Tara Brach - Awakening from the Trance of Fear - Part 2 (2017-12-06)

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

  Awakening from the Trance of Fear-Part 2 (2017-12-06) - 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. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. I begin with a story about a monk who lived in Australia and he lived in a monastery that was pretty far away from any town, any doctor. So what he would do when he had to, if he had to have a tooth out, was he would go to a little hut and he'd get some pliers and he'd just pull it out. And so a lot of people asked him how on earth he could possibly do that. So his response was, when I decided to pull

out my own tooth, it was such a hassle going all the way to the dentist, that didn't hurt. When I walked to the workshop, that didn't hurt. When I picked up the pair of pliers, that didn't hurt. When I held the tooth in the grip of the pliers, that didn't hurt either. When I walked the tooth in the grip of the pliers, that didn't hurt either. When I wiggled the pliers and pulled, it did hurt then, but only for a couple of seconds. Once the tooth was out, it didn't hurt much at all. There was only five seconds of pain, that's all. So you might have grimaced when you heard or imagined the story because if we tried the same feet, we'd be hurting all the way to the whole place of pulling,

and afterwards we'd still be reverberating from it, because anticipation is the main ingredient of fear. We're on our way to what's going to go wrong. And some of the unpleasant things we anticipate will happen and some won't happen. But what's compelling is we suffer through so many life moments on our way to things. Have you noticed this?

Yeah, okay. It's captured by an email from a... mother to her son that says start worrying details to follow. You know the word worry is derived from the word to strangle which makes sense and so we scan and say it's okay so what are you know what's your version of on the way to the dentist right now? You know are you on your way to some social commitment that is producing anxiety or Are you on your way to a work deadline? Is there a health difficulty you're anticipating?

It's going to really cause trouble? Or on your way to some real financial crunch where you'll really be feeling what's happening? So we begin to say, well, how much of what's going on today has to do with this habit of tightening against the future? It's an important question. So this is the second in a two-part series on awakening from the trance of fear. And just to state what I said last time, we're not looking in these two classes on how we work with traumatic fear.

These are the fears of anticipating something around the corner and being caught in it, but not panicking. Often talk about it as fear-thinking and fear feelings in our body as the body of fear. And the body of fear basically, if you say, well, what's going on when we're anticipating trouble? Our body tenses. Our mind narrows and it gets very fixated. So we're no longer wide open to what's going on. We narrow and fixate. The mind circles around what's going to be happening.

And meanwhile, there's all these hormones that start flowing, cortisol and other stress hormones. And there's less activity in the frontal cortex, which means we're having less rational thinking, we're having less empathy, less mindfulness. So when this is going on, our choices and our behaviors are basically fear-driven. This is the body of fear. When it's pretty continuous, it's a trance. It means we're spending a lot of time identified with a sense of a scared self, an anxious self. We're forgetting really the wholeness of our being.

So the trance of fear, the body of fear. So the first step with any version of trance is recognizing getting a glimmer, oh, this is what's going on. Okay, I can see how a big swath of today I really was in that transphir. I was anxiously on my way to X, Y, or Z. We recognize, oh, this is what's happening. It's a transifer. We notice, okay, my body's getting tense, or we notice the kind of the kind of

thoughts going on. And in the last class we talked about two major domains of thinking that can alert us to being in the trance of fear. And one of them I describe as basically fear of failure. And that's many people are pretty aware of when we're in it, when we're anticipating falling short in something or already feeling or falling short in anticipating the consequences, which often has to do with rejection. We'll lose. respect. So a cartoon has a large shark talking to a smaller shark saying, the pressure to be great is too much. I would much rather be known as the just okay white shark. And I liked it because a lot of times fear of failure is fear of maintaining what already is

working. It's like, okay, thus far it's worked out, but any day now I'm going to screw up. Okay? So that's one of them. Then the other major domain of fear we talked about that's like a signal to being entrance is really takes the form of grasping and it's FOMO, the fear of missing out. And a lot of us, you know, when you hear it and you start paying attention go, oh yeah, how much we have this grasping around, I don't want to miss out on a, whether it's a financial opportunity or an opportunity to connect socially with people we want to connect with or an opportunity to impress

or gain in some way influence or have an adventure or maybe it's the fear of missing out on certain spiritual experiences. Like there's something other people are getting that we're not getting. You know, in the last decades I've watched how many people in spiritual communities go chasing after the next cool teacher or master or guru that has, you know, really it goes deep into the non-dual and really can show you the nature of reality and whatever. And I heard this story of two friends who are very obsessed by the metaphysical. And they were really very fixated on the spiritual realms that one visits after death.

