Tara Brach - Awakening from the Trance of Fear - Part 1 (2017-11-29)

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

Awakening from the Trance of Fear - Part 1 (2017-11-29) - While fear is a natural and intelligent emotion, when fear goes on overdrive, we are in a trance of fear that contracts our body, heart and mind. Our resistance to the direct experience of fear sustains the trance and leads to decisions and behaviors that harm ourselves and others. Only by facing fear with mindfulness and compassion can we awaken from trance and reconnect with our capacity for creativity and full aliveness, wisdom and love.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. There's a fable of a wise man who lived in a very remote area and to get to him, you had to travel through really dense forests and climb craggy peaks and cross-rushing rivers and so on, but people wanted to see him because his reputation was that he had a wisdom so deep he could really heal all suffering. So those that could made their way to him and they'd be exhausted and dirty and he'd send them to the stream and they'd rinse off and they'd sit in silence

and have tea with him. And then finally he'd start speaking and he would swear them to silence and to agree not to repeat anything. And then he would say, there's only one question that I want to ask you, and that is, what are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel? That inquiry is an amazingly powerful one in any moment that we pose it. And you might just take a moment yourself and sense, okay, so, right? in this moment, what am I unwilling to feel? Just to sense that. So some might respond to that

question, well, there's really nothing strong going on and it may be that you're in a place of deep peace or openness and you're quite willing to feel that or it may be that there's nothing strong going on because you're a bit distracted or cut off from your body. Some people might respond differently, I might say I'm feeling a huge amount, I'm really struggling with fear or anger or whatever and why would I want that question? Then the question is, are you really willing to feel that huge fear or that huge anger? And what many people find when they start really excavating with that question is that underneath a lot of our moods, especially when there's any stress or we're in

any way not in a good mood. There's an undercurrent of anxiety or fear. And along with that there's an unwillingness or not wanting it to feel it. We don't want it to be there. So it's universal that we all have a dislike of fear. Fear is designed for us to dislike it so that we'll then act. But that dislike means we push it away. We cut off from it. We have a real deep conditioning to avoid feeling fear. There's one version, this is an old chestnut that I heard a while ago where it's kind of a contemporary Buddha and he's falling from a 20-story skyscraper but he's actually floating. And when he floats down to around the 25th floor somebody sees him passing by and says,

hey, are you okay? And he says, so far so good. And, you know, when I talk about avoiding fear, it's not that kind of Pollyanna-ish, hey, things are fine and, you know, kind of not looking. It's really a cutting off from a feeling in our body. What I'd like to do in this class and the next one is explore what I call the trance of fear. how we wake up from it by intentionally turning towards fear. And my hope is to recognize that fear is not only universal, it's an absolutely necessary

and intrinsic part of awakening on a spiritual path. That it's just, it's there and we're either pushing away reality or rejecting it or arguing with it or we're opening to it. And so what my real hope is is that we can have a shift in how we regard fear when it arises, a shift from that flinch reflex of don't like this, this is bad, something's wrong, to a sense of increased willingness, and increased interest, a remembrance that this is a portal and to the degree we can open ourselves to it

versus in some way avoid to that extent we'll find an openness of freedom that we had not conceived was possible. There's one friend of mine that says when fear arises it's like a little voice in us saying about to grow and so it is that fear is when we're on the edge of our comfort zone.

Now, our focus these two weeks is not on traumatic fear. With traumatic fear, it's not often wise or helpful or kind to face into it. But with our ongoing habitual lower level kinds of anxiety and fear, it can be liberating. So one thing that occurs to me is that as you explore over these next two weeks, and it's a great season for it, it's for many people, it's a stressful season. If you have one or two buddies that are listening to these talks and are interested in practicing and exploring with you, it can create a really lovely container and actually support for waking up through fear. There's a wonderful poem by Rumi that really speaks of the truth that we're waking up together

through fear. It's not really so individual. It's not so much my personal fear. And I started reading it because I was teaching workshops on fear. And one of the practices we do is we get into these groups of eight. and people, and I'd say write down something you're afraid of and people would write down a little piece of paper and then they'd fold it up and we'd put them in the middle,

mix them up and everybody would pick one and then each person would read the fear as if it was their own. And afterwards there was this realization that many had that it really wasn't my fear, it was the fear, that we're all in it together. and this is what Rumi points to. He speaks of night travelers who turn towards the darkness

