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Throughout the meditation world we hear regularly about the importance of present-centered attention and there is one story of a kind of contemporary Buddha figure man person who falls out of a fifteen story window and as the story goes around the eighth floor someone sticks their head out and says,
Hey,
You doing okay?
And this Buddha guy says,
Well,
So far so good.
And what I like about that is that obviously for most of us Buddhas to be – Buddhas in training – we are hooked by the anticipation of what's to come.
We don't stay that right here.
Rather we are pretty chronically,
Especially due to our negativity bias,
Anticipating that around the corner something is going to go wrong or when we hit bottom it's going to be like we are crashing.
So we have a real strong tendency and conditioning to worry and to obsess.
And of course Mark Twain's famous comment – most people know this these days – the worst things in my life never actually happened,
You know?
So a lot of that worry and obsessing is for naught – and this is our predicament – that we have moved through a lot of life moments in the tightness of fear,
A lot of life moments.
I think many of us can feel in our nervous system as a society that the fear and anxiety is spiking right now.
Would you agree with that?
Okay,
Yeah.
So the common reaction when greater there is fear the more actively and reflexively we go to trying to control things and then we end up causing trouble to ourselves and others,
Because rather than feel the fear we try to control.
So let me just invite you to check in right from the start.
Of course we'll be doing more reflections as we go but you might check in your mind and just sense your life and some situation that feels stressful,
Some situation that gets you nervous,
Anxious,
Uptight.
And just notice as you bring that to mind the ways you are trying to manage or control things.
Just how you are handling it.
And then zero in a little more,
Sensing the situation and what you are imagining and anticipating is troublesome.
Kind of what your phrase around the corner and just ask yourself,
Well,
What am I unwilling to feel right now?
What am I unwilling to feel?
And then when you are ready open your eyes.
Now I know this isn't the most cheerful way to start off a talk and it's not like fun because what happens is if we ask that question and we actually pay attention we start noticing a real vulnerability,
A kind of unpleasantness and a squeeze and a clench and a clutch in our body,
Right?
How many of you notice that?
The fear clutch in your body?
Okay.
Here is what we know.
This is both Western psychotherapy and psychology and Buddhist psychology is that fear when it's not faced becomes toxic.
Unfaced fear becomes toxic,
That,
You know,
Carl Jung said that our suffering,
Our neurosis and our suffering come from the unfaced,
Unseen parts of ourselves.
So unfaced fear becomes toxic.
And we know through history that fear has been used by those in power to turn people against each other.
People would not go to wars and they wouldn't fight and they wouldn't turn against each other.
We wouldn't have racism.
We wouldn't have tribalism.
We wouldn't have us against them unless we are able to stir up fear.
And when it doesn't get faced inwardly,
When it goes outwardly,
It becomes aggression.
So that's one thing we know is that it becomes toxic.
We know that when we are in a fear state in those moments we are cut off from love and we are cut off from our creativity and we are not able to be really seeing clearly the moment so it cuts off wisdom.
And here is what else we know that as long as we are moving through the world and we are thinking of ourselves as a separate self,
Okay,
The primal mood of the separate self is fear.
And this is for all creatures that if we have some sense of separation,
Some sense of inside this skin or this covering is me and the world out there is the world out there,
There is going to be some background hum of fear.
It's universal.
We all are rigged to feel fear,
To feel the unpleasant squeeze of fear,
Every one of us.
So it's a clench that we live with.
And I can say for myself if I pause and I check in,
Sometimes it's really obvious,
I can really feel it,
And other times I am still too busy and I am still too much in my mind to really feel in my body.
But it's there a lot.
And a lot of my life-path has been simply learning to pay attention and lean in and befriend that fear.
This is the lead-in to two-part talk.
I'll be doing part of it tonight and then in two weeks the rest of it.
It's called Facing Fear Awakening Your Fearless Heart.
Because the upside of facing fear is you discover a fearless heart.
And that doesn't mean there is not fear.
It means that you are resting in a heart-space that's bigger than the fear so it doesn't cause suffering.
The fear becomes a current in the midst of something larger.
We'll be using the acronym RAIN as a tool in learning to face and transform our relationship with fear.
If you want to take a deeper dive into what I am teaching these two weeks it goes much deeper in my book Radical Compassion that just came out.
