Tara Brach - Awakening Your Fearless Heart: Tara Brach on Facing Fear (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Fear is a universal human experience, but when it dominates our inner world, it can trap us in a sense of separation and suffering. In this profound talk, Tara Brach introduces how the transformative power of the RAIN meditation can help us face fear with courage and compassion. By bringing mindfulness and loving awareness to fear, we can move beyond its grip and reconnect with the boundless freedom of our true nature.   What You'll Learn: Understanding Fear: How fear arises and creates a sense of separation. The Power of RAIN: A step-by-step guide to using RAIN meditation to work with fear. Awakening Awareness: Discovering the boundless love and presence that holds all emotions, including fear.   Highlights: Gain tools to transform fear into a gateway for healing and spiritual awakening. Explore the compassionate practices that lead to a fearless heart. Learn how to navigate fear with mindfulness and loving awareness.   Why Listen? This talk is an invitation to step out of fear's grip and into the freedom of open-hearted living. Whether you're dealing with personal fears or navigating collective challenges, Tara's guidance offers a powerful path toward inner peace and resilience.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends, welcome. I saw a cartoon some years back. I had a parrot in a cage who was visibly frightened, distressed and shaking feathers falling off and the owners are saying, maybe we shouldn't have lined her cage with newspaper. It just felt so relevant to today. I mean, how is the news affecting your body and mind?

We know. So in the current world, fear, anxiety is spiking. There's global instability, and it's the endangerment of growing numbers of vulnerable beings. So I don't know anyone who really was prepared. for the speed and intensity of the destructive forces playing out. And it's quite natural like that, powered in the cage, the impact of aggression and hostility on our nervous system, we get activated.

And what that means is we need ways to metabolize fear, to process fear and anxiety. because when fear dominates, we get caught in fight, flight, freeze, fawn. We get confused, paralyzed, and it cuts off our capacity for open-heartedness, for wisdom, for wise action. I've shared in recent talks personally that I'm giving more time to practice than I have in the past, more time to quieting my mind, relaxing my body, reconnecting with presence, and also time to intentionally befriending fear. I want to share a quote that's been guiding me. I was born when all I once feared I could love. I was born when all I once feared I could love.

is the Sufi mystic Rabia of Basra, a wonderful woman who really was living from this feminist spirit of loving ourselves into healing. So what does she mean by that? My understanding is that what we most fear really is the raw experience, the raw unpleasant sensations of fear. And when fear arises, if we can learn to lean in with our attention, to meet that intense unpleasantness with a truly accepting tender presence. The gift is being born, awakening to who we really are. And metaphorically, my favorite way of understanding is that we're the sea of loving awareness that we can include the ways of fear rather than being tossed in them or possessed by them.

So, this week and next, we'll focus on very powerful meditative practices that help us befriend fear, that help us awaken through fear so we can respond to our hurting world from a wise and awake heart. Okay, blessings. Throughout the meditation world, we hear regularly about the importance of present-centered attention And there's one story of a kind of contemporary Buddha figure man person who falls out of a 15-story window. And as the story goes around the eighth floor, someone sticks their head out and says, hey, you're doing okay? And this Buddha guy says, well, so far so good.

And what I like about that is that obviously for most of us Buddhas to be, Buddhas in training, we're hooked by the anticipation of what's to come. We don't stay that right here. Rather, we're pretty chronically, especially due to our negativity bias, anticipating that around the corner something is going to go wrong or when we hit bottom it's going to be like we're crashing. And so we have a real strong tendency in conditioning to worry and to obsess. And of course, Mark Twain's famous comment, most people know this these days, the worst

things in my life never actually happened, you know? So a lot of that worry and obsessing is for naught, and this is our predicament, that we've moved through a lot of life moments in the tightness of fear, a lot of life moments. And I think many of us can feel in our nervous system as a society that the fear and anxiety is spiking right now. Would you agree with that? Okay. Yeah.

So the common reaction when greater there's fear, the more actively and reflexively we go to trying to control things and then we end up causing trouble to ourselves. and others because rather than feel the fear we try to control. So let me just invite you to check in right from the start. Of course, we'll be doing more reflections as we go, but you might check in your mind and just sense your life and some situation that feels stressful, some situation that gets you nervous, anxious, uptight.

And just notice as you bring that to mind the ways you're trying to manage or control things. Just how you're handling it. And then zero in a little more, sensing the situation and what you're imagining and anticipating is troublesome, kind of what you're a phrase around the corner, and just ask yourself, well, what am I unwilling to feel right now? What am I unwilling to feel? And then when you're ready, open your eyes. Now, I know this isn't the most cheerful way to start off a talk and it's not like fun because

what happens is if we ask that question and we actually pay attention, we start noticing a real vulnerability, a kind of unpleasantness and a squeeze and a clench and a clutch in our body, right? How many of you notice that, the fear clutch in your body? Okay. So, here's what we know. And this is both Western psychotherapy and psychology and Buddhist psychology, is that fear, when it's not faced, becomes toxic. Unfaced fear becomes toxic. That, you know, Carl Jung said that our suffering, our neurosis and our suffering come from the unfaced, unseen parts of ourselves. So, unfaced fear becomes toxic. And we know through history