And they agreed that whoever died first would contact the other to share what the spirit world was like. So one died And the other did seances for many months Trying to call into vibrational field His friend One night at dusk the friend's voice comes through And so this guy's doing the seances Evidly saying, okay, what's it like?

What's it like? And the response is, well, we eat And we drink And we mate and then we sleep And then we eat and we drink And we bait and we bait and we sleep and keep doing it. Wow, heaven sounds wonderful. He goes, oh, I'm not in heaven, I'm a moose in Wyoming. That was one of my father's favorite stories. So there's fear of failure, there's the

fear of missing out, and then of course the deepest fear is that sense of the fragility of our existence, the sense that these bodies are impermanent, these minds are impermanent, we're going to lose everyone we love and it's certain, the only certainty is that it's all going to change. And so that's the existential level that keeps us if you stop in any moment and you check in and you really scan and check your body, there's an undercurrent usually a hum of anxiety that isn't affixed anything. It's just that existential sense of at any time everything could go. Once we identify the body of fear, this trance, when we're, you know, whatever the content of the fear is, it doesn't ultimately matter. What matters is we recognize,

oh, there's been a shrinking. I'm living inside a sense of of a limited, separate, threatened self. That's the primary identity. And once we sense that's going on, we can pause and deepen presence. And this is where the potential for freedom comes. This is through the Buddha's teaching, it's in the recognizing that we've been asleep,

that we can then engage our attention in a way that wakes us up. We can change patterning of a lifetime. So in Buddhist Asia, I've always found this interesting. The artwork there, whether it's the mandala's, tankas, or whether it's entering the gates of a temple, you'll see, let's say, with the temples,

at the gates, there are these huge images, statues, or sometimes called the shadowed deities, the fierce, ferocious, grasping, you know, angry deities. And the wisdom teaching here is that in order to enter sacred space, you have to go through, you have to bring presence to all the shadow layers of the human psyche. One of my favorite stories is of a Tibetanyogini. Her name is Manching, I think it's the way you pronounce it, machik. And the story is that she would be meditating deeply, and she meditated right near this pond,

and the pond had a tree right in an island and a tree in the middle, and the pond was inhabited by a Naga, which is a ferocious spirit. And when she'd meditate deeply, she'd actually, her whole meditation and her consciousness would hang out in that tree. Well, nobody that lived in the area would even look in the direction of that pond because the Naga was so fierce. Well, there she was meditating in this tree right in Naga territory, and the Naga basically enrolled all his demon friends to try to chase her away.

And when all the demons would appear, what Machig would do is she would turn her body into the nectar of love and feed herself to the the demons. And what happened was all the local demons that tried to attack her ended up becoming her protectors. Which to me is very interesting because the very word demon, the origins of the word demon is diamond, D-A-I, D-A-E-M-O-N, which means guiding spirit. It was only later in human development that we change the meaning. But she turned the demons into diamonds. So there's a deep teaching here, which is, and this is an equation I gave last time, that fear times resistance equals suffering. The more you resist fear, the more you

push it under and run away from it or try to fix things so you don't have to face it, the more it just takes over your whole sense of your identity. Fear times resistance equals suffering. What resistance does is it keeps the patterning of fear in place. The more you resist it, the more it stays in place and solidifies. Now the opposite equation is fear times a full embodied presence, a full loving embodied presence, equals freedom.