But the key teaching here is that facing fear is a necessary and natural dimension of evolving consciousness.
It's just part of waking up our consciousness.
We face fear.
And when we get hooked by fear – in other words,
Rather than face it we go into our control strategies and we bury it – we go into a kind of developmental arrest where we can't keep waking up to our fullness.
So we are going to be looking at how we make the movement from the fearful separate self to that heart-space that has room for fear.
And as you listen,
If you decide you want to do these weeks and really practice with fear and if you have anybody else that is wanting to team up with you,
It's actually more powerful to do it with a friend and compare notes.
First of all it becomes a little less personal.
I do workshops on fear now and then and one of my favorite of the exercises is to have people get into these kind of small groups and write on a piece of paper different things that they are afraid of,
Maybe three things,
You know,
I am afraid of failing at work or I am afraid of being rejected or I am afraid of others' judgment or whatever it is.
And then they fold the pieces of paper and they all get put in the middle and kind of tossed around in a bowl or something and then everybody picks out three and then going around in a circle people read the fears and they are reading other people's fears but they are actually reflecting on,
Oh,
What would it be like to have this one?
And of course they are very overlapping.
But what comes out of that?
It's so profound and obvious… it's so simple in a way is the sense that it's not my fear,
It's the fear.
It doesn't feel so personal.
And yet when we get awash of fear it feels like it's who we are and something is wrong and something is wrong with me and this shouldn't be happening,
You know,
We get all very personal.
So to share the process of exploring and facing and waking up through fear is actually best done in a relational field.
Often the spiritual path,
The metaphor,
Is that we are kind of climbing this mountain and we are transcending all the stuff of our human-ness and experiencing some transcendent state.
And I actually think a much better metaphor is that we are going inward and inward,
It's kind of inverted and inward.
And I like the way Rumi puts it,
Rumi speaks of night travelers who turn towards the darkness and are willing to know their own fear.
He says,
Life's water flows from darkness.
Search the darkness,
Don't run from it.
Night travelers are full of light and you are too.
Don't leave this companionship.
So there is this message that in our togetherness we can bring the light of awareness and the light of presence and go in and in and in the hurts and the fears and discover within our very essence,
The shared essence of timeless boundless love.
We go in and in and in and discover that presence,
That love,
It's the love that will not die.
So the message here is that if we want to be on this pathway of facing and transforming our way of relating to fear,
The attitude is key.
And our reflex is to think that when fear comes it's bad,
Right?
Isn't that what happens?
We think it's bad,
We think something is wrong,
That we are feeling it,
It shouldn't be happening.
And what I am inviting if you want to really take this as part of your path is a kind of a willingness and an interest and above all a care.
Really gentle in turning towards.
One friend many years ago – at that time really was serving as a teacher for me – said that fear is a sign that we are at the edge of our comfort zone.
It's like a little light going saying,
About to grow,
You know.
And I thought… At first I was a little bit cynical and I said,
Yeah,
Well fear could mean I am about to die,
You know.
And actually that's true.
And yet if we really think in a very large way that the dying of some of our old beliefs and the dying of some relationships and the dying of seasons and the dying of our old jobs and the loss of our body and our mind,
It's all can be part of waking up.
And I suspect there is many of you that have been with people who are dying and watched them wake up as part of dying their hearts,
Right?
Because we start being… It's like almost as body-mind becomes more transparent and spirits start shining through and dying you start realizing,
Well,
This identity is not with the solid temporary body,
There is something much vaster and more profound,
That's who I am.
Realizing that,
The shift in identity from the fearful self to that mystery and vastness is what gives us freedom from fear.
So yeah,
About to grow.
Now I want to make clear that as I speak and as we talk about the particular tools that help us to face fear,
I am not talking about traumatic fear or panic because we still have to face all the ways that fear lives in our body – I always use that phrase – our issues are in our tissues – but when there is trauma we need to do it in a way that is more gradual and with more resources and support than we might for the fears that many people experience day by day.
So we are not focusing on traumatic fear.
And there will be next week a conversation with my friend and author Jim Gordon about his book On Healing Trauma that will round this out soon.
Another piece to say is that when we get into fear and we really get locked in,
We are in a trance,
Okay,
And you know what it is like.
