Full disclosure: I have thought a lot about this essay on
not thinking. I love to think about ideas for hours on end. ÌýAs a journalist and college professor I make
my living coming up with interesting thoughts to think. But I am also a
recreational thinker. In fact, I may be addicted to thinking. And as I explore
ways to heal from childhood trauma, I am trying to break my thinking habit.Ìý

I grew up in a home where thinking was put on a pedestal above
all other human traits. Cooking, changing the oil in a car, putting up a tent �
these were things my parents did not know how to do. But, boy, could they
think. My dad called it “intellectual stimulation.� And immersing oneself in interesting
thought was always the goal, whether by talking to strangers about their lives
or discussing ideas at the dinner table or mulling things over on a walk or
reading a literary classic. Even when Dad was at the end stage of Alzheimer’s
and in an assisted living facility, he was still thinking about stimulating his
intellect. He complained that the other residents had nothing interesting to say
(not surprising, given their condition) and he preferred discussions with the
facility’s caregivers.

I remember that throughout my childhood Dad was always
filling legal pads with his ideas. He was constantly thinking about books he
wanted to write and inventions he had dreamed up that he might one day patent. He
was always plotting, scheming, dreaming. Dad made lists of things he needed to
do to turn these ideas into a reality and searched out books he might read to
give him more ideas.

When I was little, I wanted to follow in Dad’s cerebral footsteps.
I remember that I used to announce, “I’m going to go think to myself.� And then
I would sit in my rocking chair in my bedroom and drift deep into thought. It
was comforting to imagine new worlds and ideas, dreaming up my own stories.
When my parents were yelling at each other, or I was having trouble in school,
becoming lost in thought was a good place to be.

Going to college and double majoring in journalism and
comparative literature was thinking heaven. I remember sometimes walking out of
an Honors lit class almost dizzy from thinking so hard and enjoying it so much.
In college, I found a brainy community who, like Dad, was devoted to seemingly
non-stop intellectual stimulation. After graduating, things got even better when
I was paid as a writer for my journalistic investigations and cerebral musings.
My entire identity revolved around my ability to use my mind. I was my mind. And if there was something
bothering me, all I had to do was slip inside my head to escape it.

But life as a middle-aged adult was a lot harder than during
my blissful college years. I had a child to raise and a job to keep. A
mortgage. Deadlines. A dad with Alzheimer’s. Two failed marriages. Over the
years, my non-stop thinking went from an activity that was akin to skipping
through a field of wildflowers to being more like a hamster in a wheel. I still
thought a lot about the stories I was writing and the classes I was teaching.
But, mostly, it was a steady drip, drip, drip of anxious thoughts about things
I needed to do or conversations that I might have. Yet, I remained as wedded as
ever to the belief that my world revolved around my mind. If I had problems, the
only solution was to think harder. Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then my mind turned on me. Maybe it was seeing Dad with
his stack of legal pads in the Alzheimer’s unit and knowing that throughout his
adult life he never actually carried out a single idea he had written down. I
became aware there was a certain futility to my non-stop thinking and that
always musing on this and that was not necessarily productive or even healthy. What
to do? I thought harder, all day and all night. I didn’t know any other way to
be. Despite utter exhaustion, the hamster kept at it, even speeding up. Memories
from childhood—thoughts I had long been able to keep locked away—began to
terrorize me. I couldn’t� sleep. I had panic attacks. I was trapped inside my
head and it was hell.

Desperate to get my thoughts back under control, I went to
see a psychiatrist. She told me the solution was to think less—actually,
sometimes not at all. ÌýShe said I was basically
making myself crazy with intellectual stimulation. This was earth-shattering
advice. For me, the idea of not thinking was the equivalent of not living. It
was like telling me to stop breathing.

Nevertheless, I heeded her advice because I was desperate
for peace of mind. I started studying the writings of Buddhist teachers like
Tich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron. I also attended mindfulness classes and
attempted to practice guided meditation. I started to realize that when I was
thinking, I was almost always mulling over something in the future or in the
past. If I could sometimes manage to be solidly rooted in the present moment, I
could theoretically get the hamster to take breaks.

French philosopher Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore
I am.� But Tich Nhat Hanh writes that such a mindset actually means, “I think,
therefore I am not here in the present moment.� The Pure Land school of
Buddhism revolves around the idea of attaining enlightenment and eternal
happiness in a kind of heaven called the Pure Land. Tich Nhat Hanh promotes the
idea that heaven is here and now if you can stop dwelling in the past and the future.
“Let us enjoy the Pure Land right now in the spirit of living happily in the
present moment,� he writes.

