~ a talk by Tara Brach presented on May 8, 2016
Listen and watch: tarabrach.com/fear-pathway-loving-presence/
Even if you feel like your mind has been wondering all over
the place, being in this kind of space where there is a intention to be
noticing what’s going on we become more intimate with what’s actually
happening, we notice more, and I know from the groups that there’s so much of
the increasing capacity to sense something and saying, “Yeah, under that I can
feel, hmmm, there’s sadness,” or feeling one thing and going, “Yeah, and I feel
shame about that,” you know, there is this growing capacity to notice what’s happening.
And one of the things that we start discovering as we begin
to be more here with – you know, underneath the thoughts, when we stop leaving
– for most of us is that whatever is occurring it’s often… laced in with some
fear; that if we are not feeling directly fearful – if there is another strong
energy – usually there is some sense of, “Oh, this is a problem,” and some fear
about it. That’s the second arrow, that “Something is wrong.”
Often, though, it is quite in the foreground. I know for myself that many moments, if I just randomly check in through the day and sense, “Okay, so what’s going on inside me?” I’ll find a kind of it’s not agitation but a kind of edgy sense of… it’s kind of a static feeling of just… it kind of feels like existential anxiety, it’s just that something around the corner could go wrong. And I find when I check in with others, it’s there for most people. And if we really investigate, there’s an apprehension of loss that we all live with, a feeling of knowing the pain of separation and fearing separation, fearing disconnection, it’s always about loss: loss of our own body-mind, loss of someone else we love, loss of a sense of esteem or power or respect or whatever it is – but it’s loss. And deep down it’s a kind of… on some level it’s a dying, we are afraid of dying, holding on to this selfness and afraid of dying.
Okay, so this is one of these catholic priest, minister and rabbi
stories. Get ready. A catholic priest, a minister and a rabbi are discussing
what they would like people to say when they die and when their bodies are on
display in an open cascade. The priest says, “Well, I want someone to say he
was a righteous man, honest man, very generous.” The minister says, “Well, I
would like someone to say she was very kind and fair and she was good to her parishioners.”
And the rabbi said, “I would want someone to say ‘Oh look, he is moving!’”
We want to live, you know. I’m right now at the kind of
homestretch of an online course called “Awakening Your Fearless Heart.” And I
love the title because the basic teaching which is a really perennial teaching
you’ll find in all the different traditions is that if we, instead of pulling
away from our fear, if we let fear be a portal it carries us to what you might
call the fearless heart or bodhicitta, the awakened heart, but it’s through
opening to and not resisting the fear that’s here that we actually find a
refuge in a vastness and a tenderness and a wakefulness that’s our true nature.
And so that understanding is that everyone – everyone that’s
on this planet – has a nervous system with fear in it and so that we are in it
together. The metaphor I like – one of my favorite ones – of this pathway
through fear to the fearless heart, bodhicitta, it comes from the Tibetan
tradition and in Tibetan Buddhism the challenging energies that Pat talked
about so beautifully last night that the attitude towards them is not one of,
“This is the enemy, this is wrong” but rather it’s the understanding that every
emotion has its intelligence, that every challenging energy is really an
expression of awakened heart-mind but it’s in some way torque and it’s by
bringing our presence and attention to it that un-torques it so that our
natural free heart and awareness can flow in a complete and whole way. So it’s
by going and engaging with the energies that that happens. And the way they’re
depicted – and this is what I like so much – they’re… If you look on the
thankas – which are the mandalas from Tibetan art – or if you look at the
temples, at the entrance to the temples and the surroundings on the borders of
the thankas you’ll find these goddesses, these animal-headed goddesses, they
are ferocious and fierce and passionate and filled… they’re fearsome and
they’re filled with craving and they’re all the energies that are naturally
arising in these body-minds that, should we be willing to engage with, we then
we are able to enter sacred space. So I really think that’s quite beautiful
that what we’re encountering – Pat described them as limbic loves – they’re
this aliveness that wants to be alive and yet it expresses itself in different torque
ways sometimes that we’re freeing up as we engage.
And the piece that we are doing it together. This is Rumi.
Rumi speaks of night travelers who turn towards the darkness are willing to
know their own fear. He writes this, 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 in a way I feel like that’s what we are doing together.
We’re in this sangha companionship where we’re choosing to be with reality,
with the energies that are moving through us, and in that being with we
actually discover the fullness of who we are.