I mean,
There is nobody here probably that hasn't felt fear and sensed that shrinking and how we get small and how our view of the world gets small.
It is not like we are remembering how other people are doing and concerned about them and it is not like we are enjoying the stars in the night sky,
It is like we are small and self-focused and cut off in a way from our resources.
So it is a trance.
But not all fear creates a harmful trance.
Fear is sometimes described as nature's protector.
So it is universal because it is built into our nervous systems to be a signal to let us know we need to do something to avoid threats to our body and mind.
And we are supposed to narrow our attention and get focused for a time period.
We are supposed to narrow our attention and scan for where the source of the trouble is and we are supposed to armor ourselves and we are supposed to have blood rush to extremities so that we can,
You know,
Run,
Run,
Run.
All that is supposed to happen.
If you are in a car and the driver has been drinking you are supposed to feel fear.
And if,
You know,
If medical needs and insurance won't cover or if you see a child playing on dangerous slippery rocks or whatever,
You are supposed to have fear and do something.
Fear turns to suffering.
It turns into a trance that binds our life when it oversteps its bounds.
And by that I mean when our fear-response,
The on-button gets jammed.
And so we are not just responding to something that is really a danger but everything is triggering it.
We are triggered all the time.
And that happens for many of us when we have a regularly repeated experience of threat early on in our individual lives or if we are in a non-dominant population and we are in a culture that is regularly threatening our survival and well-being our bodies will learn fear.
And it locks… it can lock in over time so that on-button is just… the accelerator gets jammed,
We are always on.
And it takes over at least partially in an unconscious way so that we are busy trying to control things but we are not aware it is going on.
So here I want to pause and reintroduce something I speak about once every couple of classes which came from Joseph Campbell and he describes this big circle with a line going through it and it is a circle of awareness.
And the line going through it means that whatever is below the line is unconscious and whatever is above the line is conscious.
And much of our fear,
The thoughts and the feelings around fear,
Is often below consciousness.
It's driving us,
Totally affecting us,
Shaping us,
Affecting our body and our mind but we are not aware of it.
And in order to face fear we have to bring it above the line,
We have to shine the light of attention on it.
So that means we have to begin to see where it is.
And I want to give you a bit of a kind of a walk-through of the expressions of trance so you can begin to identify fear,
Where it is living in your body-mind.
Some people call this the body of fear.
When you are habitually caught in fear but you are not aware of it and it is controlling your experience.
You can see through your body,
Your mind and behaviors these patterns.
Now what happens to the body when there is fear,
Especially fear from an early age,
Is the body gets really tense or it gets really numb,
Either lose contact with it or it is really,
Really tight or both,
Shoulders can get knotted up and raise the head forward,
Back hunched,
Chest sunken,
The heart and belly,
You know,
Heart armored,
The belly tight.
And in a way it is like we put on a permanent suit of armor.
You might be listening and you might say,
Check,
Check,
Check,
Check.
We all have it to some degree.
I mean we all have… the on-button is pushed on for a lot of us a lot of the time.
One Tibetan teacher said,
We are like a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.
So that is the way the body reacts when we are in that trance of fear.
It armors itself.
What does the emotional body do?
It is interesting.
If you have any really difficult emotion and you scratch below the surface you are going to find fear.
It is like all roads lead to fear.
Fear is the existential experience that is impacting everything.
So when fear is unprocessed,
When we haven't faced it,
It is like kind of a… it is there in our body,
It is like imagine a flow,
It is torqued,
It is like a hose that has gotten torqued so that energy isn't able to… it is not in our full consciousness,
It is kind of being resisted,
But the water is still running.
So it takes different expressions.
Unfaced fear turns into physical illness.
We know that.
I mean there is tons of research of the effect of stress and what happens when we are in a stress reaction for too long.
So there is the physical illness.
It takes shape as chronic anxiety and worry.
Anger is a big one.
Look at anger in the look underneath and you will usually find your way to fear.
And then of course when we really push it under it turns into depression.
So there are a lot of expressions in the trance of fear that don't initially look like fear.
And then of course we lose our sensitivity when we are armoring our heart so we lose our empathy and our capacity for joy.
So we have talked about how the physical body goes and the emotional body.