Eckhart Tolle, author of the bestselling book, The Power of
Now, is the high priest of living in the present moment. He has a term for
people like my dad and me: “a compulsive thinker.� And Tolle asserts that
intellectual brilliance does not result from compulsive thinking. “The mind is
a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very
destructive…the instrument has taken you over,� writes Tolle. “The compulsive
thinker lives in a state of separateness, in an insanely complex world of
continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects ever-increasing
fragmentation of the mind.�

Both Tolle and Tich Nhat Hanh maintain that devoting a part
of each day to living in the present moment rather than constantly lost in
thought brings both mental clarity as well as a deep, steadfast peace of mind. Tolle
simple calls this state “being� or “presence.�

But old habits are hard to break. The mindfulness classes
and group meditations did not work so well for me. I could not get my mind to
stop. If nothing else, I was thinking about how I was still thinking. Or I was
thinking about how the person next to me was breathing loud. Drip. Drip. Drip.Ìý

Fortunately, I have been a hiker my entire life and I
realized that the only place where I could get my thoughts to stop was in the
wild. As a child, I had always wandered alone in the woods and found deep
comfort from the trees and birds and sky. Nature was far more soothing than my
rocking chair. But as an adult I started using my daily hikes and trail runs as
just one more place to be lost in thought and figure things out. If I could not
solve a problem at my desk, I would search for the answer when I was in the
forest. But, as Tich Nhat Hanh would rightly point out, I was actually not in
the forest, I was in my head.

Once I became committed to breaking my thinking addiction, I
approached my daily hikes in the forest near my home in a completely different
way. Going solo whenever possible (except for my dog Sunny), I began roaming
cross country rather than on trails so I could be as close to wild nature as
possible. I turned my phone off. I focused on my surroundings and using my
senses: the smell of the ponderosa pine; the sound of the woodpecker; the delicate
purple color of the lupine. I would imagine myself a sponge that was soaking in
all the beauty around me. When my mind attempted to drift into my “to do� list,
I would just take a deep breath of fresh air and fix on a specific tree,
bringing myself back into the present.

I found that when I was already in a state of presence in
nature, I could sometimes have moments that were utterly transcendent. Moments
of wild beauty, like the view from a hilltop at sunset, connected me not only
to the place but to my true self, the person beyond the intellect. The translucent
pink sky framed by a rainbow was not a thought but an experience that went
straight to my core. ÌýIn those moments, I
was not my mind. I was everything around me. I was the sunset.

It has been seven years since I gave up chronic thinking as
a lifestyle, although I am constantly challenged by slipping back into hamster-in-wheel
mode. In addition to bringing me more peace of mind, my daily hikes have also
gifted me my best ideas. When I am climbing up a steep hill and saying hello to
the trees, the perfect idea will explode into my mind out of nowhere. Dad would
have never believed it, but not thinking during my wanderings in the woods has
made me a happier person as well as a more creative and productive thinker.

In her book, The Nature Fix, author Florence Williams calls
this phenomenon “brain rest.� And it only happens when humans are in nature,
most often in “restorative landscapes� that induce “soft fascination.�

While the modern emphasis on mindfulness may seem fairly
new, it is actually an idea that was at the heart of why the United States
established the world’s first national parks. These wild landscapes offered an
increasingly stressed out nation a place for brain rest.

Williams points out in her book that national parks founding
father Frederick Law Olmstead saw America’s awe-inspiring great outdoors as an
unmatched sanctuary for brain rest. “Viewing nature,� he wrote in 1865, “employs
the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens
¾±³Ù.â€�

Annette McGivney is the author of , and the Search for Heaven on Earth. For more about
her book and learning how nature heals visit: . She is also
founder of the non-profit Healing Lands Project, which funds wilderness trips
for child victims of domestic violence. For more go to: .

The trauma
switch flipped on for me during three terrifying weeks in July 2010. After
investigating a murder for a book I was writing, I had unknowingly triggered
long-buried memories about my own violent childhood. For three decades I had
successfully kept it a secret � especially from myself � that as a little girl
I thought my raging father would kill me. ÌýThen at age 48, despite all the will power I
could summon, the truth exploded back into my life.

