Twenty-six years ago I almost died. My husband and I had rented a house in a seasonal beach community. I was examining the menu outside the town’s restaurant when I felt a sharp pain in my left earlobe. My vision blurred and my knees buckled.

Tell us about a time you faced your fear Read more

I handed my newborn to my friend, stumbled toward the neighboring medical cottage, opened the screen door and collapsed on the examining table. My blood pressure was plummeting, and the doctor on call shot me up with adrenaline. I never saw what bit me.

The following week I visited an allergist. All my tests came back negative – I wasn’t allergic to honeybees, hornets, wasps or yellow jackets. How could that be? “You had a toxic, not an allergic, reaction,” my doctor said, explaining that the entry point of the stinger had enabled delivery of the venom instantaneously into my bloodstream.

It was a fluke that could happen to anyone, and it didn’t make stings more dangerous to me overall than to anyone else who wasn’t allergic. Still, he recommended I always carry an EpiPen. So I did, for decades. To the beach, on hikes, back and forth to work, to the playground where I watched my kids like a hawk, afraid they’d get hurt or someone might snatch them – afraid that I could suddenly disappear. (I’d lost my father to sudden cardiac arrest a few years before my own near-death experience.)

Rather than provide me comfort, though, the EpiPen always nearby felt like a physical symbol of my fear, becoming a crutch instead of a release.

One year we went to my mother’s house in the country for Thanksgiving. While folding laundry in the basement, I felt a stinging sensation on my arm, grabbed my EpiPen and plunged the needle into my thigh. I’m still not sure what pricked me. But rather than stop to assess the situation, I reacted with automatic panic.

That reflex transferred over to how I dealt with other difficulties. When my husband began having an affair and left me, I quickly lost nearly 40 pounds, had nightmares, and woke up each morning in a cold sweat. All panic, no mindfulness. I knew something had to change. I took meditation classes and slowly got through the next decade. I raised my children, gained weight and moved to start a new life. Still, I carried my EpiPen with me.

A year ago, I learned of a retreat center a few hours away from my new home. I booked a room, consulted a map of the grounds and, on day two, set off to find and walk the center’s labyrinth, a replica of the classical Greek design with concentric circles and a single path leading to the center.

I wandered for an hour, lost, until my eye landed on a small sign labeled “Labyrinth”. It was beside the huge field of tall grass and wildflowers I’d been ignoring, since to me it looked like the perfect hiding place for bees. The abbey’s golden-haired dog, aptly named Abbey, suddenly appeared at my side, wagged her tail, and proceeded in front of me into the brush at the start of the maze. I opened my small purse to grasp my EpiPen, but it wasn’t there. I’d somehow neglected to transfer it from my tote bag.

Abbey turned as if to beckon me onward. I assessed the bee risk. The grass had been cut and the path seemed wide enough to walk comfortably at a distance from foliage, so I followed her inside, cautiously. Then the path narrowed, again and again. I looked down at my bare legs and sandals. I’d been prepared for unobstructed pavement. I hadn’t known a labyrinth could be cut from a field of wildflowers. I was so intent on avoiding bees that I barely noticed the beauty around me, much less that Abbey had drifted away and left me alone.

I froze, and started to panic. But then, I was able to pause – and in that split second, to glory in the person I’d worked so hard to become. I was a wife who stood up to her husband in divorce court. I was a mother who raised two magnificent children nearly on her own. I was a woman who had, in fact, become more peaceful inside – one who didn’t need to lug an EpiPen along for courage.

Facing my fear: I'm a hopeless extrovert, and I adopted a nonverbal child | Amy Whipple Read more

So I continued on amid wasps and butterflies, a praying mantis or two, and tangles of leaves, flowers and branches. I took out my camera. Soft purple grass, daisies and goldenrod grazed my shoulders.

The Lord is my shepherd, I intoned over and over until the mantras simply floated away along with my thumping heart. There is only one direction in a labyrinth: forward. And that is where I went.

Forty-five minutes from the beginning I encountered the middle of the labyrinth, where I stopped to rest on a bench before heading back out along the same trail. I was at peace, and in no hurry to discover where the path might lead.