If you feed yourself to the demon, and I like the idea of you just turn your body into love and you just totally saturate the fear without loving, there's freedom. And I know from Western perspective, this whole metaphor in language sounds weird, that we're going to feed our bodies to demons. And it actually is a very,

very potent, imagining tool that radically undoes resistance. So I invite you to play with it. I'll give you some examples of how it can be done, this sense of really surrendering ourselves in a loving way and feeding the very thing we're scared of. Basically it's a way of bringing the two wings to fear, the wing of, okay, seeing what's happening in the moment, that's mindfulness, and the wing of heartfulness, which is compassion, holding what we see with care. Soltramaliani is a Tibetan teacher who's contemporary, a wonderful teacher who will actually be teaching this class in the late spring. And she has been the one, I think, that's brought this called Chode, the Tibetan word,

feeding the demons into contemporary culture. But one of the examples I'll give you is one woman who I worked with years ago who was very, very anxious, had a hard time sleeping, very hardworking, very into performance. And in our session she was feeling a whole lot of anxiety and I asked her, you know, like what's really, what is it you're really believing and feeling? And it's a sense of any time now I'm going to blow it and be shamed and basically lose people's respect. kind of how I mentioned earlier with fear of failure. And so we did the first important step in waking up from the trance of fear,

which is you move from the storyline into your body. I'm going to come back to that a lot of times. You go from the story, whatever you're thinking, and you purposely come into your body, you feel what's going on there. And I had her do that, and then I said, so what do you notice? and she said, well, I have an visual image and that all this fear and shame in me

is like a wolf and this wolf has yellow eyes that are burning through me. And so I said, well, and what is the felt sense of that? Well, it's this burning, twisting in my heart. And so I had her start to communicate with that wolf. What does it need? What does it want? And what it wanted was to be allowed to be there and what it most needed was to feel loved.

So we practiced, these feeding the demons, we practiced, I said, okay, so imagine that you could just call on all the love that you know about and feel your body, just completely filling with it, and imagine feeding this body of loving to the wolf. And it was a little difficult. So I said, well, what would help you? And she said, if I felt my grandmother here, and her grandmother didn't care how much she achieved her grandmother was real unconditional love. Bring in your grandma.

So she sensed her grandmother there and then she could start feeling that she could feed the wolf love. And she did a lot of rounds of this. Every real waking up from fear, every real shift in your identity comes from many rounds. She's a lot of rounds of bringing these two wings

of recognizing the wolf and feeding it over and over again. and gradually it transformed and it shifted to being just this energy with yellow glow of eyes and it was warm and alive and the message of the wolf shifted to remember what matters. Don't get hooked on achieving. Remember what matters. From demon to diamond and I don't know if I'm saying the word diamond right. We're going to be practicing together as part of this, I'm going to invite you to sense where you're on the way to the dentist that's most scary, you know, in your life.

And then we're going to be practicing, bringing again these two wings of awareness, mindfulness and heartfulness. And if you find it useful to sense that however fear appears, if you want to sense the visuals of a form and sense it as a demon, that's something to play with. but what we're really, the basics that we're exploring here are how to recognize we're in trance and interrupt it, come into our bodies and contact and see what's going on

and bring love to it, bring heart to it. I'll read you a poem. This is the poet Kaviri. I search for a buoy in this storm as the black waves threatened to kill me. The mine buoy has me swimming in 20, directions, my muscles cramping in fear. The body buoy asks me to just float and feel the true weight of my worries. The breath buoy suggests I die dissolving into the ocean itself,

the rise and fall of all experiences, and the wise stillness underneath. So the mind buoy, that's our habitual refuge. The false refuge of when we get scared, we start spinning and fear thoughts. That's what keeps sustaining the body of fear, sustaining trance. And then what she calls the body buoy is really coming into the body and beginning with wise recognition, oh, what's the true weight of this? Really feeling it, contacting it. And it takes courage. So we're making our way into sacred space going through these deities with the body buoy feeling what's happening and then what she calls the breath buoy, that dissolving, that dissolving into belonging, that's really the heart side of things, bringing care. So I'd like to do is

take a little bit of time to explore what brings these two wings of awareness alive that when we practice together we have a few different options of how we work with the fears that are coming up. I find it helpful to think of fear that's going on in your body and heart as it's kind of like a shy creature that's been living in the darkness in the woods and you're inviting it into the light of awareness into a meadow or field. And the attitude really needs to be one of gentleness, really a true invitation where you're making room, you're saying, hey, I'm here, vulnerability, it's okay to come out. Interests, friendliness, that's the kind of attitude.