After
experiencing nightmares, panic attacks and insomnia, I landed in a
psychiatrist’s office. The diagnosis: Delayed onset post-traumatic stress disorder.
I was given a prescription for medication and told to seek counseling. In the
days that followed I was like a boat cast adrift on stormy seas and I had
absolutely no idea in which direction to find land. Not only was I rattled to
my core by the uninvited memories, but my adrenaline was pumping at full
throttle 24/7. My lean body lost 15 pounds, I jumped at shadows and dreaded the
death dreams that visited me every night in fitful sleep. Yes, I had survived a
violent childhood, but as illogical as it seemed, I feared I would not survive
what the memories were doing to me now.

My behavior, I
would later learn, was textbook for a child who grew up in an abusive home with
no comforting or protective adult presence. “Most adult children [of abuse] reach
adulthood with their secrets intact,� writes Judith Hermann M.D. in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of
Violence from Domestic Abuse and Political Terror. But “as the survivor
struggles with the tasks of adult life, the legacy of her childhood becomes increasingly
burdensome. Eventually, often in the third or fourth decade of life, the
defensive structure may begin to break down…Survivors fear that they are going
insane or that they will have to die.�

I had excellent
support from therapists and friends, but I was also in my own private hell. I
was a person who had been the model of physical and mental health and now I
thought I was going crazy. Telling people that I had PTSD or that I was a
victim of child abuse did not fit the image they had of me. There also was the
societal pressure to “just move on.�

But move on to
where? Within a few weeks of the PTSD diagnosis I made my way to a meeting of a
12-step program called Adult Children of Alcoholics. As I sat sobbing in the
musty basement of the Federated Church in Flagstaff, Ariz., I shared my
terrible secret to a group of child abuse survivors who were not at all surprised
by what I said. Another woman there had been nearly suffocated as a little girl
when her mother held a pillow over her face. Other people told of experiences
similar to my own at the hands of drunken and raging parents. Every person in
that basement completely understood my raw terror and was unfazed by my story
because it was also their story.

My journey
toward healing started in ACA as I learned that PTSD is not a sickness. It is
the mind and body’s normal reaction to what is perceived as life threatening
circumstances. But for adults who have experienced chronic, prolonged trauma �
usually on the battlefield or growing up in abusive homes � this fight, flight
or freeze reaction becomes deeply imbedded in the central nervous system and
can make the challenge of recovering from PTSD daunting, and for some,
seemingly impossible.

“Healing trauma
requires a direction of the living, feeling, knowing organism,� writes
psychologist Peter Levine in his book Waking
the Tiger: Healing Trauma. The key to recovery, explains Levine, is not in
coping with the triggering aspects of PTSD but in dealing with the body’s
response to the original traumatic events and a “frozen residue of energy that
remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies
and spirits.� Just as the body’s automatic reaction to a bee sting causes the
skin to swell, traumatic memories induce a real-time fear response that
overwhelms the senses.

While
medication and talk therapy can help manage PTSD symptoms and are critical in
the early stages, I found that the essential next phase was tackling the
trapped energy � the poison that lies beneath the surface. Under the guidance
of a trained trauma therapist, I tapped into my body’s fear state by inducing
trembling and revisited those episodes when I was on the receiving end of my
father’s rage. I went there again and again through Trauma Release Exercises
(TRE) and Somatic Experiencing (SE) techniques. Every time I landed in those
terrifying moments, my therapist steered me toward a different outcome. Instead
of re-experiencing what actually happened, I chose escape. I envisioned calmly walking
out the back door of my childhood home and down my sunlit driveway into the
woods where I loved to roam. Eventually, that kid in me became convinced she
was finally safe and could start to let down her guard.

I do not mean
to trivialize or paint a happy face on the very real and harrowing experiences
of people impacted by violence and PTSD. But I want to share my own experience
as proof that there is a way to not only survive the effects of trauma but to
rise above it. After nearly five years of working on my recovery every single
day, I remain on what will be a life-long journey toward healing. There is no
reversing the past but I have found peace in the present.

For me there is
even a bright side. That switch that flipped in me turned my life from dark to
light.

Annette McGivney is the author ofÌýthe forthcoming memoir Pure Land. To learn more go to: ÌýÌýFor more info on local meetings of Adult
Children of Alcoholics go to adultchildren.org.