Then there is the fear-based behavior.
So when we are afraid we start busily trying to control things.
And there is a whole body of work called terror management theory which is all the ways we try to control things so we don't have to feel fear.
I think one of the biggest is we just work harder and faster.
We just are constantly trying to do things.
The other big one is that we over-consume.
We numb,
You know,
The fear doesn't feel good so we try to numb it with drugs and alcohol.
Then we act out trying to either defend ourselves or try to prove ourselves.
We pretend that we know things we don't because there is a lot of fear being shown to be stupid.
I read this that children were asked a question,
Name six animals which live specifically in the Arctic and the response of one child was two polar bears and then three and that's crossed off four seals.
What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for?
He is a noted figure in history because he invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles.
What is a vibration?
Well,
There are good vibrations and bad vibrations.
Good vibrations were discovered in the 1960s.
What happens during puberty to a boy?
He says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery.
So there is the whole thing of presenting ourselves which we know.
We know part of our control mechanisms to present ourselves.
And I just think it is interesting how often it is to seem knowledgeable in certain areas.
A big one is aggression that when we are feeling afraid we get aggressive.
And I am primarily talking about on the individual level but we can see it of course societally how fear leads to aggressing.
And of course then there is a feedback loop because we get afraid then we act aggressively towards somebody and then they get defensive or aggress back and then around and around it goes.
And there are different ways that it plays out when we are afraid.
There is a story some of you might remember from a long ago where there were eleven people hanging onto a rope suspended from a helicopter.
Ten were men and one was a woman.
They all decided that one person should get off because if they didn't the rope would break and everyone would die.
And so the negotiation began but no one could decide who should go.
So finally the woman gave a very touching speech saying how she would give up her life to save the others because women were used to giving up their life for others,
For their partners and their children giving in and not receiving anything in return.
And when she finished speaking all the men started clapping.
So there is aggressive and there is passive aggressive.
So I am being playful because,
You know,
We all have these terror management strategies where we are just doing the best we can to try to get away from feeling fear.
We all do it.
Then we have fear thoughts.
The fear in our body could not be sustained if we didn't keep on cycling through our worried thoughts,
Our fear thoughts.
They keep going and going of what is going to go wrong and the judging and the obsessing about what we are afraid of.
The Buddha wrote or didn't write it but taught that whatever you regularly think about that becomes the inclination of your mind which is common sense if you sense of neuro pathways and you just deepen the grooves.
So then we start sensing,
Well,
What was I thinking about today?
And we know how much of the undercurrent of worry,
Well,
There is not going to be enough time and will I get it done and am I going to miss this thing from happening and am I going to fall short on that?
We know how much is in there on these areas.
So what do we fixate on?
It said there are five types of fear.
Terror,
Panic,
User name or password is incorrect,
We need to talk and fourteen missed calls from mom.
So the deepest kind of root of fears is that primal mood of the separate self and the fear is losing life,
The fear is a threat to existence and that is at the reptilian level,
This fear that we are going to not make it.
I saw many years ago this is Victor Yalem,
He does these little cartoons and he did one that says he has got a psychiatrist sitting in a chair and then lying on the couch is the Grim Reaper and the Grim Reaper is saying,
No,
Doc,
I am afraid it is your time that is up,
You know.
And that is the fear,
You know,
Is that we are going to lose our life and of course it extends into fears about sickness,
Things go wrong and we immediately perseverate and it goes right into a deadly disease but it also goes into the loss of our home and our job and our physical security threats to our finances and so on.
So anything to do with security and safety can go right down to that deep survival fear.
I remember reading a while back,
I don't remember from where,
Joseph Campbell saying that the very beginning of all religions is the cry help,
That we all sense it is out of control,
That we are all impermanent and there is some deep place in us that is looking for some way to make it and not be terrified by it.
This life is a test,
It is only a test.
If it had been an actual life you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do.
So you get the idea.
So that is the core level of what we are afraid of.
Then when it is not a life or death issue – this is very interesting that what primates do are default when it is not life or death – is that we start comparing to others and sensing where we are going to fall short.
And each of you knows in your own heart of hearts and mind of minds how much comparing goes on and whether it is to do with our appearance,
Our intelligence,
Our success in the world,
Our personalities,
We are constantly comparing.
