Tara Brach - 2012-03-28 - Attend and Befriend: Healing the Fear Body

Episode Date: May 6, 2015

2012-03-28 - Attend and Befriend: Healing the Fear Body - Our fear management strategies--versions of fight/flight-- contract our body and mind, and separate us from others. As we learn to pause and contact the bodily fear with a gentle, mindful awareness, our sense of being enlarges. We rediscover our belonging to presence, love and life.

A story to begin, and this is one that circulates the web, and we don't know whether it has any veracity. I haven't even checked it out, but it's a good story anyway. Some of you'll remember this. A man is sitting at the steps of a building with a hat by his feet, and he's blind, and he says, I'm blind, please help me with his, you know, kind of a bowl and so on. And a creative publicist is passing by, and he notices there's only a few coins. in the ball. And so he, without asking permission, he just takes a sign, he rewrites it, puts it down and leaves. End of the day, he comes back from work, sees the blind men sitting there

and the bowl is overflowing with coins and with cash and so on. Now the blind man heard his footsteps and recognized him. So he said, you know, are you the one, you're the one that did something to my sign and the publicist responded, I changed it a little but I didn't write anything that wasn't true. Here's what he said. The sign read, today is spring and I cannot see it. Now as you can tell from the story, this has nothing to do with physical blindness. This has to do and when we feel a pain in our hearts that can resonate, this has to do with moving through life but not really being available, not being able to really see or feel or be touched by what's happening. This is when our senses are closed off and in some way

we are caught up in reactivity. And if we look at that, it's a deep inquiry of, you know, really what's between me and being open to the life that's here. And what we find is either our mood is depressed or we're caught up in some sort of a judgment or reactivity towards others or towards ourselves or we're just restless or distracted. But if we look more carefully underneath any of those moods or states, what we find is fear. That's the core emotion. And it's ironic because our fear is

about losing life and by being caught up in fear we lose life. That's the sadness. There's all different kinds. There's traumatic fear, there's deep gripping fear, there's anxiety that targets different things in different moments or that's free-floating. But around the corner there's a sense that something's going to fail. It's like a sense like in any moment something big is going to go wrong. And the very word worry, the origins of the word worry mean to strangle.

So when we're feeling fear in some way our life force is getting strangled, there's a contraction that takes us away from wholeness and presence. So one of the terms I find really useful when we consider what happens to us when we're afraid, the way our mind contracts into busy thoughts and our body. gets tense and our heart gets tight. I like the language of body of fear, or sometimes called the fear body, because the body includes all the different parts of us. And when we're in that trance, in that fear trance, our body of fear is contracted and it's really our world is seen through that lens. The world is smaller. So what I'd like to do tonight

is explore how we typically react. when we get triggered, you know, how we kind of intensify the body of fear or the fear body with our reactivity, and how if we can learn to pause, if we can slow down even a little, we can shift from fight-flight to attend and be friend. And I really see this shift of fight-flight, this kind of automatic reactivity to attend and be friend as a sign of the evolution of consciousness. That we even have this capacity to recognize, oh, I'm in fight-flight, oh, I'm identified with the fear body.

Okay, pause, deepen attention. Attend and be friend. So we'll look at that and I want to say right off that the friend does not mean that we always are immediately embracing with great love, the fear that's there. because the very biochemistry of fear and the biochemistry of love aren't the same. But there's a movement towards that loving presence when we attend and then regard with gentleness what's here. We kind of inch towards it.

So first, the function of fear, as we know, is survival, that every one of these body minds here, we all have this nervous system that is rigged to anticipate what can harm us. And if fear wasn't there, you'd be brain dead. You know, it's meant to be there. So it's a basic survival function we're meant to scan for threats and respond to them. Now, most of our fears because of the twists and turns of evolution are not directly linked to physical survival anymore.

Most of them are around the stories and emotions that have to do with our well-being in social context. A lot of our fears around personal failure. You know, what's going to go wrong, how I'm not going to be prepared, how I'm going to fall short, how I'm going to be rejected, how I'm going to drop the ball on something and all hell is going to break loose. You know, it's just something's going to go wrong and it usually has to do with me. That's a lot of our fears.