In February 2001, my friend Jane and I were huddled
under a narrow overhang jutting from the Supai formation in Grand Canyon.
Perched some 1,500 feet below the Grand Canyon’s South Rim and 3,000 feet above
the Colorado River, we were waiting out a surprise spring storm. Fat snowflakes
and grape-size hail spiraled past our faces. A hulking gray cloud sailed in
front of us like a schooner on the ocean. Thunder rumbled in the distance and
then moved in close.

A few hours earlier, we had
said goodbye to my husband Mike and my four-year old son Austin. Mike had driven
us down a gut rattling 30-mile dirt road on the Havasupai reservation to get us
to the remote South Bass trailhead in western Grand Canyon. He was not thrilled
about the 5-day, 48-mile backpacking trip that Jane and I were embarking on.
But he also knew I was determined to do it, whether he approved or not. Over
the last 10 years, while working as an editor for Backpacker, I had hiked all over the West, including many trails in
Grand Canyon. But all those trips had been in the company of a group of experienced
backpackers, and often with Mike. Jane had never hiked in Grand Canyon; she had
never been backpacking at all.

“What are you doing?� Mike
asked me the day before, perplexed at why I would hike into one of the most
rugged and remote sections of Grand Canyon with a hiking partner who had zero
experience.

And I could not explain why,
exactly, except that I felt I wanted to know more about myself and also about
Grand Canyon. To do this, I had to go in on my own, without a safety net. There
would be no cellphone or satellite phone to call for help. No rangers or expert
hikers to bail me out. I would rely completely on my wilderness skills, which I
had methodically honed over the last two decades.

But on the second day of our
trip, as Jane and I walked across the parched Tonto Plateau under a blistering
sun, I wondered if I was in over my head. We did not make it as far as planned
on the first day. We ended up camping on the lip of the plateau, some 2,000
feet above the Colorado River, at a site with no water. We packed up camp that
morning and headed to Serpentine Canyon one mile away expecting to refill our
bottles there, but the tiny spring was dry.

With one liter of water between
us, we hiked through the Tonto’s black brush flats toward Ruby Canyon, just
short of five miles away, where we hoped a spring would flow. Our boots
crunched on a fine pavement of gray-green Bright Angel shale as we pushed east
beneath the sun, too nervous about water to make any kind of small talk. The
route we hiked was called “the Gems� for the side canyons, each named for
precious gems, that harbored seasonal springs. The Jewels offered spectacular
views and adventure but it was also potentially dangerous. Dozens of hikers had
died of heat stroke over the years on this exposed, waterless stretch across
the Tonto.

We contoured around hulking,
orange Havasupai Point, which jutted from the South Rim. We stopped to marvel
at the bright pink blooms on prickly pear cacti that dotted the plateau. There
was no clear trail and we searched for rock cairns here and there signaling the
way. Navigating across the Tonto reminded me that I knew how to do this, to
find my way. Sometimes in the civilized world I felt lost, but whenever I
ventured into wild places my inner compass kicked in.

When we reached the top of
Ruby, we anxiously peered 400 feet down into the sinuous canyon. At the barely
visible bottom, a string of clear pools glinted like jewels in the sun. We
heard the faintest trickle of water gently dripping onto rocks.

“Yes!� said Jane, fist pumping
the sky.

We slid down steep scree to the
canyon floor and sprawled on smooth, warm slick rock next to the pools. We had
landed in a riparian oasis fed by an ancient aquifer that also nursed springs
in Havasu Canyon and Indian Garden. These were all sacred, life-sustaining
places for Grand Canyon’s native peoples. Water seeped out of Ruby’s walls and
flowed in narrow channels over rock. It was soft and green, full of ferns and
monkey flowers, fluttering with damselflies and canyon wrens. A trip that at
first threatened to be lethal had turned out to be luscious.

“I think the Grand Canyon is a
woman,� said Jane.

I agreed, noting that she was
tough on the outside but tender underneath. And we were definitely in one of
her sweeter spots.

From Ruby, we connected the
dots to other jewels, camping and lounging in canyons named Turquoise, Sapphire
and Agate. Each canyon harbored its own unique oasis that pampered us and sang
us to sleep with sounds of water.

On the last night of our trip,
we camped on the Tonto where we could drink in the view. Just a few feet from
our tent, the canyon dropped thousands of feet straight down into a tight
corridor of black schist and green river. Some 20 miles distant, an archipelago
of buttes and temples rose against the North Rim and turned every shade of pink
and purple in the day’s last light. In between was nothing, just a
soul-stirring spaciousness.