I think in an evolutionary way the shift in how we relate to
fear is absolutely the key to waking up. So we’re shifting from being the self
that is possessed by fear, scared of fear, is fighting fear to the awareness
that’s relating to fear. From fight-flight-freeze to attend and befriend.
So this is what we are going to be exploring tonight. We are
continuing… Pat said the groundwork so beautifully for how we pay attention to
these energies. I’d like to deepen it with how we as night travelers can work
with fears that are here, that naturally arise, and discover bodhicitta, the
fearless heart. We’ll do it by examining how we get identified with what’s
called “the fear-body” and then the practice is that loosen that up.
So it’s part of emerging in to form that we perceive
ourselves as separate. The brain is designed to perceive separation. And then
we attach to these vulnerable body-minds. And then there is this fear of
whatever threatens our survival. And we’re endowed with that negativity-bias
that has us fixate on danger. So any of you today that were – came up in both
of my groups – that tendency to think something is a problem that’s… we come by
that honestly, that’s part of our genetic inheritance, you know, if you have a
hundred dog encounters and ninety-nine of them are friendly, fun ones but then
there is one where a dog bites you that’s the one you’ll remember forever, you
know. I think it takes eight compliments or positive feedback to undo one
criticism. That’s just the way we are. The limbic system’s reaction is to
fixate on what’s wrong and that’s our fear response. And here is nature’s
protector: If you didn’t have fear, you’d be brain dead really. We need it. We
need it to alert us to where there is danger so that we can respond. It lets us
know. There are five types of fear: terror, panic, seeing the message “Username
or password is incorrect,” your partner saying, “We need to talk” and fourteen
missed calls from mom. I’ve added a sixth which is the “spinning rainbow wheel
of death” on my Mac computer, that’s Jonathan’s label for it. But as indicated
in this, the challenge is not that we have fear but that our fear-response gets
jammed, the on-button gets jammed, and so that what happens is, rather than it
being just a predator that is stalking us in the jungle or we being cut off on
the beltway and having that alarm, it’s not just that, it’s so many parts of
our life and it’s usually very psychological evoked fear.
And, you know, I am thinking right now of one man in a
recent workshop. He described growing up his father was pretty distant and
pretty critical. And he got a lot of kudos when he did well in school or did
well in sports but that was the only access to positive feedback. And so as an
adult now every time he doesn’t feel like he is meeting a certain standard in
almost anything – you know, the way he dresses, the way he plays his tennis
game, the way he is doing at work, – there’s… it goes down to a very deep place
of “I don’t belong, I am going to be rejected.” It goes from anxiety to the
belief “I am a failure” to “I am going to be rejected.” Our fear generalizes.
And in a very painful way. So we develop what is called over time “the body of
fear.” This is when the fear-button is jammed on. And I would say for all of us
if we are suffering at all it means we’ve got a slightly at least jammed
fear-button where it’s not just… we’re not just registering valuable input
that, you know, there’s a threat to us but we are caught in an associative loop
where we’ve turned a much broader swathe of our life into a danger.
The fear-body is… Fear takes root in our tissues, you know,
“Your issues are in your tissues,” it takes root in our thought forms, takes
root in the emotions that are here, in our behaviors. And that’s the fear-body.
And when we get identified with it – in other words when we are triggered and
we’re living inside the thoughts and feelings of our fear – in those moments we
are in a trance that has cut us off from our capacity… It’s interesting: We
can’t learn when we are in fear, really learn, when we’re anxious we are not
able to learn, we are not able to be creative, we’re certainly not
open-hearted, all our energy is, you know, zooming out to our legs and arms so
we can run. Fight or flight. It cuts us off from our hearts.
So what I’d like to do is to kind of shine a light on the
trance. We’ll just look at the fear-body. I’m going to invite you just to sense
for yourself what you notice how your fear-body manifests, we all have one,
just to listen with that lense because the more you shine a light on the trance
the more quickly you are alerted to when it is taking over and then you can
begin the practices that we’ll explore which are you’ve already been exploring here
to wake up out of it.
So one level of our fear-body is that our body contracts.