and are willing to know their own fear. He says, sit with your friends, don't go back to sleep. 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 we're doing it together. And when we remember that togetherness and we don't sense fear, oh, this is something bad happening to me, we actually start finding space to be with it. So the question, what's the problem with avoiding fear? So what's so bad about it if we can get away with it or can we get away with it? And often the response is given in the Buddhist circles in terms of an equation that fear times resistance equals suffering. That's the equation. And I like to envision it this way. Joseph Campbell describes this big circle of awareness and a line going through it. And everything

that's in your awareness is above the line and everything outside of your awareness is below the line. And when fear is below the line, when we're resisting and pushing it under, that's when we have suffering. When it's below the line, we're in a trance. We're not aware. And then fear basically is controlling our behaviors, our thoughts, our whole way of experiencing who we are. We become identified with what's below the line. It becomes me. We lose that sense of being a larger space of awareness or heart. So the problem with avoiding fear, it's still there. Energetically, it's still in our body. So if we're avoiding it, it just knocks on the door in a different way. If you're avoiding fear, it can come out as depression. If you're

avoiding fear, it can come out as anger. It can come out as physical illness, as we can kind of imagine. It can come out as shame and on and on. And as we're going to explore, when it's below the line, it takes the form often in terms of behavior of aggression. That's a big one. When there's fear that we haven't reckoned with, addiction. That's another big one. So one reason that avoiding it is trouble is it's still there and comes out sideways.

And another one is that it takes energy to push down a part of our being. and when we close off to fear we also close off to love. It's like you can't close down one thing but we be wide open for joy, love, mystery, creativity. It closes us down. We get cut off. When fears below the line we get cut off from, and this is very almost in terms of the structure of the brain, we get cut off from the resources of our more evolved.

brain. When we're pushing under fear, we don't have such access to mindfulness, to empathy, to compassion. So that's the argument. That's the kind of trying to be persuading that it really doesn't pay to push it under because then fear, whatever's under the line, becomes in charge and it starts really shaping our life. So you can see it globally and I think of it so often, the, what we'd all collectively say, the horrors that we're aware of globally. I mean, really, when we look at the amount of violence, I mean, if you ask yourself the question, what causes violence? What would cause the near genocide, maybe full genocide we're seeing now against the Rohingya in Burma, which is Buddhist majority? What would cause that kind of

cruelty, the stories are horrific, unfaced, unprocessed fear. So there's a sense of a threat when we get violent, and in this case a kind of inner toxicity that has to be exterminated or gotten rid of. It's fear. You can ask the same question, you know, what would make people deny climate change? It's a fear of losing something they're holding on to, losing wealth. I mean, I think of it like if somebody had a potential windfall that would be happening through sustainable energy, would they deny climate change? They wouldn't.

So there's a basic insecurity that makes us behave in ways that are harmful, both globally and our personal life. So then the inquiry is, okay, so how do we bring it above the line? Like really, if you wanted to dedicate these next few weeks to waking up from the trance of fear, how does that happen? We're going to explore the two wings of recognizing what's going on, two wings of awareness, recognizing, oh, okay, right now I'm in a trans of fear. And then the wing of compassion, holding it in a way that heals.

and that'll be, we'll be moving through this class, and next class with that. The beginning piece, can you recognize you entrance? What are the flags? Okay? Now, stepping back a bit, not all fear means you're in the transit fear. I mean, fear is nature's protector. Fear is an intelligent emotion that lets us know, hey, there's trouble, you've got to do something. That's not a trance.

that's part of what's alerting us to really surviving. And for instance, if you're in a car and somebody's driving and has been drinking and you have fear, you're not sitting here going, oh, I might be in the trance of fear. It's not like that. It's like, hey, that's dangerous. You can sense that. Or if you have medical needs and now insurance isn't going to cover it,

hey, there's something you really need to respond to as well as you possibly can. But here's the challenge. There are always threats and the question is are we inflating them, are we in a chronic state of always thinking around the corner something bad is about to happen? That's the trance of fear. The trance of fear is when fear oversteps it bounds and the on button is always jammed. You're always getting that message of something's wrong. something's bad, something's going to happen, and your body is always in that reactivity of fight-flight-flight-freeze.

That's the trans of fear. Sometimes it's called the fear body or the body of fear. And the signs of the trans of fear are on every level of our body mind. And you might think of it like the body shows the transof fear by being in a habitual contraction. And for some, you know, the shoulders are hunched and the chest is kind of sunk in and there's a tightness. One Tibetan teacher describes it this way. He says we're like a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence. So what happens is that the more fears chronic, the more the armoring, the body armor, tightens.