Annette McGivney is Southwest Editor for Backpacker magazine and teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University. Her most recent book is Pure Land, a memoir from Aquarius Press.

My mother was trying to get my attention. She did not know
me. After 12 years with Alzheimer’s disease she did not know much of anything.

I had stood up to turn off the television that the caregivers
left on while Mom sat alone in her room. For the last six years she had lived in
the locked “Memory Unit� of a facility near my home in Flagstaff, Ariz. At this
end stage of Alzheimer’s, Mom was like a baby. She wore diapers, was unable to
walk, spoke only a few words and was captivated by the simple movement and
flashing lights of a television screen.

After switching off the TV, I sat on the ottoman where my
mother’s feet were propped. She was wearing her favorite pink sweater that used
to be her mother’s. The caregivers had painted Mom’s nails a matching pink and
she was holding a chocolate ice cream cone, which she was forgetting to eat. I
put my hand on her leg and looked into her sparkling blue eyes.

“Yes?� I said in an attempt to humor myself, as if I was
about to get some kind of logical response. But there were no words. She just
smiled as the ice cream dripped onto her lap. In this silence at the end of my
mother’s life I was finally finding out what kind of person she really was.

The mother who raised me was possessed with untreated mental
illness. She was a hypochondriac who was convinced she had a mysterious fatal
disease. She was obsessed with cleanliness, food allergies and so worried about
air pollution that she wore a gas mask. She spent many days bed-ridden with
depression and seemed to only get worse as she grew older. My sisters and I accompanied
her on endless doctor’s visits as she searched in vain for a physician who
would take her many complaints seriously. The mother I grew up with almost
never laughed or smiled or stopped looking for the next worst-case scenario.
But Alzheimer’s disease was never on her long list of what might do her in.

When I was tasked with being the lone family member to care
for Mom, it seemed that worst-case scenario was, indeed, finally playing out for
us both. During the first years of her care, the obsessive-compulsive behaviors
my mother exhibited during my childhood were amplified by Alzheimer’s. I was called
to the facility almost daily to mitigate the trouble she was causing. She was
in a perpetual panic and monopolizing the caregivers� time with her incessant,
incoherent demands. Where was the doctor? How could she eat food that was full
of poison? She needed to go through the trash, to make phone calls, to sift
through other people’s stuff, to stay awake all night in case I showed up. “Oh
Annette,� she would plead as she chased after me when I tried to slip through the
facility’s locked door. “You’ve got to get me out of here!�

It was excruciating. And I responded the way my mother had
taught me to handle difficult situations � with worry and dread. I hounded
doctors about her medications, the kitchen staff about her food, the caregivers
about whether or not her teeth were getting brushed daily. The years dragged
on. How long could this nightmare last? I feared that my crazy mother was
finally going to drive me insane.

But gradually the burden lifted. Mom stopped asking about
doctors and, instead, started talking to the squirrel outside her window. She
ate whatever was put in front of her and asked for more. The lines on her face
softened. She smiled at everyone. She enjoyed wearing fancy hats and wrapping
her hair with colorful scarves. While Alzheimer’s is brutal and tragic for
everyone involved, it can also offer unexpected gifts. In my mother’s case, it
was that she forgot how to worry. And I got to know the mother who had eluded
me most of my life. Behind the neurosis, was a woman who was sweet and joyful
to the core.

In her final year Mom also taught me how to let go. I
learned just by sitting with her hour after hour, day after day, holding hands
but not speaking. If she was not bothered by the fact she could not walk, then
neither was I. So what if she did not know my name? The important thing was
that in that moment when she was wearing her favorite pink sweater with a
manicure to match, she was happy and well cared for. And she was eating ice
cream, which she had been deathly allergic to until she forgot about such
things.

When I left her room on what would be our last visit, my
mother smiled as I said goodbye. Sunlight streamed through the window and onto
her shoulders. She was without a care in the world. Three days later, Mom’s
heart stopped in her sleep. ÌýShe died in
peace. And, in the end, she lived in peace.

is Southwest Editor for
Backpacker magazine and teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University. Her
most recent book is Pure Land,
a memoir from Aquarius Press.

View from Grand Canyon’s Grandview Trail, Oct. 2016