And so what we first do when we're inviting fear and you can start feeling inside your own body if you're saying okay so what's here, where's fear living, that we begin in a very patient way just scanning to sense the physical sensations of fear. The three key areas, the throat, the chest and the belly. This is where there's the most wiring in the body of nerves that register and have a sensitivity to fear. It really helps when you're beginning to get to know fear because that's what we're doing rather than resisting or leaning in.

It helps to use some inquiry. You can ask in the moment, well, what really most wants attention? What does this really feel like? Sometimes it helps people to ask, what have I been most unwilling to feel? What am I unwilling to feel right now? So we end up bringing more brightness and clarity and a leisure like quality to attention with inquiry. It's an important part of mindfulness, this kind of investigating.

It helps to name what you're noticing. You might mentally whisper whatever you're aware of. Sometimes you might whisper the word fear, anxiety, or shame. Here's a trick. It's also helpful to whisper if it's unpleasant and you notice that, just the word unpleasant. It's very powerful because it shifts the brain around when you notice what, what's happening and you name it, you're actually activating the prefrontal cortex and you quiet down the limbic system. Naming is powerful. Some other supports when you're beginning

to get to know fear, this wing of mindfulness. It helps to remember openness. An example is one person I worked with years ago, she would feel fear and she'd imagine she'd imagine she'd she was on a park bench sitting next to the fear and she'd remember the trees and the sky and hear the birds and the whole world around her. So there was enough room for her to be in relationship with the fear and gradually she could feel it inside her. For some people it helps to literally communicate and say hello to the fear, to soften around and then communicate.

For some people grounding helps. instead of getting fixated on the place of vulnerability, you're remembering your sense of your being on this earth. You can feel the weight of your bottom on the chair and your feet on the floor, perhaps your hands resting on your thighs, sense yourself here. For some people breathing with the fear helps, a slow, long, deep breath in and a slow release out. So your feet feeling where the fear is and breathing with it. So these are all different ways to help you with this wing of mindfulness of contacting what we habitually run away from. Okay, now let's go to the wing of kindness and love. How do we wake that up? I sometimes think of it like

when we're breathing in, we're breathing in and contacting a wave and that's the wing of of mindfulness, getting in touch with what's here, and then we breathe out, remember the wave belongs to the ocean, that this fear belongs to a much more vast and tender space, a heart space. So with the wing of love, what we're doing is in some way bringing care to fear. Let me give you some examples of how we can do it and then we're going to, as I mentioned, put it all together in a practice. example is I worked for a while, this was years back, with an actor from New York who was in the theater and he was always anxious before auditions and because he was usually going

from one audition to another, he was, that meant most of his life he was feeling like he was anxious and he also was somewhat anxious during opening performances but the real thing was the audition. And it didn't matter. he was reasonably successful and that's often the case it didn't matter because there was always the possibility

of failure ahead so again we have a fear of failure and I'm sharing stories on them because I think it's so common for so many of us so he could recognize the trance easily enough he could tell he knew when he was anxious

when his thoughts started circling around and his body got tense and so we'd practice together, dropping the story, coming into the body. Again, if that's all you practice over these next weeks when you notice fear, okay, let me just see if I can feel it in my body. And even if you leave again after 10 seconds, you're still interrupting a habit pattern that's been there for years.

So he'd come into his body and he'd start breathing with the fear and he'd sense the unpleasantness of it. and ask it what it needed and it needed some flavor of care and what he would do because he felt like he was too scared to offer the fear care was he called on his future self he called on who he sensed he was becoming

he called on the wise and creative and caring being that he sensed he was manifesting over time but he wasn't always having access to. And his future self didn't care whether he won or lost. His future self really basically said to him, I'm here with you and I'm not leaving. I love you. You have basic goodness.

His future self was really solid. So he'd call on that and he'd put his hand on his heart and just take in the message of, I'm here with you, I love you, from his future self. And he'd find that the fear was still there, but it was floating in something larger. And that made all the difference. What I'm describing is a shift in identity. When we start bringing these two wings of recognizing what's happening and then bringing care,

there's a shift from a sense of being caught in the scared self, to being able to inhabit the awareness that's loving. And that shift is what the Buddha described as the shift towards freedom. For him, it was a shift by calling on his future self to access the loving. For another friend from the business world who would get very, very anxious, his way was to hand it over. And it wasn't like getting rid of his fear, but he would kind of take his fear and just invite this larger world of consciousness and compassion to hold it. Allow it to be included there.