And it becomes so familiar we don't realize that we have a body of armoring on us. That's the body of fear. Just this habit of tensing. And then part of the body of fear is that the mind gets tight and we're perpetually in worry thoughts. There's this kind of obsessing and always trying to figure out what's going wrong and what we can do about things and it takes a lot of the form of judgment. So that's the body of fear and the body and the mind.

You can sense it emotionally that you either get very numb or get really a long and sometimes it goes off into depression or shame. And then there's the fear-based behaviors that alert us, that let us know, okay, this is the trans of fear. And what are they? Well, for some of us, the trans of fear makes us go twice as fast. We start really scurring around. You know, that feeling of racing around as if there's never going to be enough time.

It's the trance of fear. For many people, the trans-of-feer, the behavior is addiction, is some form of overeating or over-going more alcohol or numbing with different drugs or food. Again, trying to control that bad feeling. Often with each other, the trans-of-feer has us either very defensive or very critical. I'm just giving you signs of it. Often with the trans-of-feer, there's some sense of pretending. like we're putting forward a self

that we're trying to make sure it gets okayed by others because there's such a fear that something's wrong. So we pretend. We act like we're better than we feel. It's particularly true sometimes with children that are afraid they're not going to get it right. They pretend.

There's one... I saw one written about a children's response when the question came up. Name six animals which live specifically in the Arctic and the response was two polar bears and three and that's crossed off four seals

other responses to questions what happens during puberty to a boy he says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery what is a vibration there are good vibrations and bad vibrations good vibrations were discovered in the 1960s I'll just read one more What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for?

He is a noted figure in history because he invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles. So you get the idea, making up stuff, which we do. I mean, how many of us have pretended we know more than we actually know? Okay. So the body of fear, and then we start sensing, well, what are we typically afraid of? Again, this gives us a sign when we're, you know, the real fears are the dangers to our existence, the fear of losing our life. When it's not life or death, one of the defaults of the mind is there's something wrong with me.

I'm going to lose my status. I'm going to lose respect. I'm going to fail. So fear of failure is one to keep your eye out for. Like how many moments are we having that sense of fear of failure? And many of you are aware of the ranking of fears that goes on. And according to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking, which is a kind of death if you get shamed.

Jerry Seinfeld says this. He says, number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? He says, this means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing a eulogy. It was great. Okay, so one fear, fear of failure, and that means that the thoughts and the feelings are all circling around, how am I going to do and am I going to fall short?

There's a lot of comparing mind. And if you see yourself comparing a lot to how other people are versus you, we even compare against how we're doing against ourselves. But mostly it's the pecking order. Where are we? How does our... intelligence or looks or personality or success match up to others. So the suffering is that when we're in this trans of fear, our identity gets small and we become an insecure self who's not good enough, who's going to fail, something's going to go wrong, and we're not at home.

I'll give you one example. One man I worked with years ago was a lobbyist for the for an industrial trade group and very workaholic and always scanning for what would undermine his reputation as a really powerful connected person. And he'd often prime himself with alcohol and cocaine to get through tons of meetings and social gatherings and it gave him confidence. And so this is fear of failure. He was really in the trance of fear. And his, he was really in the trance of fear. and his addiction, he almost lost his job and he almost lost his marriage, which is how I ended up getting to know him,

because he was told that perhaps mindfulness could help out. So as part of the process of looking at what was going on with him, we just started looking at, okay, when are you in the trance? And he could start seeing his insecure feelings and thoughts, and his practice was whenever he got any flag of trance. And by the way, he went into narcotics anonymous and marriage counseling and so on, but we were working in the meditation angle which was mindfulness of what's happening. Whenever he got any flags of his thoughts comparing to other people, what he needed to do to get ahead,

to impress and so on, his practice was to pause because to interrupt patterns we have to pause. And what he'd say to himself before he would do anything, before he would act out of the fear trance and speak, what he'd say to himself is not my will but my heart's well. And that helped him shift above the line. Because when he was below the line, all of his actions were coming from fear. But if he could recognize the trance and his way of interrupting it. Not my will, but my heart's will. Then there was some more compassion, some more awareness that was actually engaged for him to make more wise decisions. So that's one domain of fear, fear of failure just to keep our eye out for.