And you might have noticed here as you’ve been sitting that you start noticing
how there are habitual areas of tightness or tension that are very hard to
loosen. I certainly know them very well in my shoulders. To have my shoulders
go back and down, to have my chest out, to have my posture correct after all
these decades it takes a lot of work because the fear-body has the shoulders go
up and forward, this chest sinks, you’re protecting your torso. Does that make
sense? So this is the musculature. And what happens is that it becomes like a
permanent suit of armor that is so familiar we don’t notice it in daily life,
which is why we get here, and we start being mindful of our body and we start
noticing the contractions. Chogyam Trungpa – Tibetan teacher – says, “It’s like
we’re a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.”
Then there is the mind which gets when we are in a
fear-state we have got these neuropath ways of repeating fear-thoughts about
what’s going wrong, what’s going to go wrong, comes out in judging and
obsession, figuring things out. Have you noticed how many moments you’re trying
to figure something out? You know. When we don’t have to be figuring things
out? From the old days, decades ago, one of the first jokes I remember my
father telling us was, “A woman sends her son a telegram” – this is how long
ago it was – “and the one liner: ‘Start worrying. Details to follow.’” You
know, and it’s like that, it’s like we’re anxiety ready to hitch itself to
something.
And then there are the emotions that loop around with the
fear-body. We’re afraid and then there can be depression which is trying to
push down the fear or jealousy or anger, there’s a lot of emotions. But the
interesting thing is that you have to keep having fear-thoughts to have the
emotions lock in. So if you’ve noticed an emotion has set in here, it’s because
there have been thoughts to keep it going. An emotion left to its own devices
takes 1.5 minutes to come and go. But it’s the fear thinking that keeps fueling
it. So those emotions and thoughts go together.
And then there are our behaviors, our fear-management strategies
that I usually refer to as “false refuges” which are ways we are just trying to
feel better. And they can be very mild seeming like just the daydreaming kind
of things where we are just trying to find our way to more pleasant territory.
For many of you we’ve talked today about sleep how you can come here and be
sleepy because you’re really, really exhausted. We can also be sleepy because
there’s something in us that doesn’t want to deal with some rawness that’s
there. So sleep can be a management-behavior. And then probably the addictive
behaviors, the consuming is one of the biggest – that when we’re very young,
preverbal, and there is anxiety that’s been handed down to us or that’s right
around us or in our culture the quickest control-strategy we have to
self-soothe is eating. That’s why such a huge portion of the population has
eating disorders. Fear-management strategy. And of course there is different
ways we use drugs and other medications. I personally feel like there are many
medications that can be used skillfully and many that can be abused. So I’m not
weighing in on that. But I will tell you about one poster at a conference on
PTSD. And it had the question, “If there was Prozac back then” – with a
question mark – and then it has a few examples of what might have been
different, it has Carl Marx saying, “Sure we can fix capitalism if we tweak it
a bit” and then it has Edgar Alan Poe and he is looking out the window and he
goes, “Hello birdy.” A really big fear-management strategy is speeding up,
staying busy, moving fast. It’s like we are on this bicycle, paddling fast to
get away from the present moment where there is fear.
Another fear-management strategy is rationalizing things to
ourselves and trying to make things okay to ourselves, we are misrepresenting
the truth. You know, how many children grow up with the fear of punishment for
telling the truth? So there is a really good reason that we present things so
we look good and so we don’t look bad. And since I’m on this thing about rabbis,
ministers and priests. They are playing poker when the police rate the game.
Turning to the priest the police officer says, “Father Murphy, were you
gambling?” Turning his eyes to heaven the priest whispered, “Lord, forgive me
for what I’m about to do” and to the police officer he then said, “No, officer,
I was not gambling.” The officer then asks the minister, “Pastor Johnson, were
you gambling?” Again an appeal to heaven and the minister replies, “No,
officer, I wasn’t gambling.” Turns to the rabbi and the officer says again, “Rabbi
Goldstein, were you gambling?” Shrugging his shoulders the rabbi replied, “With
whom could I be gambling?” you know. Okay, so misrepresenting things.
And then there is how we perpetually try to control others.
When there is fear we have to take control. So we try to control others, we try
to control ourselves. And then the last one I’ll mention is aggression. And
when we are afraid we aggress against ourselves by means of judgment. We get
very, very harsh towards ourselves. And when we’re afraid we aggress towards
others – again, lashing out, judgment and more physical aggression. Rumi
writes… which reminds me of the mother who tells her child, “When you’re
walking through the graveyard at nighttime and you see a bogeyman run at it and
it will go away.” “But what,” replies the child, “if the bogeyman’s mother has
told it to do the same thing? Bogeymen have mothers to.” So there’s aggression.