There's a wonderful teaching that if you trust the ocean, you're not going to be afraid of the waves. So the love wing helps us trust the ocean. The fear, the waves still come, but we're trusting something. larger. Now, with accessing love, often we also do it with real people in real time. I'm emphasizing in this class how we can access it in our meditation. But it is part of our psychobiology that when we're with others that we trust, it actually soothes our fear. It helps us remember something larger. And there's wonderful research, about holding hands with a loved one and they actually can watch the change through the MRI

of the brain and the deactivation of the limbic system. And in one of my favorite stories, family with a young son during a powerful storm, the son would cry out a number of times because he was scared of lightning and thunder and his father would come into his room and comfort him and as his father would leave his room he'd say, don't be scared. God is with you. And after this happened about four times, the boy finally said,

I know God's with me, but right now I need someone with skin on. Robert Browning writes, take away love, and our earth is a tomb. So we need both wings. We need to be able to bring mindfulness to the fear. Contacted in our body, see what's happening.

And we need kindness, some quality of tenderness. When we have both, there's literally a shift in our evolutionary self from being dominated by our limbic brain to really a wholeness of being. And you can see this shift. I'm going to share a story that I think I shared about a half a year ago that I find so powerful because you can really see the awakening from the trance of fear

This is a story from the book The Five Invitations by Frank Ossestesky. And if you haven't gotten it, The Five Invitations is one of my favorite books around. Frank has worked for years with death and dying and very, very deep and wise. And he describes in this story accompanying a young man, Matthew, who's dying of age, he's gay, and he's a long-time Buddhist practitioner. And Matthew's been suffering from pneumonia and fevers and so on. But the biggest thing he's suffering from is really a deep fear that God was going to condemn him.

He had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, and his father had been a kind of a brimstone preacher, you know, a fire and brimstone preacher of a father and really he had been taught about a punishing God. So his God was the God of the limbic brain. Does that make sense? The punishing, fearsome God. And the story, you're intrinsically bad

and you're going to be deeply condemned for your way of living. So Frank tried to support him and orienting him to mindfulness, compassion practice that he'd been studied. and loved in the recent years and created an altar by his bedside with the Buddha. But none of that calmed him.

So Frank would massage his feed and he'd play his favorite chance, still no change. So finally, if doctor ordered a sedative and even that didn't help, because there's so much agitation from this limbic brain who's so in the trance of fear of badness. So I'll read you what,

Frank Wright, he said, by two in the morning, I was exhausted and feeling ineffective and powerless. So I chose to go home and get some sleep. On the drive there, for some unknown reason, I thought of my first Holy Communion, the Catholic ritual that ushers young innocence into the loving lap of God. When I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box, a small collection of amentoes I hold dear. Here I located a five-inch plastic figurine, of Jesus, surrounded by lambs and little children. Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. As Matthew continued to moan, shout, toss, and turn in agony and fear,

I took down the thanka and replaced the Buddha statue with this small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, a cleaning woman named Dina came into the room and spotted the figurine, setting her mop to one side. She said with great enthusiasm, Merciful Jesus, when his kindness is with us, everything is all right. At once, Matthew's eyes locked onto Dina. An angelic smile spread across his faces.

He pivoted toward the altar to gaze at the plastic Jesus statue and then back in Dina's direction. His entire body relaxed in that moment. The punishing God of Matthew's child the one whose wrath he had been taught to fear and whose judgment had made him feel like a terrible person was transformed into a merciful God he also knew in love, the one who adored all his children no matter their so-called faults and flaws, a kind forgiving, all-accepting and benevolent God. Dina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed

to defeat that inner critic and that fearful place. I left them together there. They didn't need me. When I eventually returned to the hospital later that afternoon, Matthew was sitting up in bed smiling and eating a bowl of jello. So this is the waking up from the trance of fear. This is the shift from being in the grip of our limbic brain