Around the corner I'm going to fall short. I'm already falling short but it'll have big consequences, you know, that thing. But even underneath that, when we examine the questions, I'm going to fall short, I'm going to fall short. and fear, the deep core level is this sense of the fragility of life, that every one of us intuit this uncertainty. And it's true, it is uncertain and it's fragile. So fear is an anticipation of what's going to go wrong because of that fragility. And if we can begin to distinguish between our habitual fear reaction, the one that's kind of programmed into us that gets overdone and when there's actually a threat that we need to respond

to we end up living most of our moments in the awareness of the fear body but not stuck inside it but there's a discrimination that goes on is this really something to respond to that's a danger or is this just my habit most of its habit really you know how mark twain put he said the worst things in my life never actually happened, you know, that. So it's anticipation of what's going to go wrong. And I watch myself so often with it because I, part of my sadna, which is a spiritual practice as I go into the woods most days and go walking. And I can start sensing what my mind is like, you know, if I can, if I'm walking, but I'm not really on the river by the trees. I'm thinking of the emails. I didn't respond to.

or, oh, I have to fill this prescription for medication before I go travel and did I make the right plane reservations and, you know, did I have time, am I going to have time to finish the fear talk, you know, that kind of thing? Anyway. And then so then the practice is, okay, wait a minute. This is, it's not helping me to prevent something from going wrong by ruminating because usually it's not. So come back, okay, what am I seeing?

What are the forms, the colors, the blossoms? the smells. You know, what's the feeling of the earth as I'm walking? Come back, come back. So that's one discrimination. And I was thinking, as I was writing this, of a time last year that I was walking, and the wind started blowing more and more intensely

and twigs were crackling and so on. And then all of a sudden there was a huge crash and I saw a tree come down. You know, but wait when the crash happened, I instinctively covered my head. head and I want to just and then I high-tailed it out of there. I got home. I was not going, okay, the breeze on the cheek, feeling the feet, you know, it's like that was no longer the point. You know, it was like get out of there. So we don't suffer because we anticipate threats

and respond appropriately. We suffer because our sympathetic nervous system is locked into a fight-flight reaction and we're just continuously interpreting the world through that lens. We're living in a fearful, anxious mentality. So this is the fear body and it's and it becomes our identity and you can sense for yourself how much of the time is there some sense of who I am as being hitched with the fear of what's going to go wrong, the insecurity socially, the reactivity to situations. how much of our self-sense is hitched to that. So then the inquiry becomes, well, what makes it so strong for so many of us,

it gets definitely amplified by the culture we're in. I mean, you can't listen to the news and read the newspapers without being triggered. I mean, it's just the way, it's the slant of our culture. We've got a very fear-based culture. And then you can sense also it has to do with genetics. and our upbringing is one of the biggest factors to the degree we had an insecure upbringing, not good attachments with the healthy attachments with our parents. There's a sense of something's wrong with me and things are going to keep going wrong.

It gets locked into our nervous system. Part of the inquiry is to recognize how we habitually react to fear. You know, what is your fear management strategy? It's really useful to know it because if you know it, then you can begin to pause and move from your version of fight-flight to attend and be friend. But the first step is recognizing. And if I have any goal in this talk, one of the big ones is that after it you'll be at least a degree more interested when fear comes up.

Because if you're interested, if you don't automatically tumble into the reaction, in that interest there's a bit of a pause and more freedom to deepen attention versus continue the fight-flight. There's more choice. Interest helps. Okay, so what are our strategies? And you know the major ones. One of them that isn't talked about as much as freeze, the freeze strategy, it's when

we're overwhelmed and powerless and there's no way to effectively respond. of all sorts and us humans we freeze on some level. But the ones that we're most used to are the flight and the fight. So flight, what do we know about flight? Like how do we flee or pull back from the feelings of fear and from the triggers of fear? How do we do that in our lives? Okay, so I'll read you. This is Freud.

If I brought it. Yeah, here we go. writes, life as we find it, is too hard for us. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. There are perhaps three such measures, powerful deflections which cause us to make light of our misery in a way we ignore it, substitute satisfactions which diminish it and intoxicating substances which make it which make us insensible to it. That's pretty well, I'll say it again, three such measures, powerful deflections which cause us to make light of our misery, substitute satisfactions which diminish it, and intoxicating substances which

make us insensible to it. So what's your management strategy? Is it the kind of deflect and ignore? So there's fear going on but I'm not going to deal with that, you know, it's kind of muscling it through, stiff upper lip kind of thing. You know, for most of us, in some way, what we're doing is a control strategy. And we are trying to control things so we reduce the unpleasantness. We're in some way trying to get away from what feels wrong.