And as mammals and primates we have a fear of failure in the relational field,
We are pro-social creatures,
So it is another form of death.
It really is to not belong,
To feel rejected.
So that is another domain of fear is that I am not going to succeed,
I am going to fail,
I am going to be rejected.
So I have been talking about the fear thoughts and those are the thoughts that can predominate when we are in the trance of fear,
Worry thoughts,
Fear of failure thoughts.
And unless they get brought above the line,
Unless we start becoming aware of them,
They control our biology and they keep us as a scared small self.
So story – this is a story you will find in True Refuge – was of a man who was a lobbyist for an industrial trade group and he was a workaholic and that was his one fear management strategy but he was always scanning for what would undermine his reputation as a very powerful connected person.
So he was always competing with people,
Another management strategy,
And finally he used alcohol and cocaine to kind of rav himself for different meetings and so on.
Anyway,
This is fear of failure,
It all came down to fear of failure,
That was what was going on behind it,
But it caused trouble.
Like he basically became addicted and he was on the verge of losing his marriage and his job so he had to go into recovery,
Kind of got forced there,
But then it turned out to be grace because he was basically having to bring above the line the whole tangle of the trance of fear,
The whole tangle of his body's armoring and the whole tangle of all the thoughts he had about failure and all his strategies to control things had to start coming above the line.
And he described a gift from his sponsor who taught him the phrase,
Not my will but my heart's will.
And I am sharing that with you because when we get into these control strategies my will is the ego saying,
You are going to fail if you don't do this and you have to do that and it's okay to have this drink,
That's my will.
And for him every time he saw himself,
You know,
About to say something or about to enter into his old control strategies he would say,
Not my will,
My heart's will.
And that started to bring the whole thing above the line.
He started to see how many of his thoughts were keeping him completely in that trance of fear.
One of my favorites of all spiritual teachers,
His name is Srinur Sargadatta,
He wrote a book,
I Am That,
And he has a line that just comes back to me over and over again.
And it's that the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.
Our minds keep us in the trance of fear.
Our minds tell us,
You are not good enough.
Our minds tell us what's wrong around the corner.
Our minds tell us what we've got to do to control things.
That's my will,
My ego's will.
It's the heart that begins to sense that if we want to be free we have to come into presence,
We have to face what's here,
And we need to do it with the help and support of each other.
The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.
We're going to now shift and look at how can you over these next few weeks start practicing once you sense that you're in that trance of fear.
And sometimes your indicator will be that you're just physically tight,
Sometimes you'll be sensing fear thoughts,
Sometimes you'll see the control behaviors,
Any of them is an entryway.
Okay,
This is the trance of fear.
If you're not familiar with the acronym RAIN,
It's a weave of mindfulness and compassion,
And the letters stand for R is recognize… Oh,
Recognize,
Fears here.
A is allow.
That means don't go into the control strategy,
Just pause,
Give it space.
The I of RAIN is to investigate.
And it's not mental,
It's not like saying,
Oh,
I'm afraid because my father treated me this way and now somebody else has his tone of voice.
That's not the I.
The I is investigate,
Okay,
Where am I feeling this in my body?
What am I unwilling to feel?
It's like really getting into the body.
The N is to nurture,
Is to bring kindness and care to that process.
Then there's in RAIN what's called after the RAIN is notice the shift that's happened in presence,
How by bringing above the line,
Attending and investigating and nurturing,
Notice who you are at the end,
Notice the shift from the scared self to the fearless heart-space.
So that's the RAIN process in a nutshell.
And what we'll do in this… the remainder of our time right now is just look at the recognize and allow because that alone is incredibly powerful at bringing things above the line.
But I just… before we start I want to name that with RAIN even though it seems sequential,
The N or nurture you need all the time,
You need the N before you start,
You need to even engage at the very beginning with kindness.
And at any point during the process if you're feeling caught again it's the quality of kindness and there's many different pathways to kindness and many ways that you can offer some calming and soothing to the body and the heart in the process.
So nothing is formulaic.
You each have to customize for yourself.
But this gives you a structure that's useful.
To keep in mind that fear… I think of it like a wild shy creature that's in the woods and it's like we're standing in the meadow and we're saying,
Come on out,
I'm here to be with you.
