By Carrie Garcia — Last Updated: March 11, 2025

As I write this, I sit in the waiting room at St. John’s Hospital in Maplewood, Minnesota. My mom, who turned eighty years old on February 21, is getting a pacemaker. This is not the first time I have waited in a hospital. There have been many times I have waited for doctors to fix or put back together loved ones or to find the key ingredient to combat illness. Sometimes, bodies were healed, other times they weren’t.

Sitting in a waiting room can produce worry and anxiety. A string of stressful moments ensues as one anticipates the worst, hopes for the best, and then copes with the eventual outcome. Similarly, on a day-to-day basis, whether or not you are sitting in a hospital waiting room, events arise that produce worry, fear, and anxiety in our bodies. An article published by The American Heart Association entitled, “Understanding How Stress Affects the Body” (February 8, 2024), describes the body’s reaction to stress with this paragraph:

“When you are stressed, your body releases cortisol and other stress hormones. If this bodily response to stress goes on for a long period, it can put you at risk for certain health conditions, which can include: anxiety, depression, weight gain, headaches, sleep problems, memory, and concentration issues, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.”

We will never live in a stress-free world. So, how do we help our bodies and minds, when we encounter those stressful waiting room-like moments? As a student of Zen Buddhism since 2013, my faith in Buddhist teachings confirms that as human beings, we suffer. It is the nature of our human condition. There are causes to our suffering, and there is a path to alleviate those conditions. Buddhist teachings are thousands of years old, and luckily for us, in 2025, you don’t have to be a Buddhist nun or monk, or even commit to the religion itself, to practice helpful techniques deriving from these original teachings.

Meditation, the practice of sitting, is one of those techniques. In Zen, “just sitting” is called zazen or shikantaza. It’s stopping all the “doing” we do and sitting with awareness of what is going on with the body and mind. Lewis Richmond, in his Lion’s Roar article entitled, “Zazen: Just Sitting, Going Nowhere” (Lion’s Roar, September 20, 2022), describes this practice:

“Fundamentally [zazen] is the practice of just being here, being present—except that we are not rocks or stones, but aware beings—so I think ‘just-awareness’ more fully captures the essence of the term.”

“Just-awareness” helps to strengthen a muscle that we forget we have, the awareness muscle. This muscle, like any other in our body, atrophies if unused. When we busy ourselves and fill our lives with so much “doing” that we lose our ability to be aware, we can lose the ability to care for ourselves in a kind and loving way.

Building the awareness muscle through sitting meditation helps us to become familiar with the sensations in our body and the loops in our minds. Over time, sensations become familiar to us, and the loops in our minds become old friends. We have opinions about them and know them well. We become aware of where anger, anxiety, worry, fear, and other emotions live in our bodies and how they feed the mental loops.

I like to envision my mind as a train. This train has an engine, and it can move slowly or at high speed. It has certain tracks, but I have a choice about the route I am taking, when I get on, and when I want to get off. Sometimes, when I haven’t worked enough with my awareness muscle, I can, all of a sudden, be on the high-speed anxiety train and not even realize it. It is then harder to get off that train. The anxiety train is going so fast, and I don’t even know I am on it. It is at this point we need to utilize other mindfulness tools. 

Breathing is a wonderful and free tool to help engage our parasympathetic nervous system when we have a stress response. There are many different breathing techniques you can learn and then practice when in a regulated state, so that when you find yourself in a heightened/stressed state (on that high-speed train) you can more easily access them.

Although there are many platforms for learning breathing techniques, yoga is the way I know best. Yoga practice provides a safe place and clear guidance on how to breathe. When guided by a yoga instructor, and engaged in regularly, you have the opportunity to practice deep breathing and awareness of the body when your body is regulated.

“The more you practice bringing awareness to the body and breath on your yoga mat, the easier it will be to bring that same awareness to the body and breath when you are dysregulated or stressed.”

As human beings, we prefer to have things go smoothly in life. We gravitate towards the pleasurable and try to fill our lives with things that make us feel good. So, when feelings like worry, anxiety, anger, and sadness arise, it is our natural tendency to want those feelings to go away, to stop. As we build awareness, we can see that our experience of being human is a collaborative event filled with all sorts of feelings. We can learn to embrace all feelings, knowing that they are temporary, and like the ever-changing landscape of nature, they will come, and they will go. We can then build our capacity to be with these difficult feelings in a loving and kind way.

This can be done in meditation or in the moment when experiencing the difficult feeling. Invite yourself to move closer to the feeling, to treat and care for the feeling like you would a sick child or an ailing pet. Send that feeling love, compassion, and kindness. Tell the feeling that it is seen, and that it doesn’t need to be any different than it is. As in a loving-kindness meditation, you could say to it (silently), “May you be safe and protected”. By doing this, we are embracing the full experience of what it is to be human and moving closer (in loving-kindness), to the ever-changing landscape of our emotional body.

Take classes with Carrie

Carrie Garcia is an RYT 500 yoga and meditation teacher and Success Coach. She is certified in yoga through Lifespan Yoga with specialized training in vinyasa, yin, and Rainbow Yoga. Carrie creates spaces for people to share movement, mindfulness, and laughter. She grew up in Minnesota, immersed in music and watching her mother practice yoga from a library book. She has been practicing meditation since 1992 and was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest in 2022. Carrie brings her passion for yoga and mindfulness to adults and youth with an intention to decrease racism, bullying, isolation, and anxiety and to increase compassion, connection, and well-being.

Carrie is deeply grateful to her amazing teachers including Gopala Yaffa (Rainbow Yoga); Francoise Freedman (Birthlight - fertility to school-age yoga, and Street Yoga trauma-sensitive yoga); Michelle Pietrzak-Wegner (yin yoga); Amelia Ruth (vinyasa/power yoga); Michael Moore (Iyengar yoga), and Ben Connelly (Soto Zen Buddhist Priest at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center). And she is grateful to the many wonderful human beings who she has met in elevators, on the streets, and on mountaintops – all her teachers.

Emotional Well-Being