One of my favorite stories, Edith Wharton, she says, One day, when the Sultan was in his palace at Damascus, a beautiful youth who was his favorite rushed into his presence, crying out in great agitation that he must fly at once to Baghdad, and imploring leave to borrow his majesty's swiftest horse. The Sultan asked why he was in such a haste to go to Baghdad. Because the youth answered, as I passed through the garden of the palace just now,

death was standing there. And when he saw me, he stretched out his arms as if to threaten me and I must lose no time in escaping from him. The young man was given leave to take the Sultan's horse and fly, and when he was gone, the Sultan went down in digger. into the garden and found death still there. How dare you make threatening gestures at my favorite? He cried, but death astonished answered, I assure your majesty.

I did not threaten him. I only threw up my arms in surprise at seeing him here because I have a trist with him tonight in Baghdad. So we try to outwit in some way death. We try to control our experience and we do it in a few major ways in terms of of, when I mentioned in terms of flight, William James describes life as this ceaseless frenzy where we always think we should be doing something else. Okay? Do you know that feeling? That sense that whatever it is you need to get this done

because you really need to be doing something else. Under that is fear. I'm not going to be prepared. I'm not going to get life taken care of. I'm not going to tie up the loose ends. So one of our flight responses is to get busy and see how many things we can do. And there's a sense of when we're stressed, not doing is can be almost intolerable because we're rigged to feel like just do something, do anything, you know, but trying to do something about it gives us some sense of power. Is that resonating? Some of you might remember it's kind of a silly little story of two hunters on a hunting expedition And one of them gets a heart attack and falls down and he stops breathing.

He's gone. Panic partner calls 911, totally freaked out. And the person who answers says, calm down, calm down. First, make sure that he's dead. A little bit, time goes by and she hears a shot. Then he comes back, now what? It's really a bad story, I know. But you get the feeling of it.

that will do anything, just do something about it when we're panicked. So then Freud pointed to substitute gratification. When we're freaked out, we try to in some way, in some way, soothe ourselves, some way make ourselves feel some other kind of pleasantness or happiness. It's like that story of the man and his wife in the living room and he's saying to her, you know, if I ever become, you know, go into a vegetated state, please just, you know, pull the plug. So she goes to the TV set. pulse the plop, you know.

So we kind of dull ourselves, numb ourselves, you know, we zone out because that zone, you know, the stuff we're getting on TV is not the same fear thoughts that keep our body triggered. So it gives us a temporary vacation. Okay? Flight. We're still talking flight here. And then one of the big ways that we self-soothe and most people have some tendency towards that it's through substances, whether it's sugar, chocolate, you know, food kind of substances or whether it's marijuana or alcohol, some substance that in some way takes us away from the immediate rawness of feeling fear. I remember going to a conference on post-traumatic stress and they had posters and one of the posters

was on Prozac, which can be one of the substances that can help to give some distance from fear. and let me say before I tell you the rest of this that I have, you know, I feel like for many people, medication is completely an appropriate choice and part of freeing them up to move forward on the path. But anyway, so the story,

so there's this poster on Prozac and it says, if there was Prozac back then, and it has a picture of, you know, Karl Marx, you know, he's saying, well, maybe if we tweak capitalism, maybe it'll work and we just tweak it a little bit, you know. And then they have Edgar

Alan Poe and he's looking out the window and he's saying hello birdie. What I like about these examples is you get it that the flight, the stepping back, it might cut off the fear but it cuts us off from the reality of what's here too. So we avoid taking risks that's part of the flight strategy. Okay fight. I mean some of us, most of us have both and we major in one or the other but we have both. We have both. And we know that one of the fight strategies when we're afraid is we attack and we attack

ourselves a lot. When we're afraid, we attack ourselves and our intention is good. We're attacking ourselves because we're trying to make ourselves into that better person that will no longer be risking failure. You know, that's our strategy for being better. And of course it doesn't work. And we attack others who feel threatening. We attack them with our thoughts.

our judgments, with our actions. There was a study which I don't think would meet any of our criteria for being of sensitivity and kindness to animals that shows how rats, when they're under a fear of shock, bite other rats very, very quickly. And so it is with us. It's behind all war, that there's this fear that brings up aggression and gets fed. If anybody wants to make money out of a war, they just feed the fear, right? It's the way it goes.