And you know it just… it takes inviting with real gentleness and kindness and interest and then we see what happens.
But the beginning of RAIN is to,
When you sense fear,
To name it and to allow it to be there.
The shamans say that when you can name a fear it loses its power over you.
To just say,
Okay,
Fear,
Fear,
Unpleasant,
It loses its power.
Not all the way,
Clearly,
But some.
And there's a lot of science that correlates that shows – this is especially from UCLA – that by mental notation naming what's going on you activate the prefrontal cortex and that quiet,
Solimbic system and there's more coming back online with executive function,
With compassion and mindfulness.
So naming helps.
Now the example that I share with you on recognize and allow is my very favorite example.
It's something that I have remembered now for decades.
And I wrote about in Radical Acceptance a man who was at a retreat and in the early stages of Alzheimer's.
And he needed help getting around the retreat.
His wife was there to get him to the meditation hall and to the dining room and so on.
And when he came in for an interview I was surprised at how upbeat he was.
And I asked him… He was a psychologist,
He had been meditating for a number of years,
But he knew what was going on.
And he told me that it was like the fall time when the leaves are falling,
It's not bad,
It's just what's happening.
So I thought,
Wow,
That's pretty wise.
Then he shared something that happened in the onset of the disease.
He said he was teaching,
He went to a place to give a workshop,
About a hundred people there,
And he was about to start and he went totally blank,
Like completely blank.
He had no idea what he was going to say.
In fact he didn't know what he was doing there.
He didn't know why people were looking at him expectantly.
So that was the situation.
And of course his heart starts pounding.
So here is what he did.
First of all he didn't do anything,
He just paused.
And then he started naming what he was aware of,
Pounding heart.
And then he kind of bowed.
Scared.
Bowed.
Having a clutch right here.
Bowed.
Embarrassed.
This went on for a while just naming his experience and allowing it.
And then finally he said,
You know,
He just looked around and he said,
Well,
I'm sorry.
And you might imagine a number of people actually had tears in their eyes,
You know,
Because one person said it,
They said,
Nobody has ever given us the teachings in this way.
And what had he done?
Well,
He sensed the trance of fear about to take over and he paused.
Instead of the control strategy he just paused and he named and he just kind of allowed what was there to be there.
And bowing is another way I think of saying yes – and it doesn't mean yes,
I like this – but yes,
This is the reality of the moment,
Let it be here.
Or I use the phrase,
This belongs.
It's just part of what's happening right now.
No resistance.
So that's what recognize and allow is.
And when we sometimes don't even need to go beyond that,
If you can just recognize and allow the play of fear,
It shifts you from that resisting scared person to the space of presence that has room.
And this is the gift of a mindful attention.
Recognizing and allowing is the ground of mindfulness.
That when you are mindful of something it's no longer under the line,
You are no longer inside it,
You are bigger,
You've enlarged to the presence that can include it.
And I mentioned at the beginning that this is really the practice that everybody on a spiritual path,
If we want to keep waking up,
Needs to do otherwise we are living in resistance.
There is a poem I like called Fearing Paris.
Suppose that what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris.
Then you would have the courage to go everywhere in the world,
All the directions of the compass open to you except the degrees east or west of true north that leads to Paris.
Still you wouldn't dare to put your toes smack dab on the city limit line,
You are not really willing to stand on a mountainside miles away and just watch the Paris lights come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side you decide to stay completely out of France.
But then the danger seems too close even to those boundaries and you feel the timid part of you covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend who learns your secret and says,
See Paris first.
Don't you like the way the siren is saying,
Yeah,
That's right,
See Paris first.
So of course we need to regularly visit Paris because the more we do or whatever you want to call your fears what happens is that we start developing a kind of space for them that can tolerate them,
That we are not tightening against them and we are not closing our heart against ourselves or others because there is kind of openness still and a flow.
And if we start developing that tolerance our behaviors start changing because we are not having to run away from the present moment because most of the time we are running away from the present moment because it feels uneasy and out of control and has some fear in it.
So it is a regular practice and it is an on purpose practice.
I can say for myself I often either sit down on my cushion at home or I often meditate as I have shared with you all by the river and I will come into stillness and I will ask,
You know,
What really wants attention right now?
