Between Terror and Enlightenment

I once read the Tao Te Ching from cover to cover in a single afternoon. Sucked in and mesmerized, I had no words; simply, the truths of the Chinese classic resonated with my soul. This is how it is to flow with the universe. I emerged from my office as if to another world, my head swirling with the poetry of being. Everything felt alive, as if it were speaking to me, as if we were not separate, but deeply interconnected.

That night, ironically, the student philosophy club was meeting to discuss the use of psychedelic drugs to induce mystic experiences. As I walked down the cement stairwell to the basement classroom, I could not tell whether the world was full of indescribable beauty or indescribable terror. It seemed like both. The particles in the walls were speaking to me and closing in on me. As I sat in the meeting—at turns listening, speaking, and drifting away—I continued to alternate between these two states. As I breathed deeply, the world filled with enchantment. As my mind strayed, it eclipsed me. I felt powerless, crazy, and lost.

For the last four years, I have experienced panic attacks in this way. They are like a razor’s edge. On one side lies the divine—infinite peace, beauty, and wisdom. On the other side lies what is utterly mortal—fear, pain, and a deep sense of abandonment. The minute I let go of the one, I flip into the other.

I have often thought that this dual nature owed itself to the common origin of my strong panic attacks and my deep spiritual practice, which both began when I was accidentally hit over the head with a car trunk. This single event jarred my sense of reality. I could no longer find ground beneath my feet. The world was no longer in the same place, in the same shape as it had been. My mind scrambled without success to find something familiar and soothing, but I was nowhere at home.

All of my past traumas bubbled to the surface, leaving me naked to the inescapable discomfort of being. The doctors told me that if I wanted to heal, I needed to find a way to quiet my mind. There was no exit. All I could do was sit with it and breathe.

This simple action changed everything. I shifted into a new world, one full of wisdom and grace. The gods descended. My life filled with synchronicities; new possibilities opened before me. I found meaning at every corner, insight with every breath.

And this pattern continued. Each time I felt fear and faced it, my reality grew more beautiful. As I learned, this is a core principle of spiritual development; as we lean into pain, we find growth. As we break down areas of ignorance and resistance, our awareness expands, allowing more energy to flow through our world. And as we flow with this, as we learn to move more and more with the energies of the universe, we find more and more beauty around us.

Surprisingly, however, even as I made great progress in meditation and self-understanding, my panic attacks did not stop. In fact, they seemed to grow worse. I had more overwhelming attacks that threw me back to the first impact of the concussion, shattering my mind all over again. When I felt rundown and sick, I collapsed into days of constant smaller attacks that held me in a cloud of weakness, shifting between terror and revelation.

My health deteriorated, leaving my body less able to recover from stress. Just a small excitement could set me spinning into space, and it felt as though there was nothing to bring me back. This strange condition gave me a much closer look into panic attacks than I would wish for anyone. Yet, as I was presented with more and more opportunities to explore the relationship between terror and enlightenment, I grew convinced that their coincidence was much more than that.

During a panic attack, the mind and body come out of alignment. The “fight or flight” response can become dominant, while reflection and reason become harder to access. This is why embodied practices like grounding, imagery, and movement can help interrupt or settle a panic attack. They help to reintegrate the mind and body, bringing us back into balance.

But what happens if, instead of ending the panic attack by integrating mind and body, we end it by shifting into the state of disembodied mind? Or what if, unable to hold such a pure state for very long, we end up uncomfortably shifting between a state of divine insight and one of instinct and fear?

Over time, I began to realize that during a panic attack, not only did my mind imagine impending death, but my spirit seemed to begin to experience it. It was as if my spirit went rushing back to the white light, just as in death. As I looked more deeply, I realized: the moment trauma disengages the mind from the body, we have the unique opportunity to experience the light that always shines through us, without our everyday fetters. We catch a glimpse of what transcends our finite, embodied existence.

A friend recently asked if it didn’t sound cliché, or perhaps simply unreasonable, that her car accident was a profound spiritual experience. The insight that she gained had left her calmer, more at peace, in the months after that near-death experience than at any other time in her life.

I told her that this made complete sense to me. Although she processed the experience more quickly than most, the opportunity for the spirit to grow from trauma is there for all of us all of the time. When our body freezes in terror, the hands of the divine are right there to hold us. In fact, they are more keenly there than in any other moment of human experience, because everything else has been stripped away. The trick is to integrate those experiences that are profoundly finite and infinite at the same time.

I remember discussing Freud’s case studies in a graduate class on the philosophy of psychoanalysis. My classmates and I were struck by how some of his subjects, while struggling to function within their societies, seemed at times to perceive something about those societies that in retrospect looked startlingly prescient. Does psychological instability necessarily mean that the perceptions themselves contain no truth? Perhaps the failure can sometimes lie not in accessing truth, but in embodying it—in integrating experiences that are profoundly finite and infinite at the same time.

I wonder, too, about our world today—about our collective situation, about humanity itself. Have powerfully traumatic or oppressive situations caused us to divide into overly separate selves—one excessively embodied and materialistic; the other ineffectively transcendent and spiritual? I look at our recent collective history—slavery, genocide, world wars… I think of the slower-growing traumas of attrition—the extreme self-neglect and alienation of our post-industrial, techno age… And I think it is time for our collective grounding and breathing exercises. It is time for us to reintegrate our collective mind and body.

As I heal myself, I dream of our collective healing. How do you imagine it looks? How do you imagine it feels?

Just breathe, now. Breathe with me.—I think this is how it begins for all of us.