So hatred, aggression, underneath it is fear. So many of us are living with the immediate sorrow of the loss of life of Trayvon Martin and knowing how, at just one example of so many, of how fear ends up destroying young lives, destroying lives everywhere with the aggression that comes out of it. We don't massacre other people if we're feeling inner peace. You know, when we hear about the massacres at war, it comes from a very scared psyche. And our society ends up, you know, nourishing that, that fear. So the suffering of fear, just to sum it up, is that when we're living in the fear body,

when we're living in the thoughts that are anticipating and the body that's tense and the heart that squeeze, when we're in that fear body, we lose our sense of belonging. We lose our sense of belonging to the moment. We just can't open to what's right here. We lose our capacity to really be intimate and belong with each other. when we're afraid there is not that tender open receptivity. We lose our belonging to the earth. Of course we're going to politically make decisions that are not sensitive to the needs

of Mother Earth. If it's a fear-based culture, Earth is separate. It's not part of us. We are not made of it. We forget. We lose our sense of belonging to awareness. We become small and separate. So that's the suffering of it.

Now the hope, the hope is that fear can either trigger reactivity, fight-flight, or it can be a call to deepen attention. If you leave with even a little more interest in, oh, okay, so here's the fear management strategy, can I pause even for five seconds? Even five seconds, it's radical. In five seconds there's a little more capacity to begin to deepen attention. So that's what I want to explore with you now. How do we deepen our attention in a way that really wakes us up from the body of fear, that

really lets us know who we are beyond that small, separate sense of self? And we move on this path not only for a sense of our own inner freedom, but because this This is what's necessary for the healing of our world. For there to be peace on earth, for there to be that care for our environment, for there to be social justice, for there to be anything that we want and long for, we need to be able to attend and befriend the fear. And you can't do it with others, you can't attend and befriend others if you haven't with the life that's here.

So let's look a little bit of how we decondition the reality. activity. And if you think about it, just imagine a sea an enemy, that little creature that, you know, if you poked it, it goes, you know, it contracts, it contracts away from its environment into itself. That's essentially what's happening when we get triggered. In some level we contract and then we might have our spines come out and we might do more to create the separation, but we pull away from belonging, we contract. The mind does it, it contracts into busy, worried thoughts. thoughts. The body does it so that we, our blood flow changes, the hormones change, our arms

and legs so that we can run and fight or are filled with a lot of blood. We can't digest for anything in our stomach though. No blood flow there. The sympathetic nervous system turns on. We're in fight-flight. What happens to the heart? Very tight, very tight. So I think of the practices that move us towards a mindful awareness, towards attend and befriend, that there's some preliminaries that can be really helpful. And I want to name them because when you're practicing this, when you do this pausing and this interested attention, you might sense, wow, this fear is really strong. I need a tool right away just to kind of calm down the sympathetic nervous system. So the first things I like to, when I'm working,

working with people individually is sometimes just to very intentionally pay attention to the breath. When you slow down the breath and lengthen the breath, it changes your biochemistry. It calls on the parasympathetic nervous system which is like a break that says, slow down, it's okay, you don't have to fight flight. You might just for a moment we'll practice together, okay? If you will, just come sitting in a way that allows you to bring your attention inside. And each of these things we'll do right now just are, have been shown in a biochemical way

to assist us. So you might first in this pause just scan and sense where you are right now. Does the mind feel busy? Is there openness and space in the mind? What's it feel like in your body right now? now? What happens when you let the awareness settle down, come into the body? What happens when you bring your attention to your heart? I'd like to invite you to very consciously let the breath lengthen.