Then we see the trance of fear in a societal way of course
with the addictive consuming that we do as a society and the way we deplete the
earth of its resources we see the damage that’s done there with unfaced fears.
You see the deception on a societal level because we can’t believe anything
that’s reported, everything is a spin. And we see most vividly how the trance
of fear turns us into aggressors against others that seem like “unreal others”
that are different in some way. And so we have the fear of others, we need to
control them, we need to exploit them. And then you see racism, you see sexism
and you see all the violations and the circles of violence that are going on
and on, the repeating ones. And I have been thinking a lot about generational
trauma because, you know, we think, “Okay, some group attacks another group and
then that’s that” but it gets handed, I mean, research is showing how it gets
handed down through the genes, that fear is genetically transmitted, it affects
the DNA in sperms, it affects the brain, and it affects behavior on future
generations. So generations back those in this country, dominant culture,
kidnapped and bring in slave Africans here, continued oppression through the
last generations and it gets handed down – the fear and the fear response –
which leads of course to addiction, aggression, and aggression and everything
we know including self-aversion we see it in the first nation people what’s
happening when fear is handed down generation to generation. Faulkner writes,
“The past is not dead. It is not even past.”
And so it is with us that each of us grew up in a culture
that has a huge amount of fear and with parents with their own fears and yet
somehow or other we feel our fears and take them very personally and we feel
bad about ourselves for them and feel bad about the fear body. We don’t like
the way we get tense and we don’t like the way our thoughts go and we don’t
like the way we behave. And yet it’s conditioned. And it’s not our fault.
So in order to loosen the fear body we begin to pay
attention to these different layers. And it’s important to see them all because
if you catch the fear in your body but you don’t sense the thoughts that keep
on fueling it then you still identify. And if you catch the fear thinking – the
worrying – but you don’t feel it in your body you are still identified. And if
you catch the fear but you don’t realize this shame that you have layer over it
you stay identified.
I’d like to pause here. We’ll just do a brief reflection
together. I invite you to kind of just check out what you notice about
yourself. And as you kind of set yourself for reflecting you might just sense
that there’re different degrees of being identified with the fear body. When we
are really suffering we are very identified, we are very cut off. When we are
in the fear body we are cut off from the whole; that’s the nature of fear:
feeling separate, cut off. Trauma is the most extreme, that’s the most major
dissociation where we’re really cut off from our sense of wholeness. But there
are different degrees. And in order to be free we need to see the way that
cutting off is affecting our body, our mind, our behaviors.
So as you reflect on this I’d like to invite you to sense
yourself as a witness that’s friendly and interested with the intention of
growing, of waking up. You might bring to mind a situation that arouses
moderate fear, not trauma. It might be something around the corner that’s
coming up that you’re anxious about, it might be a situation with another
person, a difficult conversation or conflict or something that triggers off
fear and anxiety, something at work, something to do with finances. Let
yourself get close in enough to the situation that you can feel what it’s like
when your system starts registering fear. You might imagine the situation
visually, if another person is involved what they might be saying… Notice how
the fear body expresses itself in your physical body. Where do you feel fear?
Sometimes if you’re experimental you can even exaggerate it a bit and exaggerate
your body posture and the facial expression if you really want to get in touch
with the fear body you actually let it… a facial expression that you sense has
got fear to it and it’ll help you get in touch with the feelings in your body.
Getting familiar is actually helpful. When you’re feeling fear in this
situation what are you believing? What do you believing is going to go wrong?
What do you believing about yourself? About the world? What’s the worst thing
that’s going to happen? It might be easy to sense the belief; it might not be,
if it’s not just drop it. It’s good to check in and see if you notice the
belief. Is it that I am going to fail? That I am going to be rejected? That
something is fundamentally wrong with me? There may be related fear thinking
that you’re aware of when you’re in the body of fear. You might notice as the
fear thoughts and beliefs are there what the whole felt sense is in your body,
your heart. What behaviors come out of it? What are your particular fear
management strategies relating to this situation: to try to ignore, to try to
fix or control or plan or rehearse? More generally, do you know your false
refuges, your fear management strategies? And please now check and sense: Are
you still witnessing or is there some layer now of judging the fear body? And
if there is, with gentleness just note that because if you’re aware of it you
won’t get so caught by it. Okay, you might take a few full breaths and open
your eyes.
