Equanimity and Mindfulness - What Wouldn’t Leave My Mind

Before the crash, mindfulness had already helped me. It had helped me slow down, notice the things that kept returning, build my habits more carefully, and catch certain emotions before they turned into action.

That was real, but compared to what came later, it was still the easier version of the work. It is one thing to practice mindfulness when your life is functioning well enough that you still feel like yourself. It is another thing entirely when your body is healing, your emotions are unstable, your mind is recovering, and your normal life has been shut down. Whether it comes through injury, grief, stress, loss, or some major life disruption, the work can become a lot harder.

That is where mindfulness changed for me. A couple of months after I got home from the hospital, after I had started recognizing my gratitude to the people who were supporting me, the rebuild became more real. It was not all at once. It took time and energy I did not fully have yet, but it was constant.

I still could not drive, so I had to deal with how frustrating that was. My mother was staying with me to help, and I was attending the early release recovery program through Alberta Health. My life felt much smaller than it had been before. I was limited, much more dependent, and if I am being honest, I had become fragile in a way I was not used to. Physically and emotionally.

In that kind of life, your mind has room to get very loud. That was one of the hardest parts.

Even though I had survived, been released from the hospital earlier than expected, and was noticeably recovering, there was still a lot inside me that would not settle. Especially the negative feelings. Fear, shame, grief, embarrassment, confusion, anger, and regret all came in waves. Some of it came and went. Some of it just stayed.

When your normal structure has been stripped away, thoughts have a way of getting louder. There were things I could not stop thinking about. The stupid choices that ended in a crash I cannot remember. What I had done with alcohol and what it nearly cost my family. The things my son might one day understand about all of it. The kind of man I had been, an alcoholic and an avoider, and the kind of man I might still become.

That is where the old mindfulness work came back, but differently. Before, box breathing had been helpful. After I got home, living with confusion and weaker emotional control, it felt necessary.

Not because it fixed everything. Not because it made me peaceful. It certainly did not erase the things I had done or the consequences that followed. It did something smaller than that, but that smaller thing mattered. It slowed things down enough that I did not feel completely run over by my own mind.

After the crash, my emotional control was weaker than it used to be. The distance between a thought and a reaction felt shorter. The distance between a feeling and a spiral felt shorter too.

So I went back to box breathing.

It was not a theory or a nice wellness idea anymore. It became a practical reset.

Inhale for 5.
Hold for 5.
Exhale for 5.
Hold for 5.

Repeat.

That breathing gave me just enough space to stop everything from stacking so quickly. After I did it, I started capturing the things that would not leave my mind. That became one of the real beginnings of restarting the rebuild.

Writing things down did not solve everything, but it helped stop the thoughts from swirling around unchallenged. If a thought kept returning, if a feeling kept pressing forward, or if a fear would not let go of me, I captured it by writing it down.

That mattered because after the crash, my mind did not need more fog. It needed places to put things.

Capturing thoughts through writing gave them somewhere to go. The breathing gave me the space to notice them, and equanimity gave me a reason not to obey every one of them. That combination helped in a much harder setting than before.

That is one of the things I want to say clearly in this entry. Mindfulness is not the same thing in every season of life. When things are relatively stable, mindfulness can feel like sharpening. After everything fell apart, mindfulness felt more like survival. Earlier in these entries, mindfulness helped me notice what needed building. Now it was helping me sit with what had already broken, which is a different and much harder kind of work.

When you are rebuilding after real damage, whatever caused it, what keeps returning to your mind is not always a useful habit idea or a small improvement. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes it is humiliation. Sometimes it is fear, regret, or the memory of what you nearly lost.

Mindfulness does not get to be romantic in that kind of setting. It becomes blunt.

For me, writing things down helped me start dealing with them. The questions I asked myself and wrote in my journal were simple, but they mattered.

What keeps returning?
What feeling is sitting underneath it?
What part is truth?
What part is fear?
What part still needs acceptance?
What part still needs action?

Those questions helped rebuild the work.

I do not mean I did it perfectly. I most certainly did not. Some days the breathing helped and clarified something. Other days it just showed me how full my head still was. Even then, it was doing something useful, because it was showing me what was actually there.

That is one of the hidden strengths of mindfulness. It does not always make you feel better right away. Sometimes it feels like it fails completely. But most of the time, it makes you more accurate, and accuracy matters when your emotions are unstable.

If you are not careful, pain will tell you stories that sound true just because they are loud. Mindfulness helped me hear those stories more clearly. Once I could hear them more clearly, I had a chance not to let them run everything.

That is where mindfulness and equanimity fit together so well. Mindfulness notices what is happening. Equanimity helps you remain steady enough not to be ruled by it.

Without mindfulness, I might have stayed flooded without language. Without equanimity, I might have noticed the emotion and still let it drive badly. Together, they helped me begin again.

Not in some dramatic movie moment. Quietly. I was stuck at home, unable to drive and dependent on help. I was trying to heal and trying to become someone worth the second chance I had been given. That is what this entry means to me.

Mindfulness was not easier after the crash. It was harder. Honestly, much harder. Because it was harder, it also became more valuable. It was one of the first things that made the rebuild of the old system feel possible again. Not because it gave me strength I did not have, but because it helped me work honestly with the strength I still did have.

Breathing, then capturing what kept returning to my mind. Simply. With a pen, some honesty, and enough steadiness to notice what would not leave.

That was not the whole rebuild.

But it was one of the first true steps back into it.

Designing Restart

Breathe First. Capture What Stays.

Here is what I want you to take from this blog entry.

When life gets badly disrupted, your mind will most likely get louder before it clears. That is normal. It does not mean you are failing, and it certainly does not mean every thought showing up over and over deserves to be trusted. It means your mind is trying to sort through more than it can easily hold at once.

Mindfulness does not need to solve that all right away. It just needs to help you work with what keeps returning, most importantly, without overreacting. For me, that started with taking the time to breathe. Not because breathing is magic, it just creates enough space to stop everything from stacking so high, so fast.

After that, I believe it is important to capture what would not leave your mind. That might mean writing it down in a journal, putting it in a note on your cell, recording yourself talking into your phone, or hell, carrying an old school recorder in your pocket.

Whatever works for you to capture it. You do not need every passing thought or every piece of mental noise. The ones you want to capture are the recurring ones. The heavy ones that keep coming back during and after the breathing, or whatever calming practice works best for you, is done.

Then ask yourself what feeling is underneath it. Ask what part is true, what part is fear, what still needs action, and what simply needs to be felt without being obeyed. Do everything you can to avoid lies within your own mind.

That is the practice. Approach it in a calm way first. Capture what stays. Sort it honestly.

You are not trying to become emotionless. You are trying to become steady enough to live inside reality without being dragged around by every thought that rises. No matter what those thoughts make you feel, try to deal with that feeling with honesty and calmness.

This is how mindfulness helped my rebuild begin again, and I believe that if it’s your first time trying to build a system, it is also a good place to start.