So there's a conscious, longer, more full in breath, and match it with the out breath about the same length of the out breath, but sense of letting go with the out breath, a deliberately longer in breath, and then softening and releasing with the out breath, releasing with the out breath, matching the duration, full in breath, filling the lungs a bit, and with the same length, letting go, letting go. As you continue, see if you can let the breath be without too much of a gap between

the in-breath and the out-breath, so there's kind of a smooth continuity, full in-breath and then a real conscious softening and letting go with the out-breath. Now continuing to feel the breath, you might gently place one hand on your heart and one hand on the belly and as an experiment feel how that is for you. Just feel what's that like right now. To feel the warmth of the hand, the pressure on the heart, the belly. You can let the breath be natural. Just feel what that's like and then as an experiment switch and put the other hand on the heart,

chance, the other hands on the belly and sense what that's like. What's the experience of the warmth, the pressure, the hands? And then continue by putting whatever hand feels best on the heart or the belly. So if you liked having your right hand on your heart, go back to that if you just switched away from it. So whatever way feels best, one hand on the heart, one on the belly. You might open the mouth slightly, relax your tongue. Just sense the possibility next time. you feel some real stress or fear of taking a few moments to explore the breathing and are this hand on the heart, hand on the belly, just to notice whatever changes, whatever occurs. Open your eyes when you'd like.

For quite a while I've taught people to put their hands on their heart and often on the belly because these are kind of neural centers that have a lot of activity and there's been much evidence that when there's touch and warmth in these two centers, that it actually is very calming. It calms the sympathetic. I'm curious for you, how many of you noticed a real difference between which hand was on which? How many of you noticed that? Okay. I have always automatically put my right hand on my heart and my left hand on my belly,

but I was with Dan Siegel, who's a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, colleague. colleague friend. We just had lunch a couple days ago and he was telling me how he's done research that shows that there's actually a very different effect depending on which hand you have where, depending on your preference. So if you found one was preferential and then you were put under some brain scanning equipment, there would be a distinct difference in how effective this technique was in calming you. He doesn't know why but I thought that was fascinating and I wanted to share and thank you, Dan. That was a, I like that. So that's something to explore for yourself. These are trainings or strategies that help preliminaries that help pave the way

for a pure and mindful attention. If you've been traumatized, you don't go directly into mindful presence where you're just being with what's there. You do whatever skillful strategies help to settle down some, including working with another person. What I'll be talking about now, which is attend and befriend, is something you would do only gradually and with support if there's very strong trauma, because sometimes as you pay attention to trauma in the body, it gets retramatized. So that's my caveat. Now, having said that, let's look a bit at attend and befriend. And one way I find really helpful to think of it is, imagine as you breathe in, that's attend, that you're bringing your attention to contact

what's right here in the body. And as you breathe out, you're offering space and kindness and gentleness to whatever you touch. So, attend and be friend. It's just a way to think about it and there's actually meditations that link with the breath just in that way. Okay? All right, so attend. It's attending to where you feel it in your body. It's a mindfulness of the So one of the ways we think about it is you're learning to stay with the uncomfortableness of fear as a physical sensation in the body, which is exactly the opposite of our conditioning. All of our conditioning is to get away from that unpleasantness. So this is countering the conditioning.

Unfortunately when we try to get away, we actually deepen the trance. We become more identified with the fear body. the more you run, the more you're identified. It starts dissolving that identification when you stay. So the first step is sometimes it's called just leaning in. For one person described if a dog runs at you, whistle for it. You know, it's like stay. Or one Zen master was asked, how do you relate to fear?

His response? I agree. I agree. So this is a kind of courageous. willingness to contact the physical sensations. Again, if they're really strong, first breathe, their first go like this, do whatever it takes to cozy up to them, okay? This isn't something where you're supposed to be in some way masochistic.

This is a courage that comes because you have that wisdom that knows you don't want to keep on doing fight-flight, that it's this presence that heals. So this is the first step, is this contact and I find it helps for people to name what's going on. Just to name. You might say squeezing or pounding or clutching or heat or cold or, you know, just name what's going on, name where you feel it sometimes. That really helps.

And investigate it from the inside out. Feel it from the inside out. Now, one of the keys in this attend part of the equation is to notice when you've gone off into fear thoughts and come back. That's intrinsic to the training. As soon as you start feeling fear, your mind is going to generate more thoughts about what's going to go wrong. So it takes a certain commitment to go, okay, those are fear thoughts.