Evolving or waking up from the trance of fear. The first
piece is really just the aspiration that there is something in us that intuits
this possibility relating to the fear body, not being caught in it, of living
in a fearless heart, that heart-space that can include. One teacher calls it “a
heart that is ready for anything.” I like that expression. You’re not having to
spending your time defending.
So we’re going to explore two domains of practice that then
get integrated that really are bringing mindfulness and heartfulness to the
fear in a way that we can engage with the deities, you know, have tea with Mara,
and wake up through it. And the language we use for one domain is… we call it
“resourcing.” It’s really on purpose finding your way to some sense of
connection, some at least basic level of safety so that you can say “Enough” to
engage, okay? So that’s resourcing. And then the other domain is an
unconditional and full presence.
And generally when we’re really caught in fear we need to do
some resourcing first. In other words: We need to soothe our nervous system
some. Keep in mind that when we are fearful we are disconnected, we need some
sense of connection. And I think one of the most useful ways to understand
resourcing and how resourcing makes it possible to then work with fear comes
from Dan Siegel – psychiatrist and author – and he has a hand model of the
brain that I know some of you are familiar with. It is useful for us all just
to kind of have it in the room I think. Which is that he… You might raise your
hand for a moment, all of you, if you will. Put your thumb in the middle of
your palm and your four fingers over the top. And this is the model of the
brain. Okay? This is your brain right here. And if you open it again, the wrist
is the spinal cord, okay, and then the lower palm is the brain stem – and this
is the limbic area right here, okay? And the limbic area regulates arousal,
emotions, fight-flight-freeze, that’s what’s involved with all of that, right?
– now roll your fingers over again. This is the frontal cortex here, this is
the higher part of the brain, and this is what allows us to think and to
reason, when information comes up through the brain stem that says, “Oh, oh!
Danger, danger!” you know, it’s the frontal cortex that says, “Yes, it feels
dangerous but you have been through this one before and you are really okay and
here is how you can deal with it… Plus, you poor dear, you really are a good
person!” Empathy, compassion, it’s all in the frontal cortex, right, that’s
where it’s at least correlated with the parts that are there. Now here is what
happens: When we are stressed or when we are triggered and when this frontal
cortex isn’t fully online – and by online I mean really integrated – and, by
the way, mindfulness practice is what integrates this frontal cortex, the
information comes up but when this part isn’t activated and it’s a strong rush
we flip our lid, okay, which means that in those moments we are being dominated
by the limbic – these kind of more primitive parts of our brain – and we don’t
have access to mindfulness, to perspective, to humor, to compassion, okay? So
the whole job at that point is what will help us to reconnect? We need some
reconnecting, some reactivating, so that we can begin to begin to be present
with the fears in a way that doesn’t re-traumatize. How many of you find this
model of the brain helpful? Okay. Because I find it so useful just to consider
it that way.
So resourcing. There are many different strategies that help
to strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system, which actually allows us to
relax and subdue a bit the sympathetic. One of the ways I sometimes like to
talk about this resourcing. Jonathan and I do a lot of kayaking. And one of the
things with kayaking is that either you are going upriver or downriver but if
the currents are really strong and you are either getting exhausted or things
are going too fast you can tok behind a rock – just get out of the currents –
and when you are behind the rock you can resource, you can look at the river
and plan your strategy, you can catch your breath and can relax yourself, you
can talk to… for me talk to Jonathan and whatever it is – but you can resource
yourself so you reassess with your strength, your resilience, your capacity to
navigate. Okay, and that’s what it’s like when it’s like this and we’re all
dominated by the limbic that’s the time to pause, take a break and say, “Okay,
need to do some resourcing here.” So what does resourcing look like? One of the
strategies – the most simple – is just to name what’s going on, just to
mentally whisper, “Okay, a lot of fear,” just in those moments you’re beginning
to reactivate and reconnect with the frontal cortex.
Again, this is all… There is a lot of research on this. When
there’s a lot of trauma, a lot of disconnection, grounding is one of the best
things. It’s right now if you want to ground what you do is close your eyes,
you feel the weight of your bottom on the cushion or the chair, you feel the
pressure and warmth of your feet on the floor, and you sense gravity, you sense
that this body is belonging to here, that you are here, on the earth, on the
ground. To further resource or a different kind of approach is conscious
breathing. One of the simplest is a long, slow, deep, full in breath, a long,
slow outbreath, equal length, a total of maybe six seconds, count to four, no
pause in between. That’s described as coherence breathing and it helps to calm
the sympathetic nervous system. Just doing that for a couple of minutes.
