Where’s Your Nose

I’ve been trying to listen to guided meditations in the morning. I do unstructured meditations sometimes too, but they tend to do more harm than good. I get too deep in the muck and the mire, and my brain takes me to dangerous little places. But the guided meditations are perfect, because I have someone else’s voice to continually pull me back to reality.

Lately I’ve been… well, not in a good place at all. And because I’m me, I put myself in a position to receive a lot of negative feedback, twice, which didn’t help in that regard.

Enter Noah Elrief. Noah Elrief does a guided meditation that sort of blows me away with its simple message. It is aimed at anxiety, but I find that it works for its cousin, depression, as well. He talks about my favorite thing: how in the present moment there are no problems to solve. That our mind will wander and freak us out and make us think there are problems, but when we gently bring it back, we remember.

We’re safe.

We’re right here.

There are no problems.

This is reality.

“Where’s your nose?” he asks. “Where’s the problem?” Your nose is reality. The problem is not.

I’m sad.

Where’s your nose?

I do everything wrong and everyone hates me.

Where’s your nose?

Nothing will make this feeling go away.

Where’s your nose?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot the past couple of days, in between trying to sleep, and trying not to cry, and trying to keep myself distracted. Where’s my nose. I simultaneously spend too much time “out there” where all the yuckiness lives, and inside my brain where… well, where more yuckiness lives. So I try to remember my nose. My nose that just exists in reality. Not in the noise of my brain, and not in the noise of the world. It just… IS. And that’s where the peace is, grounded in reality, grounded in the present time, grounded in a place that’s safe.

It will change, to be sure, but right now thinking of that meditation (and my nose, of all the random things) helps a lot.

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2 Responses to Where’s Your Nose

  1. Hey Jen sorry to hear that you’ve been doing it tough lately. Depression sucks. I’m glad that you’ve got some strategies though that can help with moving through it.

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