Okay, come back. I don't have to believe this. back, back to the body. Okay? So that's what I'm calling the breathing inner contacting, feel it, name it, keep coming back. Okay? Second part, what we sometimes call breathing out or discovering the space or the tenderness that holds things is like the word yes. It's like it's the sense of the space or the kindness that can be with. And the Buddha taught the metta or loving kindness practice initially, explicitly for fear. It's always been interesting to me that when the monks at one point during the rainy season had been in some sort of a jungle and had been

encountering all sorts of really nasty spirit entities that were making life miserable for them. And they ran to the Buddha and said, can't we just leave that encampment? It's just too much. It's too scary. And he said, you need to go back, but here. go back and practice this. And he had them practicing loving kindness, that sensing the space of love, the field of love. As the story goes, the field was so powerful that the transformed the energy of the tree spirits and creatures and they became allies and, you know, it's a happily ever after Buddhist story. But it talks about the power of befriending. So attend, breathe in, feel it, befriend, offer spirit.

space, say yes, some kindness. So an example that I'd like to share with you is one woman I worked with some years back. She had gone through a series of really painful relationships and they all ended, and they all, she felt, were failures that reflected on her undesirability, her lack of worth. Then she had a 10-year hiatus, like from like 32 to 42 or something like that. that. And so it was a long time and then she began dating. And as you can imagine in this new round, she was terrified of what was going to go wrong. I mean she was so set, so primed with fear and fight-flight. And her main way of fight-flight was this generating all the stories.

Like she tells herself, I really need to be like this because that's what's going to show that, you know, she had all these ways she wanted to configure herself to be like. likable and all the way and her fear was he'd see her fear. That was her fear. So we when we worked together you know and I asked her what was going on you know she described the fears I'm gonna blow it he'll see how afraid I am. He's just being patient right now but who likes insecure people you know that was this stuff that I'm sure many of you can relate to. So this was a mental fear body okay and then her physical body she'd say so the first step was okay just say to the

thoughts, thank you very much but not now and come into the body. That's the first step, you know, just attending, contact, what's here. In her body as she named it, it was clutching and tightness and pounding. So she'd name it and then say yes, okay, let's just say, agree to let it be there, agree to let it be there. And then she'd go off into thoughts again as soon as she was settled into it and the thoughts she was believing. These are real, this is really what's going to happen. I said, no, wait. You don't have to believe them. Thank you very much. Come back. So that was step one. Recognizing how she left, thank you very much, come back, feel and name and agree to what's here. As she got a little bit of the knack of being with the sensations

and it takes something to stay with unpleasant sensations, then she began to very intentionally become more gentle. And that's what I mean by befriending. It's in some way there's a sense, just as the gesture of touching your hand on your heart, I should use my right hand, that just like this gesture in some way she was communicating to the place of fear, it's okay, you can be there. I've done many, many sessions with people where if they can get to the point of like sensing, well what is the fear most want? Often the fear just wants us to accept that it's there. It's a part of us that just needs to be accepted.

So there's some way she was saying, okay, you can be here. That's what I mean by befriend. The intention to be kind. And the more she became gentle, and the more she just let it be there, the more she discovered what we call space, a kind of tender space. And as she described it, you know, I get it

that that fearful and secure person is not who I am. It doesn't mean I am this secure, confident, together person just means I get that that's been playing out for years and years. It's not my identity. She had more space, more freedom. And in this relationship, as it worked out, because they both were practicing meditation and they put a value on honesty,

they began to name out loud what they were experiencing, which truly is, I think of it as Vipassan out loud, or we now call it interpersonal Vipa, our IVIP, that's our latest phrase. But it's where we start naming out loud and holding a space for each other in what we're feeling. It's a very powerful practice with another person. You just name what's true, you name it, hold it, name it, hold it. If what you're naming brings up conflict, then you need to bring in some other skills. but if you're just holding a space for each other, in the naming what's here becomes

less personal. It's just, it's not my fear, it's the fear. And they're both able to find they both were insecure which of course helps it out too because we all are. I mean when we're with each other, if we're really honest, much of the time there's a fear there, we're afraid of each other some. that's okay. I mean there's also love and appreciation and fun and but there's some fear and to the extent that there's fear and it's not acknowledged and processed it creates a separation.