And I will feel inwardly or I will ask that question,
What am I unwilling to feel?
And quite often there is a kind of clench in there.
And I have learned to not think something is wrong.
I just figure,
Oh,
That is the fear clench,
The fear,
Not my fear,
Just that universal fear clench.
So imagine us all,
All of us here and those that are listening online,
If we are all just practicing with fear and when you are practicing think that there is hundreds and maybe thousands of other people right now that are practicing going,
Oh,
There is that fear clench.
And what about if we just breathe with it and what about just feeling the feeling and being kind?
You can even put your hand where it is.
There is a lot of evidence that if you just touch yourself the warmth of the hand right here at the heart helps to bring some comfort.
You can breathe.
You can breathe long and deep a bit.
Something that calms you down,
That can be helpful,
But stay and feel where that clenches.
Visit Paris.
So the starting place for us as we explore this on the spiritual path,
This evolving consciousness by opening to our fears,
Is wherever some expression of that fear-trant shows up.
And we named a bunch of them,
Whether it is the armored body or the worried thoughts or the controlling behaviors.
And take some time to pause and ask yourself,
What am I unwilling to feel?
And bring kindness and curiosity.
And we'll just practice a little bit of that right now as we are together sitting and I invite you to take it home and explore it for the freedom of your own heart and it also a freedom that ripples out to others.
So please sit comfortably.
And close your eyes and take a moment to let go of any unnecessary tension or tightness in your body.
And as we did at the beginning of the talk I invited you to scan for where you might have some stress in your life that brings up anxiety or fear.
And again I invite you to look for that but not something that is like on a scale of one to ten,
A ten,
Something that is more like maybe a five or a six because it won't serve you right now as we do this light rain with fear.
So it might be something that is coming around the corner where you are afraid,
Some gathering socially or something to do with work or maybe it is some in an individual relationship some confrontation coming up.
Maybe it is your fear for another person,
What they are going through.
Let yourself get close in with what is going on so you can kind of sense the worst part like what is it you are really afraid is around the corner.
Maybe there is a belief you are going to lose something,
You are going to fail.
So you are beginning to notice the fear beliefs in the mind.
That you are noticing that you can begin to come into the body and ask yourself,
What am I unwilling to feel?
And recognize,
Just name what you are aware of.
Maybe what you first come to is anger,
It might be fear,
It might be hurt,
Vulnerability,
Whatever you notice.
And keep paying attention,
Just recognizing,
Naming,
Allowing it to be there.
Maybe there is that clench.
And to allow means just really let it be there for now and if it helps you though putting your hand on your heart or wherever you feel strong feelings you could put your hand on your throat or your belly,
You are beginning to accompany yourself in the process.
This is the beginning of nurturing as it is going on which can only be helpful.
So you might experiment.
What am I unwilling to feel,
To feel in the body,
To recognize it,
To allow it and to deepen with investigating just to really sense,
You know,
Where is it and where is the most vulnerable place?
Let whatever you discover belong here.
Let it be here.
So if you are bowing you are saying,
Okay,
This too.
Investigating it,
Feeling it.
And I describe those wild creatures in the forest just sense what this part of you might most need to feel embraced and held by you,
To feel welcomed,
To feel cared about,
Accepted.
So you are asking,
What does this fear part need?
How does it want me to be with it?
And that will guide you in nurturing.
I am just offering a really kind presence.
You might sense as part of After the Rain even just for these few moments the difference between the scared self and this growing heart-space,
This kind presence that is attending.
This is the beginning of freedom,
That shift.
You might sense that you are with others,
Hundreds or thousands of others that are like the night travelers facing fear.
Maybe you can think of one person in your life right now and the fears they are feeling.
Let your heart include them.
So it is not my fear but it is the fear,
The clench that we are all feeling,
All of us,
All of us facing an awakening through fear,
All of us evolving from that fearful separate self to this heart-space,
The shared heart-space.
The poet Hafez writes,
How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being.
Otherwise we all remain too frightened.
As we close you might sense your own intention to bring that light and that care to the fear that is universal and living through your body-mind and others.
Your intention to discover the heart-space,
The fearless heart-space that can include fear but not be controlled by it.
Namaste and thank you for your attention.
For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list please visit TaraBrak.
Com.
