A Day at the Beach with OCD

Sometimes, OCD can feel consuming. It’s with us when we wake up and it’s with us when we go to bed. Throughout the day, difficult thoughts, feelings and urges arise, again and again… until we feel exhausted and demoralised. For many years, this was my experience.  

When things were at their worst, obsessions and compulsions dominated my mind, my relationships, my work and my free time. OCD was with me everywhere I went. I remember once saying to a therapist that my life felt like a forest and OCD was like a blight, spreading from tree to tree, covering everything in its path.

One day, my wife and I took a trip to Lyme Regis, a pretty coastal town in Devon, famous for its fossils. As soon as we arrived, I could feel my anxiety escalating. I felt the familiar sensation of panic, rising from my abdomen up through my chest and to my throat. I remember my wife asking if I was okay and I said something like, “I’m just feeling really anxious and having lots of intrusive thoughts”. She looked at me with empathy and asked, “what do you need?”

I’m not sure why… perhaps it was because I was so tired of feeling consumed by OCD… but I replied, “I just want to have the day we planned”.

So, for the first time, instead of struggling with my thoughts and feelings, or talking about my thoughts and feelings, or thinking about my thoughts and feelings, I made the decision to focus on our plans and leave the difficult thoughts and feelings alone.

They didn’t stop. In fact, they popped up constantly and I felt anxious for most of the day. But, as well as experiencing the difficult thoughts and feelings, I hunted for fossils. I listened to the sounds of seagulls, the crashing waves and the pebbles shifting under my boots. I ate my picnic and watched boats on the horizon. I scanned the shoreline looking for ridges in the rocks that might be the edges of an ammonite.  

Looking back now, a subtle change was happening. Instead of concentrating on my OCD while everything else faded into the background, I was focusing on everything else and OCD was fading into the background. Instead of ruminating, worrying, confessing, or seeking reassurance, I was fossil hunting. All the while, the difficult thoughts and feelings hummed in the background.

After many hours of searching, I found an ammonite that had been pyritised. A 65 million-year old fossil, nestled under a rock, gold-plated by unique geochemical conditions. I remember the feeling of wonder and excitement. Nothing stopped the horrible thoughts and feelings (not even a golden fossil…) but something else was happening. OCD was still there, but my awareness was expanding around it. The difficult thoughts and feelings became just one part of a broader, richer experience.

There’s a very old story about a Zen master and his apprentice that explores this idea.

One day, a young apprentice approached the Zen master and said, “my life is full of sadness and pain”. The master took a handful of salt and put it in a glass of water. “Drink this”, he said.

“Yuck!” spat the apprentice, “that tastes horrible!”

Then the master walked silently with the apprentice to a nearby lake. He took another handful of salt and tossed it into the lake, “Now drink from the lake”, he said. So, the apprentice knelt down, cupped his hands and tasted the water.

“How does it taste?”, asked the master. “It tastes good”, said the apprentice, taking another sip. 

The master smiled warmly, and offered the following wisdom:

“The pain of life is pure salt, no more, no less. But how we experience that pain depends on the size of the container we store it in. We can’t remove all the pain from our lives, so we must be a lake, not a cup”.

At the end of our day at the beach, my wife asked me again if I was okay. I felt positive and proud that I’d managed to have such a good day in spite of my anxiety. I realised that I’d made it through the whole experience without getting caught in the net of my compulsions, or becoming consumed by my suffering. I’d done everything that was important to me. Looking back, I’d done nothing with the difficult thoughts and feelings, nothing at all. I just made space for them.