You Are Here: Choosing Presence When Fear Wants Control

One late night. A hospital corridor. A single map that read, “You are here.”
Everything in me wanted to run ahead- to outcomes, to answers, to safety. But this episode is about what happens when we stay.

In this deeply personal reflection, I share the night my husband had a heart attack - not to tell a story of crisis, but to explore how presence holds us when life tilts sideways. It’s an invitation into the real practice of mindfulness: not the perfect calm of a meditation cushion, but the quiet courage to meet uncertainty one breath at a time.

We’ll talk about how fear writes its own stories, how the body signals what the mind avoids, and how choosing awareness over anxiety changes everything -from hospital rooms to everyday moments of overwhelm.

If you’ve ever faced the unknown and longed for steadiness, this episode is for you. Tune in to learn what it means to stay here now, even when every part of you wants to run ahead.
✨ Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in - or Watch on YouTube and if the message resonates, share it with someone who could use a reminder that presence is its own form of grace.

🌹Find more reflections in The Keepers' Garden  🌿🌱 

➡️Learn more about me on my website www.susutherland.com

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why Practice Presence
• 1:14 You Practice For The Tests
• 1:33 Heart Attack: The Moment Arrives
• 3:38 Melanoma Memories And Fear
• 5:08 Symptoms And ER Decisions
• 6:51 Waiting Outside The Cath Lab
• 6:52 Choosing Presence Over Fear
• 7:43 What Presence Really Means
• 7:52 Midnight Transfer And The Map
• 9:03 Thoughts, Wills, And Letting Go
• 10:13 Emptiness In A Hospital Hallway
• 11:21 Fear Lives In The Future
• 12:37 Choosing Thoughts, Not Spirals
• 13:04 The Wake-Up Call: Slow Down