There's another I want to mention that takes the shape of grasping and it's fear of missing out. FOMO. I first heard the phrase. I was doing an interview with Tim Ferriss and he asked me, so how do you work with FOMO? And I kind of sat there and waited for him to say more. And he did and it totally resonated, of course. I mean, we all want to live fully and we have a fear of missing out and it takes a lot of different forms. It could be a fear that we're going to miss an opportunity for more success or miss an adventure that could be really fun or miss out on having a child or miss out on having real romance or miss out on an investment that will really make a difference in our life, whatever it is. There's this sense that we're going to miss out on some gratification that could be there

and FOMO drives us to grasp and compete and try to have things happen faster, sooner, better. a chicken and an egg relying in bed. The chicken is leaning against the headboard, smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face. The egg, looking a bit pissed off, grabs the sheet, rolls over and says, well, I guess we finally answered that question. It's a sleeper, I know. So, FOMO, fear of missing out.

So what happens is that rather than, and just getting in touch with this anxiety in us that wants to make sure we don't miss an opportunity, we grasp after the missing gratification and it becomes a habit. It becomes a habit of thinking there's always something missing and there's always something more to get. One woman went to see a fortune teller and she wanted to find a way to contact her husband who had passed away recently and she was completely focused on having contact. That was her thing. And finally, after some incantations,

the fortune teller says, okay, I'm getting your dear departed husband. He can't believe you paid $45 for this. That was it. FOMO drove her to not having much gratification, which is really the teaching here, is that when we're hooked on FOMO, fear of missing out, we never get there. We're always on our way. And I want to name what I think

is the biggest fomo generator in existence, which is the internet. Do you agree? It's ever beckoning us with new information, with more possibilities for human connection, for financial deals, for products, for everything. And there's just so much. that, and it's designed to keep grabbing your attention, that there's always a sense that there's something out there that we don't have, that we would want if only. I'll just share that my first real recognition of that process in me was about seven or eight years ago when I was writing a book and I was advised to create a platform that would enable me to get word of the book out to the world.

And I was a real ludite in the sense of I was barely involved with online anything. And all of a sudden I was just tossed into the cyber world where I was being told that I had to have a website with this and be on Facebook and Twitter and things I didn't know anything about, blog posts and so on. And tracking stats and it was a whole world. And so for a while I had this sense that if I had the sense that if I'd didn't keep doing this and having another interview and write another blog post, I'd be missing out on access to this world of people that would want to see what I wrote.

And so it was this very speedy, pressure-driven, uncomfortable feeling of never doing enough to get there. And that's when I realized that I was really not feeling aligned. Like I was hooked on something. I would never get there. It would just be anxiety and grasping. And we still use Facebook and Twitter and all that, but it's from a whole different place

because I went through this inner process of, well, what am I doing all this for? Oh, I'm doing it so that I can teach more about presence being here. And it didn't go with that kind of grasping feeling. And so it really helped to see the FOMO trance. It really helped. It gave me more choice. So there's suffering, and the suffering's around never enough. It's around that sense that something's missing.

And the suffering of fear of failure, something's wrong. So meditation gives us this strategy to recognize the trance and start to disentangle. And that's where I want to spend the last part of this. talk and then we'll continue next time. Rumi says the cure for the pain is in the pain. In other words, rather than all the activity to try to get away from the fear, just sit down and be with what's here. This poem is called Fearing Paris.

Suppose that what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris. Then you'd have the courage to go everywhere in the world, all the directions of the compass open to you, except the degrees east or west of true north that lead to Paris. Still, you wouldn't dare to put your toes smack dab on the city limit line. You're not really willing to stand on a mountainside miles away and watch the Paris lights come up at night. And just to be on the safe side,

you decide to stay completely out of France. But then the danger seems too close, even to those boundaries, and you feel the timid part of you covering the whole globe again, you need the kind of friend who learns your secret and says, see Paris first. See Paris first. So we're talking about bringing above the line with presence, what we've been moving away from with our thoughts, moving away from with our behaviors, and in that discovering really a larger sense of who we are.

You know, when we're not hooked in the fear of trance, we're really free to live from our natural creativity and generosity, intelligence. So the question is how when we start seeing the trance, can we create a bit more freedom? I'd like to share a story that taught me a lot and I wrote about it in radical acceptance. And this is a man that was in the mid-stages of Alzheimer's when he came to a retreat I was leading. And his wife was with him because he needed support and finding his way to get food and get to the sessions on time and so on. But when I had a meeting with him, he was surprisingly buoyant and he was in a good mood.

And so part of me was kind of basically saying, well, what gives? Like how come you're in such a good mood? And he said, well, I don't think anything's wrong. It's like in fall when the leaves come off the trees, it's not wrong or bad, it's just what's happening. I thought that's pretty cool. And then he went on. Background is psychologist

and he'd been practicing meditation for about 15 years. He told me a story then of the earlier onslaught of the disease how he had been asked to give a talk about 100 people and he got there and he was about to start and he went completely blank.

