Healing Your Fear

I would like to invite you to do a very radical thing – to acknowledge how much fear you experience, usually underneath your everyday awareness. For heaven’s sake, Life can be very scary. Even though we spend our lives trying to control it, it is highly changeable and ultimately uncontrollable. Or as Buddha once said, “Life can change in the swish of a horse’s tail.”

Most of us don’t think we operate out of fear, but we do. We’re afraid that our hair doesn’t look good, or we’ve gained weight, or we’ll be late to the appointment, or we’ll get the flu. And it goes deeper than that. We are afraid Life won’t give us what we want and that it will give us what we don’t want. We are afraid that we are not enough and afraid that we’re too much. And it goes even deeper. We fear the unknown, we fear the vulnerabilities we have hidden deep within, and we’re very afraid of other people seeing what goes on inside of us. We also fear death, but ultimately we fear Life. We are terrified of being open and available to Life as it shows up out of mystery.

Fear is at the foundation of the mind that believes it is separate from Life. Even when our lives are going well it’s still there, molding our choices and causing us to tighten our bodies and minds. We wander around in a bubble of fear, not even recognizing how much fear runs us.

Fear not only causes us to resist Life, but it also causes us to reach forward trying to grab hold of something that will quell our fear. This causes us to be anywhere but here, so we miss the living moments of our lives, for fear always wants Life to be different than what it is. It also closes our hearts, so the illusions of ‘for and against’ and ‘them and us’ can get a foothold in our consciousness. All you need to do is look at history to see where that takes us.

Imagine putting on of pair of glasses where the lenses have been fractured. Your view of the world would be very distorted. We have all put on the fractured glasses of fear, and because of that we don’t see things clearly.

There are two ways you can be with this wild and crazy time. You can keep the glasses on and feel that Life is going the wrong direction and falling apart, or you can take the glasses off and recognize that the way your life is showing up invites you to discover how to get to know fear in order to not be run by it.

There is so much happening in the world now that generates fear: terrorists, global warming, active shooters, and politics. Whether you are afraid of Trump’s actions and what they may do around immigration, terrorism, and global warming; or if you voted for Trump because you believe he is going to act in a way that makes you less afraid, it’s all still just fear.

Down through the eons, humanity has constantly been maturing. At one time, we were so afraid of Life that we sacrificed fellow human beings to placate the gods. At one time, we were so afraid of other people’s beliefs that we burned them at the stake or we hung them until they were almost dead and then disemboweled them. So, the fear that is here is nothing new, but we are now being asked to relate to it in an intelligent and responsive way rather than being run by it.

How can we not be run by fear? How can we meet Life through our aware hearts rather than our reactive minds? The first step is acknowledging fear itself and actually noticing how much the voice of fear talks in your head all day long. It’s about not being ashamed of how much fear you experience and recognizing that most everybody else also believes their stories of fear. This will help you not to be afraid of fear so you can begin to be curious about it.

In discovering how to not be run by fear it helps to recognize that there are two types of fears. The first is biological fear which is necessary for survival. If you stepped into the street and suddenly heard a very loud honk, your body would immediately step back. The second type is psychological fear, the stories of fear in your mind, which is what you experience most of the time. Yes, your fear-based stories can be very seductive, but there is a huge difference between imagining an attack by a lion and the fear of actually being threatened by one. And yet we mostly believe that the imaginary fears are real.

An amazing thing happens when you begin to explore fear. You see that most of your fears have never come to pass. Or, as Samuel Clemens, the author of Mark Twain, once said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my Life, most of which never happened.” Take a moment and ask yourself, “Other than the stories in my head, am I okay right now?” One of two things can happen when you ask that question. The first is that you see that your stories are not grounded in reality. They are mostly imaginings about the future. The second is that your mind may resist, saying, “I have to be concerned about what may actually happen in the future in order to be okay.” Even though the mind feels that that is the way to safety, it just imprisons us in a world of fear.

As you are discovering how to relate to your fears rather than from them, fear itself may become afraid that you will not be safe if it isn’t your guide through Life. It will say that if you don’t listen to it, something bad will happen or nothing will happen. But if you discover how to be curious about fear, exploring how it lives in your body and what stories it tells you, the clouds of fear will gradually lift, and what is revealed is a natural guiding system inside of you that will inform you in every situation how to respond in a way that brings harmony rather than reaction.

Be willing to use all the chaos that is happening right now to get to know how fear lives inside of you so you don’t have to be run by it. Be willing to take off the fractured glasses for a moment here and a moment there.  For the world needs people who respond in wise and inclusive ways to all that is happening rather than reacting. Whether it is personal challenges or collective challenges, if we react we only create more reaction. Or, as Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. It only creates more problems.” But we all have the capacity to respond, we all have a highly intelligence heart that can bring healing out of chaos and inclusion out of exclusion.

I would like to end with the quote from the beloved Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron that was also in the last blog. I offer it again because it is the core invitation we are being given at this time, “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to Life directly or do I choose to live and die in fear.”  Get to know fear inside of you and become a part of the healing of our planet.