Or as one person described today – and this for many has
been helpful – if you are just following the breath – in breath, outbreath –
notice the gap after the outbreath and just let go and relax and just be in
that stillness and then the in breath will come naturally, but just finding the
gap after the outbreath can be helpful for some. A whole other way of
resourcing is to visualize a place that feels safe. And probably the most
effective has to do with visualizing and sensing the presence of another person
or a deity or some energetic being that in some way helps you feel connected.
And in doing that you can see the being’s face and seeing the eyes looking at
you and the felt sense of it and perhaps there are words that are offered. That
can be very powerful because, again, fear has to do with disconnection.
Anything that begins to establish a sense of connection including talking to
the fear and listening to the fear begins to bring online again the frontal
cortex. You can walk, you can move, you can have tea – things that bring you
back into your body and into activity in a connecting way. And then
communicating with others. That night travelers talk with each other. And there
is again so much research on… If somebody is scared and they hold the hand of a
loved one the fear level goes down.
When we introduce RAIN we begin with Recognizing and
Allowing and then it goes right into investigating, you know, feeling the fear
words here, what I’m describing tonight actually you’d do before you begin to
really contact the fear, you’ve already noticed it, you’ve already felt you’re
caught in the currents, this is actually, instead of going right into
investigating and contacting, you do some resourcing that’ll actually enable
you to be more available for the next step which is full presence, having tea
with Mara or tea with the deities – however you want to think of it.
So I wanted to give you an example tonight of a process of
resourcing and being present with fear that I have found incredibly instructive
in my own understanding. And it starts with a story that a woman wrote that was
about her own healing. And she wrote it in the process of us doing therapy. So
I’m going to read you the story and then tell you how she worked with her fear.
Okay. It’s called “The Fairy Story.” In it she is… Just by way of context, she
is seven years old; she is hiding in a closet terrified after an unexpected
attack by her drunk and enraged father. And the little girl is praying. She is
saying, “Help! I can’t take it any more!” And she opens her eyes to see a fairy
in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. She lets the fairy know how her
father has been beating her and her mother doesn’t help and how she feels like
they both wish she were dead. And the fairy listens with tears in her eyes and
then tells her that, while she can’t make all the pain and fear disappear, she
can help get her through this time, she can help her forget and then remember
later when she is able to handle it. With the wave of the wand the good fairy
said, “I’m going to send things into different parts of your body and they are
going to hold them for you until you feel strong enough to let them move freely
again.” And she explains she is going to tighten and dull her pelvis and her
belly, she is going to constrict her heart and throat some to protect her from
feeling the raw intensity of her hurt and fear and broken-heartedness. I’m
reading the rest of it from what she wrote, “You will have trouble feeling and
being close to people but it’ll be your way of surviving. At those times that
the pain erupts you’ll find your own ways to control it, though it may not look
good to the world, but will be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will
be a fairly functional human being in spite of all this because you have a
strong mind and you can hold all this in. And I’ll be helping you.” The child
looked directly into the fairy’s eyes and asked, ‘How will you help me? You
come back to see me?’ ‘You’ll not forget everything. I will leave a voice
inside you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a
very long process but in time you’ll feel an urge and calling to step out of
imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it’s been holding all
these years. You’ll learn the art of sacred presence. There will be physical
and emotional pain as you open but you’ll have what you need – the compassion
and wisdom and support of loving others – to be a whole person, spiritually
awake but still the same. This is because your soul has always been there just
hidden by the scarce of this life-time.’ The good fairy put her arm around the
child’s shoulders and gently lead her to bed. She waved her wand and stood by
the little girl as she finally relaxed into a deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at
the small, innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. ‘When you wake up
you’ll forget I was here and you’ll forget that you asked for help. You’ll
forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you
through this. You’re a beautiful child. I love you and, in fact, your parents
love you, although they’re incapable of showing it to you. You’ll have to love
yourself enough to heal so that one day when you are older your life will be powerful,
full and free. One day you’ll know who you really are. You’ll trust your
goodness and know you’re belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you.’”