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:22

Hello friends. Today I want to share with you why we practice presence, why we have a spiritual practice. It is easy to think of mindfulness as something we do when life is calm, when we have the time and the space to sit quietly. But the truth is this practice isn't for the calm days. You practice for the tests. It is for the moments when life tests us because it is guaranteed it will. These moments that pull us into fear or into panic or into the spiraling of what ifs. This past week, my husband had a heart attack. And while that may sound like a moment to unravel, what I found instead was that the practice held me. I didn't spiral. I didn't rush into the future. I stayed present in the moment. And in that moment, he was okay. And I want to talk about that today because I've experienced both. When he was diagnosed with melanoma in 2017, I rushed ahead. My mother passed away from melanoma. She was diagnosed seven months later, she passed away. And his diagnosis, I went straight back to that moment when I buried my mother. It it spiraled into a panic for me, a panic of what ifs and how I'm going to navigate this and all of the unraveling. Instead of being present with his circumstance and his situation, I allowed it to carry me into a great unraveling. And so I want to share this experience because it was a bit different. My husband went on a bike ride. Now, truthfully, he has experienced chest tightening for three or four months. And at first was navigating thinking that it was stress-induced because of when it was happening, and he could kind of breathe through it and it would go away. And then thought perhaps it was due to testosterone shots he was taking. So he stopped taking those. So it wasn't out of the blue and from nowhere, but he went on a group bike ride. And after the bike ride, his chest tightened and it felt different to him and didn't go away after a few moments. And so he called me and I was on the way home from soccer with a child, and he, you know, said take me off speaker and was trying to be very casual and not alarm my daughter. But if you have a teenager and they hear you say take me off speaker, then they then listen very intently. So it's not like it's not like he was keeping anything secret from her. But he told me, I have this chest tightening. I think I need to go to the hospital. I'm gonna go to the ER now. And so he did that. And I went home with my kids, and he just said, I'll call and let you know what's happening. So I got them dinner and his initial scan, the EKG, was normal, and they thought everything was fine. And then with the blood scan, the blood test, the troponin levels were really high, and he was going to have to be admitted and sent to a different hospital that has a health care unit. And so I got my kids all sorted, and then I went to the hospital to wait on the transfer with him, see what's going on. Um, initially he was very casual about it, and so was I. You know, I'm just gonna go pick him up. They had said I could drive him to the other hospital. That ended up not being true. We needed an ambulance because he needed to be on blood thinners and um ID medication anyway. So we ended up waiting there until two in the morning for an ambulance that could take him to the other hospital and got to the ER. And I went to the ER, and we already had a room number and everything, but I beat the ambulance. I wasn't speeding, but I beat them there, and she wouldn't let me go up. So I was waiting in the ER until he got there. And then when he got to his room, she came out and said, You can go now. And she just swiped her badge and sent me out into the main hospital. And all I have is a room number and a tower name. But the the hospital is a ghost town at two in the morning. It is very eerie and quiet, and I had no idea where I was going. So I just started walking, and eventually I started seeing signs of you know which way the Palmetto Tower is, and I started following that. And then I got to a map, and I'm standing in front of the map, and it said, You are here. And I had this panic flush over me. Like, I am here. I am I am in a hospital. My husband had a heart attack, like, oh my gosh. And this fear just kind of swept over me, and I felt the energy come over me. And then I paused and I was like, wait a second. You are here, and he is here, and we are at a hospital with a heart care team, and he is going to be looked after and monitored, and we are we are here, and that feels good. And at that moment, I saw myself standing between two doors. I could walk through this door of fear, or I could walk through the door of presence, and I knew which one felt better. And so that's what I did. And we got settled in in the next morning. They took him to the cath lab about nine o'clock, and I knew it would be an hour or an hour and a half, and I could sit there and I could Google all of the what ifs. I could read the rotten stories that have been posted of things that went wrong, or you know, concerns when your troponin levels are that high, or I could trust and I could read my book, and that's what I did. Y'all, we don't practice presence for the easy days, we practice it for these tests. Mindfulness is not looking peaceful on a cushion or about having those moments where you feel a little la la after your meditation. It is about being steady when the ground is shaking. And I had to keep remembering that in that moment he is okay and I am okay, and I could stay in that truth by not leaping ahead, by not conjuring up the possibilities of what could happen. That presence is not avoidance, it is trusting that whatever happens, I will be able to handle. I will be able to meet that moment with what is required, but I don't have to jump ahead and see what it is. I don't have to live experiences that I haven't been assigned. I don't need to contemplate what could happen. And occasionally I would have thoughts come up, you know, we we haven't looked at our will, we haven't re-evaluated our trust. And I would witness those thoughts and I would allow them to pass by, just like I do in meditation, where you witness your thoughts and then you think, okay, there is a thought, I see it, but I'm not gonna grab onto that one. I'm not going to allow that to be my process right now. I don't need a will in this moment. Is this something that we will address a couple weeks down the road? Perhaps, but this is not where I need to be right now. I need to read my book or walk around the halls. And I was pleasantly surprised and sometimes amazed as I was walking the halls to get a coffee or a cup of fruit or something, how empty my mind could be, that I could walk the halls of a hospital and just be in my steps and not sit here and conjure up all of the problems that could happen because of the situation that we were in right now. I had emptiness in my mind and I realized, wow, I have worked a long time to get to this place. Not because that emptiness for 10 minutes in the morning is important, but that emptiness in this hallway, walking these this hospital, that emptiness was important. I didn't have to look for happy thoughts, I didn't have to look for positive thoughts. I just had to allow as many no thoughts or not clinging on to the bad thoughts. And that's what we have to do because this is why we practice. Because the ground will shake, and we are asked, how steady can you be? So this is a reminder that you are not there to have the most elevated experience in your meditation. You are there so that you can witness your thoughts without grabbing onto them or being able to see which one feels like fear and which one feels like presence, and knowing which one you want to choose. Fear lives in the future, it asks us to write stories that we don't want, and then feel those stories, the panic in our body. And when we can come back to this moment, to the present moment, and realize our breath is here in this moment, and that's all we need. We don't have to live in that fear. We can trust that we are held in this moment, and when the next one comes, if it feels scary, we will be held in that one too. But it's true what they say that your circumstance is often not the source of your problems. Your thoughts about the circumstance are, and you guys, we get to choose our thoughts. And when you are not choosing your thoughts, you can still witness them and choose not to energize them by saying, Yes, this is a thought I'm gonna grab onto and spiral. We can just witness it and let it go through, just like we do in those five or ten minutes in the morning. That is why we practice. We practice not for the calm days, but for the ones that test us. Now, once we got checked out, we can also send gratitude to his body for sending him a message, one that was not a fatal message, but a very loud wake-up call, because he, like me, sometimes things the shout because we ignore the whispers. He has been encouraged by his body, by his wife, for for a long time to slow down. He burns the candle at both ends, both with things he has to do and things he loves. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he sets the alarm and gets up at 5 a.m. to go riding in groups and does a long ride before coming home and clocking in family time to get back to the office early on Monday morning. He rides many nights in the week and has definitely been trying to fit 10 pounds of stuff in a five-pound sack. And just like my body one time encouraged me to slow down, and I didn't, and so I tore a muscle in my calf. His body is sending him a very loud signal now that stress is not your friend, and rest is.