we tell ourselves in our mind about the fear, can be worse than the reality. And sometimes the aftershocks of self-blame is more toxic than the actual event. As I am getting older, I find my attachment to life being a bit more tender. I want to be here in this body, experiencing the world.
The payoff for anxiety is often limited. Where we might think dress rehearsing the tragedy and our anticipation of the negative outcomes is helping us, it is often trapping us. We are here to live, to be, and to experience life. Living in anxiety can feel like playing out our worst fears over and over rather than experiencing presence of the beauty and the life all around us. It can erode away our resiliency for when something truly challenging happens. Brene Brown names this eternal waiting for the other shoe to drop “foreboding joy.” Learning to tolerate new sensations as temporary visitors rather than threats has been helping in curbing anxiety’s intrusive snares. Mindfulness in the moment centers us back around truth.
I have since repaired my relationship with mushrooms and foraging and have gotten back to enjoying my meals and my taste exploration. I want to be present, to live my life now, not in fear, but in deep and abundant joy, play and exploration. If you have had moments or seasons of anxiety, I hope some of the videos on my YouTube page will be as helpful for you as these tools have been for me. And I hope you find joy in whatever you are foraging on your own journey of life.