When I first shared this story – it was at a Wednesday
night, my Wednesday night class in Bethesda, probably around fifteen years ago –
and many people came up to talk afterwards and said that what most affected
them was the realization that, you know, that their fear had been pushed away,
they weren’t living in terror all the time but they had all these habits that
looked ugly to them of over-eating, of being defensive or whatever it is, and
that hearing this – hearing how it’s actually part of the design almost to be
able to deal with fear – it was like they started seeing the second arrow and
realizing it wasn’t their fault. Because when fear is really strong and we’re
young, we don’t have a way to be with it, we don’t have RAIN, we don’t have a
capacity to recognize it and hold it and be with it, so we have to disconnect
from our body some and we have to use pain-management strategies. And the way
to free ourselves includes being profoundly forgiving of that, profoundly forgiving
of any strategies that we use to defend ourselves, to control things, because
it’s not our fault.
So that for this woman was in writing and telling the story
there was a really deep sense of a forgiving. She had to resource. Her resource
was a sense of for her the good fairy became more a kind of the divine
feminine, that sense of just energetically a kind of a benevolence, a warmth
and a loving energy that she would call on and she called on again and again.
So whenever she was afraid she’d call on that and, you know, it would work some
but she practiced a lot when she wasn’t afraid and that’s really critical to be
practicing resourcing when we are not in the midst helps to build the pathway
to our resources. And so finally the time that she most directly encountered
the rawness it was not during the therapy session. She had done a lot of
resourcing. And she was on her own. And it was then that she felt like this
sense of being more shook than she ever had, she could feel like… her whole
nervous system was rattled and she was feeling into the memories of being in
the closet and the enormity of the fear. So she called on that energy. But then
she started saying, “Okay, what is this like really? What does it feel like?”
And then that’s when she was beginning RAIN. She had recognized and allowed.
She was investigating. She was contacting. She was being with. She was being
with it. And she said it was like broken glass, you know, ripping through her,
it was very, very difficult. And then she just put her hand on her heart and
just kept calling – calling on, that’s the nourishing – and what played out was
that she felt broken apart and then described it like she had finally
discovered the space inside and around her that could handle all that fear. Her
language wasn’t the fearless heart, but she felt this loving, vast presence
that really was her own heart that could hold the fear. Many, many rounds of
coming circling back when fear arose, it wasn’t a one-shot, and it wasn’t one wagon,
now I know how to find bodhicitta, many, many rounds. And this is the way it
goes that when we’re working with decades and decades of fear-body that has all
of its patterning, all of its neural wiring, it takes many rounds to rewire.
And yet I love the metaphor I first heard through Jonathan
of how indigo cloth gets dyed, that there is a vat of the dye, and you take a
white cloth and you dip it in and you pull it out and you see the indigo color
– that brilliant, radiant blue – but it fades right away to little bit off
white, dip it in again, pull it out, fades again but not quite so much, and
each time you dip the cloth into this incredible, brilliant luminous blue it
holds it a little more. And so it is when each time you feel fear there’s a
willingness to be with yourself, to name it, to feel it, to hold it – each time
you engage with the deities you become more and more familiar with the
tenderness and space that has room for fear. Your identity shifts. You’re less
and less identified with the fear body, the self that feels oppressed and
unprepared and anxious and so on. And more and more of you are resting in that
openness and that tenderness.
There is many different ways that people find their way to a
fearless heart through resourcing. One vet with PTSD would see images, war images,
have feelings of panic and his mantra was just, “May I be held in God’s love,
may I feel protected, may I touch peace.” He’d just say it over and over again.
One woman today in a group gave me permission to share described being six
years old in Iran, her mother had already immigrated and the secret police came
to the house and the fear, and this was one of the first time she had let
herself feel the fear of that. And when she asked herself what that fear needed
it was some sense of a mother’s embrace, but not some amorphous deity, a real
sense of a body holding her and that was her resourcing to practice again and
again feeling that holding of a real body and the warmth that came with that.
One high school student with social anxiety, for him he was impacted by Thich
Nhat Hanh, so he had an image of a mountain, he felt himself as a mountain,
whenever the anxiety would come he would feel himself as a mountain and feel
the strength and the steadiness in the midst of storms and just say, “It’s okay.”