and believing that something bads around the corner to resting in a larger, wiser, loving presence. And there are many pathways to that presence. For some of us it's going to be because we sense we're caught in fear and we mindfully contact the fear and then we just gently bring our own kindness to that suffering. And for others it may be that there's some sense of some external being that can help us feel that love, or we might sense our own most awake heart-mind bathing us with love,

or we might offer the fear into something larger. The directionality does not matter. What matters is remembering love, in some way remembering love. Annie Dillard in her writing, teaching a stone to talk. I just want to read a short quote from her. She says, In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down,

if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate our name, the substrata, the ocean, the unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for each other and for our life together here. This is given, it is not learned. So we started with a story that basically says we spend a lot of life moments on the way to the dentist.

And then we explored how if we can instead of resisting fear, we can, go through the deities, like Ma Ching, or Machik, I think is the way you pronounce it, if we can, instead of resisting the fear, really give our attention a love to it, who we are, the whole experience of who we are shifts. And that's the freedom, that's the gift of what I sometimes call a fearless heart. It's not the fear is gone. It's just that we are resting in something larger and there's room for the fear. So in that spirit, let's practice together a little.

This will be short and I invite you to take it home and explore it at your own pace when you have a chance. Please feel free to shift around so that you establish a sitting posture that's comfortable for this final few minutes of meditation. When you come back into stillness, close your eyes and sense this as a pause. Re-awaken your senses, listening to the sounds that are here, opening to the sensations in your body, feeling the movement of the life breath, the inflow, the outflow. And from this place of presence, scanning your life and sensing where you might be, habitually moving on your way to trouble where you feel that you're in some way moving towards

something you fear. It may be something to do with work, some fear of failure at work, or it may be that something that you're afraid of in a relationship with another person, something you're afraid you're going to miss out on. Where's the habit that feels like a trance of fear, where you get more contracted, where you lose contact with really what matters to you, with creativity, with open-heartedness, sense where you get small, anxious, and just recognize in that particular situation, what kind of thoughts going.

on in your mind? What do you worry about? What are you afraid it's going to happen? What are you believing is wrong? Sensing the trance of fear and to begin to unfurl this wing of mindful presence, you might inquire, well, what's it like? What does the fear feel like? What most wants attention? What most feels vulnerable? Let the attention drop, the awareness drop into the body, the throat, the chest, the belly. You're inviting that vulnerability to make its presence known. An interested and friendly attention, an intimate attention. You might note whatever you become aware of. Maybe a clenching in the chest or tightness or a pressure, squeezing in the throat, tightness in the belly. You might mentally whisper.

the words fear or shame or if it feels unpleasant, unpleasant. If it feels very strong and intense, you might sense making some space for what's here, letting it sit next to you or sensing the world around you as you remember a larger space. But stay in communication with the vulnerability. What is it most need? What's the flavor of care that it needs? Maybe forgiveness or acceptance, compassion, love. What would help this fearful place to heal?

We awaken the wing of loving by in some way offering care to this vulnerability. For some the most direct ways is just to put a hand on the heart gently and sense that we do care and sending that loving energy in and you might experiment with that, just the touch being tender and light and just offering, just saying I care, I'm here, I'm not leaving. And if it helps to imagine someone who cares about you and loves you, just the atmosphere and sense of their love also flowing through your hands right into the vulnerability, maybe Maybe you can feel the loving, filling you so that it's as if you're really dissolving your whole body and being in a loving way right into the place of vulnerability.

Really giving love fully. For some you might be imagining your high self or your future self, this very awake heart mind, very tenderly bathing. the fearful place with love. Sensing your own experience of your own being as you bring these wings of mindful presence and love to the vulnerability, sensing that natural opening out of the vulnerable, scared self

and into presence itself, loving presence. You might widen the attention to sense many others with you, right this moment for those that are sitting here or those that are practicing at other times listening to this, all of us together meeting fear with loving presence, sensing who we are together when we're meeting fear with loving presence, getting to know this fearless, boundless heart space that can include the waves of fear. Often on the spiritual path the metaphor is climbing a mountain

and transcending fear but instead we're practicing going in and in and in Rumi 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. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.