And so Harry's staring out at 100 expectant sets of eyes and he had no idea where he was or what he was supposed to say or anything. So here's what he did. First, he didn't do anything. He just paused. And then he put his hands, his palms together, and he said, Afraid.

Then he bowed. He said, heart beating. Bowed. Embarrassed. Mind spinning. And he started settling, so he said, settling, you know, he bowed. And he kept naming and finally relaxing, bow. He looked around and he said, I'm sorry.

And there were people with tears in their eyes and one person said, you know, no one has ever given us the teachings this way. And what had he done? He had modeled having this kind of the waves of trance start coming, getting kind of caught in the fear. He had modeled pausing because again you can't step out of trance, you can't come above the line unless you kind of interrupt the reactivity and create some space. So he had paused and then he just began naming what he was aware of, just staying

right there with his experience, fear, heart pounding, embarrassed, whatever it was. He not only did he name it, he bowed to it, meaning he just allowed reality to be as it was. He said, okay, this is how it is. And this is what we call again the two wings of awareness, recognizing what's happening in the moment and allowing it. And if you can start getting the signals of, oh, okay, this is a trance. I'm in the trance now. I'm having all those thoughts about what's wrong with me or I'm having that wanting things to be different. In a trance, you can feel your body tensing, you can feel your speeding up, you can feel the anxiety.

Pause. Okay, just name a little bit. Just notice what's happening and let it be. Just create a space for it to be. what happens in those moments is that you become above the line. There's more of you resting in awareness, less of you being controlled in the world of fear. And this is the shift that the Buddha described as a shift of awakening,

that rather than being identified and below the line, you're resting in an awareness that notices what's happening. Your identity is more open and free. So we started tonight talking about what are you unwilling to feel? And I'd like to invite you to explore this week and next week when you start getting signs of being caught in fear, running from fear, to pause and get interested. And sense the possibility of relating to fear,

not reacting from fear. It's like Rumi says, move, but don't move the way fear makes you move. You can respond, but not from the fear. A place, respond to the fear. Name it. Make some room for it with heart. So we'll continue this exploration, but I'd like to close tonight with a reflection where we can begin to do with what the man in the story did,

which is step out of the trance ourselves. So take a moment to adjust how you're sitting so that your posture is comfortable, but alert, relaxed, at ease. Take a moment as you enter this reflection to feel a sense of presence, of heerness. You might take a few full breaths and let the breath help to collect your attention.

And you might feel your intention to wake up from the trance of fear, to live more of your life in that heart space and awareness that's above the line. And you might scan now for something going on in your life where you're aware of encountering anxiety or fear some situation in your life perhaps with another person where there's conflict or fear of disappointing or letting down.

It might be a work situation where there's a fear of failure, somewhere that you're afraid of missing out on something, romance or success or fun or happiness. What's a situation where you sense you go into trance where you get anxious, where your body tightens where your mind goes into fear thinking, where your behaviors are no longer aligned with your values or your heart, who you can be. When you come up with a situation, focus in on it some. See if you can bring a mindful presence to investigating how trance appears in your body, mind, and life. Kind of thoughts come up when you're hooked in fear in this situation? What kind of thoughts? What do you believe is around the corner? What

are you afraid it's going to happen? What are the signs of trance in terms of your behaviors? Do you pretend or act different to other people? Do you get judgmental? Iritable, short? Do you grasp onto substances? What are the signs? How does it feel? you and your body and your heart when you're caught in the trance of fear. And most important, what's the sense of yourself? What's the sense of yourself when you're caught, the who you're taking yourself to be? Sense like the man in the story that you could notice this and just name a little bit of what you're noticing some of the feelings that you're aware of.

let them be, not to make them wrong, but to include them above the line in the light of awareness, judging, afraid, defensive, what's there? Sense that you're like the man in the story, including trance in the light of awareness, bringing it above the line. The poet Hafez writes, How did the Rose ever open its heart and give to this world all of its beauty? it felt the encouragement of light against its being. Otherwise, we all remain too frightened.

Taking some full breaths, feel yourself right here in this moment, sensing the awareness that can notice trance, sensing the heart that can hold your experience. You might ask yourself, is there anything missing right here in this moment? Is there anything wrong in this moment? Who are you when there's nothing wrong? There's nothing missing.

As you're ready, take a few full breaths and opening your eyes. Welcome back. And thank you for your attention. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.