It stops us from being able to sense the springtime of who we are together, that aliveness, that spontaneity. So this was her experience and as I said earlier this is intrinsic to the spiritual path that everyone on the the spiritual path, needs to face this sphere body, needs to open to where it lives in our physical body, and in that presence discover a larger sense of who we are. In that presence, we discover a larger sense of who we are. There's a story that I rediscovered. I had it years ago that this is in one of Pema Chodern's books. And she's described. a man who's talking about his experience in India and he's trying to get rid of his negative

emotions and he's struggling against his anger and his lust and his laziness and his pride. But mostly, more than anything, he wanted to get rid of his fear. This is a story of, you know, his meditation teacher kept saying, stop struggling. You know, this is, you know, it's attend and be friend kind of thing. But he just took that as another way of overcoming his obstacles. so kale stopped struggling, you know. So here's what happened. Finally the teacher set him off to meditate

in a tiny hut in the foothills. He shut the door and settled down to practice and when it got dark he lit three small candles. Around midnight he heard a noise in the corner of the room and in the darkness he saw a very large snake. It looked to him like a king cobra. It was right in front of him swang. All night he stayed totally alone.

alert, keeping his eyes on the snake. He was so afraid he couldn't move. There was just the snake and himself and that fear. So all night alert with that fear. Just before dawn, the last candle went out and he began to cry. He cried not in despair but from tenderness. He felt the longing of all the animals and people in the world. He knew their alienation and their struggle. All his meditation had been nothing. but further separation and struggle. He accepted, really accepted wholeheartedly all those emotions that he had been struggling against so far. And as he put it at the end of his description, he said, that much intimacy with fear caused his dramas to collapse and the world around him

finally got through. He was able to connect with life, feel his belonging to life. This is the gift of opening to the fear body. The fear body, if we're fighting with it or avoiding it or acting out of it, keeps us from that tenderness. It keeps us from knowing our belonging. It's very premises separation. When we bring presence to it, we begin to rest in and inhabit that presence and discover that set of thoughts, those physical sensations, that does not define who we are.

We sense this very deep belonging to the space and the awareness and the tenderness that's attending and befriending. So it's a homecoming. I remember, oh now it's been probably about eight years ago and one of the very beloved members of our community here, Alec, was dying, a very close friend. And he'd hit these waves of fear. And when he was afraid, you know, he'd feel his fear, but then he'd, you know, feel it, but his breathing out was he would start intentionally remembering his daughter, beautiful young girl,

and my sister who was close to him and me and the members of the Sangha that were supporting, him and the members of this church, he'd remember his loved ones. And he said that when he could reconnect with that belonging, that loving field, the fear was still there but it didn't define him. He was big enough to face living and dying, which he did with a beautiful grace. Here's a poem. I remember we shared a few weeks before he died. It's called Late Fragment.

And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. And if you sense what is it we really long for when we're most afraid, if we can trust our belonging to this moment, to each other, to this earth, there's this enlarged beingness It has room. Now, what I haven't yet mentioned, and I'm going to mention in just a very short amount

of time, is that one of the most powerful and beautiful ways of reminding ourselves of that belonging is actively with each other. So it's not just that we're bringing to mind each other, but actively. We need to take refuge in each other. It's one of the refuges, Sangha. It's not something that's like a support or a crutch. actually helps dissolve that sense of separation. There have been research at UVA that shows that if you're getting shocks and you're anticipating

with fear and then if you hold the hands of a loved one, the neural centers that register fear calm down. We calm down. And I like to remind us that that 20-second hug were you really hugging? seconds and oxytocin begins to spread through the body and the fear reduces. How about just saying, yeah, somewhere in the next 24 hours you're going to do one of those? Why not?

So I remember one mom describes her three children getting into a horrific fight and then they go to bed and then there's this terrible thunderstorm and she heard this whispering and she found them in the closet and they said they were in the closet forgiving each other. We want that contact. So maybe as part of closing or just a story that I like to share when I have a chance. This is Araya Mountain Dancer writes this. She says, she's describing an incident where she had given a workshop and then a woman wanted to talk to her afterwards and she said, and this is a woman, small, thin woman

in an oversized park or her name isabel. Can I do meditation on my own? she asked. Yes, I said, I'm sure you can, although many people find it easier to establish a meditation practice with the help of a group. It's just hard to keep the discipline up on your own. But what will it give me? What will it give me? What will I get if I do this every day?

And her tone took on a whining quality. And a rye amount of dancer writes, I felt my irritation rising as she continued, how fast will it work? Well, I feel a difference after a week. How will I know when it's working? This is exactly the kind of thing I detested, the quest for a quick fix, the desire for guaranteed outcomes, a simple answer, do this and you'll get that. My sons are waiting for me and I wanted to go home.

