by Donna Kaishu Quesada

The night I saw "The Aviator" with Leonardo DiCaprio, I came out of the theater with tears in my eyes, and I’m not one to cry at the movies. In DiCaprio’s realistic portrayal of Howard Hughes, I saw how bad obsessive-compulsive disorder can become. No one knew that Hughes was too petrified of germs to touch anything, too terrified of contact to leave his room. As I watched, I couldn’t help thinking I might be looking at my own future on the screen.

I don't have five-inch long fingernails like Hughes did, but OCD comes in many varieties. Sleep was the polestar of my existence. I worried unnaturally about what would happen if I didn’t sleep or sleep enough; I imagined I would be enfeebled to the point of incapacitation and sickness. No matter where I might be, I needed to get home by 11 p.m., a compulsion akin to Cinderella's, only worse. If I were out with my husband, I would watch as he lingered over goodbyes, cringing at any lightheartedness and laughter that might mean longer farewells.

As my family life suffered, I finally went looking for help.  I found a therapist who used Buddhist teachings in his approach. A fast and easy amity ensued.

At the time, I had only recently begun practicing at the Hazy Moon. I had never participated in a sesshin, or meditation retreat, for obvious reasons. A retreat would mean the annihilation of every single routine I had so zealously erected in my irrational defense. I would have to share a room, not with one person, but perhaps with four, and one or more of them would probably go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and they would flush the toilet!

My new therapist cheered me on and told me not only to participate, but to do it as often as possible. It was the perfect "exposure," he said, which in appropriate doses is a means of diminishing the power of the thing feared.

Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind exhorts students to exhale away the "small self," along with its fears and angers. To sit even a short time is to become intimately acquainted with this small self. In my case, it’s the self that complicates everything, the self with the picking and choosing mind, pushing her fearful and ritualistic agenda on the world. Interestingly, the more I sat, the more I also became acquainted with a bigger self. This equable self was readily adapting to the brigade of discomforts, worries, pains, concerns and thoughts—lots of thoughts—that marched in and then right on out again, as if through a revolving door. Sometimes, the rowdy brigade wouldn’t come at all.

Committed to my own recovery, I also attended one of those popular seminars on the theme of creating the kind of life you always dreamed of. The hopeful audience in the airless hotel meeting room was told to imagine their desires fulfilled. After being pumped up with dance music in a pep-rally atmosphere, we were urged to hug each other and visualize our ideal reality. Our perfect future need only be conceptualized. I participated; I projected my wish into the universe—a wish for a fearless future. We were told we could have, and be, and do, any thing we desired. We were told we were “awesome.”

Zen told me that I was never what I thought myself to be. And it called me back to the ordinary, rather than toward my fantasy of a certain kind of future at a certain point in time. While I pondered the possibility of willed fearlessness, I continued to sit zazen, and while I sat, I discovered that when I’m here, and truly engaged in this present moment, I can respond appropriately to whatever life demands of me, even if it’s unexpected or unpleasant. I began to see that there was no need to fear what may or may not happen in the future. And as I was learning simply to be, I was slowly transforming,

When I finally attended my first weekend sesshin, I surrendered control, gave up every measure of security and welcomed not knowing. I didn’t know whether my roommates would snore, get up in the middle of the night or rustle the covers in their sleep. I didn't know whether dogs would bark or car horns would sound. I didn’t even know what time alarms would go off. Not only did I give up security, I realized I never had it.

An eager trooper, I took my newfound aplomb on a midnight flight to attend a wedding that would continue until the rooster crowed. Armed with advice that Nyogen Roshi had given—to act as if I were enlightened—I abandoned my agenda and marched onward with arms swinging. My teacher knew that acting as if would destroy my old habit-energy, extinguishing my old fears through direct experience with new behavior. It was through reconditioning myself that I began to feel truly liberated. I was dealing with the present by living in it. I had achieved my wish by wishing for nothing at all.

Donna Kaishu Quesada is an instructor in the department of philosophy and social sciences at Santa Monica College. She also blogs as Donna Quixote.