Taming Anxiety: Into the Void and Back

Seven days. Seven sessions. Seven opportunities to grab my racing mind by the collar and drag it, kicking and screaming, into something resembling stillness.

I use the Insight Timer app every day. It’s a vast trove of meditations, talks, live yoga classes, tarot readings—you name it. My daily ritual is simple: set the timer for 20 minutes, hit play, and giddy up. No frills, no distractions, just breath and space. But occasionally, when my mind is chewing on something relentlessly—whether it’s work, life, or some godforsaken song that won’t leave my head—I opt for a guided meditation. Something to steer the ship while I sit back and let the mind unclench. A spa treatment for the brain.

Among its endless offerings, Insight Timer also provides multi-day courses—deep dives into everything from sleep to self-compassion to, apparently, the energetic balance of the universe. Something structured, designed to build upon itself each day, gently nudging awareness in a particular direction. That’s where I stumbled across Yin-Yang Elemental Wisdom for Anxiety Relief.

I don’t think of myself as an anxious person. For the most part, I’m a confident, easygoing guy—but I have my moments, as any of my friends will tell you. It’s all part of the yin and yang, the dark and the light. I can be cruising in a state of absolute zen one minute, then rocketing into full-scale apoplectic combustion the next. Zero to a hundred in 3.2 seconds. But here’s the thing—when people describe someone as “anxious,” it usually conjures up an image of a perpetually twitchy wreck, wide-eyed and vibrating with nervous energy. That’s not me. My anxiety doesn’t hover—it strikes, in brief but potent bursts. A worry here, a spiraling thought there, sometimes a full-blown mental demolition derby when the stars misalign. It’s episodic, not constant. But still, it’s there. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this course might be exactly what I needed.

From day one, this course hits differently. The instructor, Jungjin Moon, a meditation teacher based in Seoul, delivers her lessons with the kind of clarity and ease that makes it easy to lean in. Call me shallow, but when I go for a guided meditation, I need the voice leading me into the abyss to be one that doesn’t sound like a seagull or someone on their third Pall Mall of the morning. Moon hits all the right notes—soothing, but firm. A voice that doesn’t just guide, but gently leads—like a steady hand on the shoulder, nudging you deeper into the journey without ever forcing the way.

Mercifully, she doesn’t drone on about “just letting go” or pretend that mindfulness is some magic spell that fixes everything. Instead, the course is rooted in the five elements—water, wood, fire, earth, and metal—each with its own psychological and energetic terrain. The premise? Anxiety isn’t just some nebulous thing that strikes at random. It’s imbalance. Too much fire (agitation, restlessness). Too much earth (stagnation, heaviness). Too much metal (rigidity, perfectionism). The key isn’t shutting it down—it’s redirecting the energy.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

One day we focus on water, using breath to cultivate flow, breaking through the mental dams that hold everything back until it explodes in the worst possible ways. Another day, we lean into metal, learning to cut away the excess noise—like forging a blade sharp enough to slice through the nonsense. Each session is precise, yet open-ended, not demanding total surrender but inviting it.

By day three, something cracks. I’m lying there, half in, half out of consciousness, when the familiar anxious static starts creeping up—the usual loop of unfinished business, unspoken words, the tiny disasters that always seem more pressing when the world goes quiet. But instead of feeding it, I let it burn. Fire element. I don’t fight the heat; I let it consume, feeling the tension melt off my ribs like wax.

By day five, I’m not sure if I’m meditating or disintegrating. The air element session is weightless, like floating through some cosmic void where everything—stress, identity, the need to control—feels ridiculous, a fever dream of the ego.

And then comes day six: metal.

Moon introduces a concept from Thích Nhất Hạnh: habit energy—that invisible gravitational pull dragging us into repetitive, unconscious patterns. Habits, she says, feel safe. Maybe that’s a delusion. Maybe we retreat into these loops not because they help us, but because they spare us from having to make real decisions.

She encourages us to stop and notice it. Observe the patterns instead of drowning in them.

And just as I’m thinking, Yes, this is brilliant. This is exactly what I need to write about! I’ll add it to my series on spirituality and presence and—

Oh, you son of a bitch.

There it is. Habit energy. The very thing I’m trying to untangle. The urge to immediately turn inspiration into output. The compulsion to write the moment an idea ignites, to grab my laptop and start hammering away, stretching and twisting the concept like Silly Putty until a draft emerges.

So I stop.

I don’t chase the thought. I don’t try to capture it and pin it down like a butterfly on a corkboard. I just watch it.

And suddenly, something shifts.

Meditation courses always promise peace, but peace is a slippery thing, especially in a world built on chaos. This course didn’t hand me enlightenment on a silver platter, and I didn’t expect it to. What it did was rewire something fundamental: my approach to the noise.

Anxiety isn’t some external villain—it’s internal weather. Some days, it’s a wildfire; some days, it’s thick fog. But there’s always a way to work with it, to shift it, to stop fighting and start moving with the current.

So if your mind feels like a blown amp, if your thoughts are running in distortion-heavy loops with no sign of stopping, give this course a shot. Not because it’ll save you, but because it might just remind you that you don’t need saving in the first place.

Seven days. Seven sessions. A new kind of loud.