I took a deep breath, looked directly to Isabel and set my knapsack down on the floor. I tried to slow down my words thinking that maybe if I spoke slower I would feel more patient. Well, I said meditation is more a process than a goal-oriented activity. They can help you become more aware of what's going on within and around you, and this can help reduce stress. My best advice is to try it and just be patient with yourself. I picked up my bag and started to button my coat. I really did have to leave, and I wanted to get out while I was still feeling virtuous for not snapping her head off.

But as I started to move away, Isabel suddenly reached out and grabbed my arm with surprising strength. But what I want to know, she said, her voice rising in a crescendo that bordered on real panic, is will it help me find God? If I meditate, while I have an experience of something or someone out there listening, something really with me. A wave of desperation swept out

from her through me, and I was surprised to find my eyes filled with tears. This woman wasn't looking for an easy answer or guaranteed formula because she was lazy. She didn't want a simple plan because she was unable or unwilling to think critically about what would work.

She wanted something she knew would work and work quickly because she was hanging on by her fingernails. She wanted something that would work in a week because she was afraid that she simply wasn't going to make it through months or years. I put my hand gently over Isabelle's where it gripped my arm. It's okay, Isabel. We all feel desperate at times, I said. Nobody does it by themselves.

We all need help. Her hand relaxed a little beneath mine and she started to cry. We talked for a while longer. There is no them. There's only us. When I left I did not leave one of them. I said goodbye to one of us, a human being doing the best she can, searching for the home for which all of our hearts long.

As we begin to look at our lives and sense this fear body, this habits of fight-flight, we realize they take us away from home. They take us away from what we love. And the blessing of this path is that we have this capacity to deepen our attention. We have this capacity to pause and choose to attend and choose to be friend. And in those moments we actually wake up from that identity of a separate self of them, a person that's one, I'm here, you're out there. there is a sense of the belonging for which we long.

We open to that belonging. So I'd like to close with a very brief meditation, just in the way we started as you find yourself a position, pause, just to mention that I started with that story of a blind man and it wasn't about physical blindness as I said. When we're caught in the fear body were cut off. This practice, this path is about reconnecting. So just taking these moments, if you will, connect with whatever experience is right here. And if there's any place of vulnerability that's in your body or your heart, anything

going on in your life right now, you can allow yourself to bring that into awareness, anything that's bringing up stress, fear, reaction. So letting these moments be ones where you just identify or know notice, okay, so this is where I get caught. This is where in some way the fear body begins to get more solid, more active. This is where I shrink in a way and pull away from life. Get busy, get judgmental, in some way lose contact. And for now, simply notice that, your intention to pause, to attend and be friend, your intention to intend and be friend. And for now you might just feel where that stress lives in your body if you're able.

You might acknowledge the kind of thoughts that go on when you're caught in it. When you're caught in fear, thinking, just sense, okay, so what's it really like in my body right now? And if you'd like to put your hand on your heart, as we did earlier, you even put one hand on the belly, just to feel what is going on in your body when there's some stress. So you breathe in and just feel it there. And you breathe out and just sense softening, caring space, breathing in and touching where the rawness is and breathing out and sensing the space of care that can hold it.

This is an honest, kind presence. And as you breathe and as you feel the fear body with presence, you can begin to sense that that presence is more who you truly are. Just this place of awareness, of tenderness, than any of the stories of self. Hafez writes, the poet Hafei's writes, how did the the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all its beauty, it felt the encouragement of light against its being. Otherwise, we all remain too frightened. So in a very simple way, we're learning to offer the light and warmth of our own awareness to the fear body, sensing

in your mind the possibility that whenever fear arises that there's a little more of view that can notice, oh, okay, this is the possibility to pause, to attend, to befriend. So we close with the meta, loving kindness practice, just this simple wish, this prayer for our own being that we may come home to who we really are to live in that place of belonging, of awareness of love, that the fear like a wave in the ocean can be there but not define us. This recognition that when you know you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. And we can hold that same wish for all beings everywhere, that all beings may face fear with presence, may discover that loving awareness that can hold this living dying world.

May we live from love. May our lives be an expression of love. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington,

please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.