One last example I’ll share with you because it came again
from here a couple of years ago. One woman was waiting for a biopsy and was
feeling that grip of uncertainty and not knowing. We were sitting in a group in
our circle and she named that and others named what was going on for them. One
woman who was… Or one man actually was really scared for his son who was
addicted to heroine and not in treatment. Another woman was describing her
husband with Alzheimer’s. Another person’s job threatened. And they became
light night travelers because each of them in their own way was being with
something and when we met again at the end she described during the sittings
that when she felt really afraid that sense of “others feel this too.” Because
if we remember that we’re beginning to reconnect, we’re beginning to get online
again with the frontal cortex, we’re beginning to become more integral. In the
deepest way when we are disconnected and we start to reconnect we are evolving
past an old identity. But it requires a kind of dying to that old identity. So
when you begin to face fear, it’s a kind of dying because to face fear you’re
going against all your normal egoic strategies. And one way to understand it is
that because I started with this whole talk with that fear is about that fear
of loss and disconnection and death, there is a deep relationship between
opening to fear and love. And it’s really that we’re not free to love, really
free to love from our wholeness, until we’ve faced fear and faced death. As
long as there is any part of us that’s defending from an egoic stands against
what’s going to go wrong, that defendedness will stop us from sensing our full
belonging. So we have to die in a way. And opening to fear is a way of kind of
dying. And yet when we do, then there is a capacity to cherish what’s here in
an entirely new way.
I want to share as part of closing a story Thich Nhat Hanh describes. He talked about how his mother’s death was one of the great misfortunes of his life. And I could really relate when I first heard this story. I could really relate because the first fear I remember in my life was being afraid of my mother dying. And I remember being very young and telling her it and her reassuring me – I have no idea how she reassured me – but just being able to tell her. Remember if you say something and communicate you’re beginning to reconnect – soothed me. And I did it a lot of times. I told her a lot of times that I was afraid of her dying. And as it happens, as she got old I already so in touch with the grieving and the loss and so open to the realness of her dying that the love became incredibly strong and I’m thinking about her a lot today because she was here at this retreat three years ago, and she would always sit right in that corner over there, I realized that I thought of her I felt all the depth of sorrow but so much a kind of love that was timeless. And it came from absolutely opening to the fear and underneath that the grief about her going.
So Thich Nhat Hanh describes his mother’s dying and his grief. And he says he grieved for her for more than a year and then she appeared to him in a dream. And in that they’re having a wonderful talk and she is young and beautiful. And he wakes up in the middle of the night and has this distinct impression that he has never lost his mother because she is alive in him. He says when he stepped out outside his monastery hut and began walking among the tea leafs he still felt her presence by his side. He says, “She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet.” And continuing to walk he sensed that his body was a living continuation of all his ancestors and that together he and his mother were leaving footprints in the damp sand. It takes opening to the fear of loss, the fear of personal loss, to discover that which is eternal. As long as we are defending against the loss of tis body, this life, we really aren’t able to open to a loving that’s always and already here. And Thich Nhat Hanh says, “All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand and feel the breeze in my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me available at any time.”
So I’d like to have us end with a brief reflection together
just bringing our hearts and awareness to wherever there might be a sense of
the fear body right now knowing that this is just a very brief reflection, it’s
something you can explore on your own as you have more time. One of the ways
that we sometimes think of the spiritual path is transcending and getting
beyond but an alternate and more true understanding is that we are going in and
in and in, it’s like we might sense ourselves as separate wells but as we go in
and in and in we discover the waters of a timeless undying love. We go in and
in and in. So you might if you’d like bring your attention right to your body
here and your heart right here and your mind right here. And as you sit and as
you breathe and pay attention just notice if there’s any expression of the fear
body that you are aware of. And there may be or there may not be. Just notice
what’s here. With whatever you are aware of – whether it’s quality of openness,
presence, tenderness, sadness, fear – just explore this going in and in. You
are recognizing and allowing how it is right now. Investigating by deepening
your attention. Perhaps feeling from the inside out wherever there is the
strongest sensations or emotions in your body.
Poet Danna Faulds writes, “Go in and in. Be the space between the cells, the vast, resounding silence in which spirit dwells. Dive in and in as deep as you can dive.” So investigating. Feeling what’s here. And then exploring whatever brings a sense of warmth and connection, you might put your hand on your heart and sense that you are offering very tender, sweet care for what’s here. And you might sense that that loving, caring energy is flowing through you from beyond, from the heart of the universe, from some spiritual figure or through others that you know. See if you can let in. Just explore that. Go in and in, letting in. She writes, “Go in and in and turn away from nothing that you find. And sensing whatever you’re contacting can flow, unfold, be held in a very vast and tender space.”
~ for more talks & meditations from Tara Brach, please visit tarabrach.com.
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