that fear has been used by those in power to turn people against each other. We couldn't have people, people would not go to wars and they wouldn't fight and they wouldn't turn against each other. We wouldn't have racism, we wouldn't have tribalism, we wouldn't have us against them unless we're able to stir up fear. And when it doesn't get faced inwardly, when it goes outwardly, it becomes aggression. So that's one thing we know, is that it becomes toxic. We know that when we're in a fear state in those moments we're cut off from love and we're cut off from our creativity and we're not able to be really seen clearly the moment, so cuts off wisdom. And here's what else we know, that as long as we're moving

through the world and we're thinking of ourselves as a separate self, okay? the primal mood of the separate self is fear. And this is for all creatures that if we have some sense of separation, some sense of inside this skin or this covering as me and the world out there is the world out there, there's going to be some background hum of fear. Okay? So, it's universal. We all are rigged to feel fear,

to feel the unpleasant squeeze of fear, every one of us. So, it's a clench that we live with and I can say for myself if I pause and I check in, sometimes it's really obvious, I can really feel it and other times I'm still too busy and I'm still too much in my mind to really feel in my body. But it's there a lot and a lot of my life path has been simply learning to pay attention and lean in and befriend that fear. So, this is the kind of lead-in to two-part talk, and it'll be, you know, I'll be doing part of it tonight and then in two weeks the rest of it.

It's called Facing Fear, Awakening Your Fearerless Heart. Because the upside of facing fear is you discover a fearless heart, and that doesn't mean there's not fear, it means that you're resting in a heart space that's bigger than the fear so it doesn't cause suffering. The fear becomes a current in the midst of something larger. So we'll be using the acronym Raine as a tool in learning to face and transform our relationship with fear. If you want to take a deeper dive into what I'm teaching these two weeks, It goes much deeper in my book Radical Compassion that just came out. But the key teaching here is that facing fear is a necessary and natural dimension of evolving

consciousness. It's just part of waking up our consciousness. We face fear. And when we get hooked by fear, in other words, when rather than face it, we go into our control strategies and we bury it, we go into a kind of developmental arrest where we can't keep waking up to our fullness. So we're going to be looking at how we make the movement from the fearful, separate self to that heart space that has room for fear.

And as you listen, if you decide you want to do these weeks and really practice with fear and if you have anybody else that is wanting to team up with you, it's actually more powerful to do it with a friend and compare notes. First of all, it becomes a little less personal. You know, I do workshops on fear now and then and one of my favorite of the exercises of people get into these kind of small groups and write on a piece of paper different things that they're afraid of, maybe three things. You know, I'm afraid of failing at work, or I'm afraid of being rejected, or I'm afraid of others' judgment, or whatever it is. And

then they fold the pieces of paper and they all get put in the middle and kind of tossed around in a bowl or something. And then everybody picks out three. And then going around in a circle, people read the fears and they're reading other people's fears, but they're actually reflecting on, oh, what would it be like to have this one? And of course, course, they're very overlapping. But what comes out of that? It's so profound and obviously it's so simple in a way is the sense that it's not my fear, it's the fear. It doesn't feel so personal. And yet when we get a wash of fear, it feels like it's who we are and something's wrong and something's wrong with me and this shouldn't be happening. You know,

We get all very personal. So to share the process of exploring and facing and waking up through fear is actually best done in a relational field. Often the spiritual path, the metaphor, is that we're kind of climbing this mountain and we're transcending all the stuff of our humanness and experiencing some transcendent state. And I actually think a much better metaphor is that we're going inward and inward. It's kind of inverted and inward. And I like the way Rumi puts it.

Rumi speaks of night travelers who turn towards the darkness and are willing to know their own fear. He says, life's water flows from darkness. Search the darkness. Don't run from it. travelers are full of light and you are too. Don't leave this companionship. So there's this message that in our togetherness we can bring the light of awareness and the light of presence and go in and in and in the hurts and the fears and discover within our very

essence, the shared essence of timeless, boundless love. We go in and in and in and discover that presence, that love. It's the love that will not die. So the message here is that if we want to be on this pathway of facing and transforming our way of relating to fear, the attitude is key and our reflex is to think that when fear comes, it's bad. Right? Isn't that what happens? We think it's bad. We think something's wrong that we're feeling it. It shouldn't be happening. And what I'm inviting, if you want to really take this as part of your path, is a kind of a willingness and an interest and above all

a care, really gentle in turning towards. One friend many years ago, at that time really was serving as a teacher for me, said that fear is a sign that we're at the edge of our comfort zone. It's like a little light going saying, about to grow, you know. And I thought at first I was a little bit cynical and I said, yeah, well fear could mean I'm about to die, you know. And actually that's true. And yet if we really think in a very large way,

that the dying of some of our old beliefs and the dying of some relationships and the dying of seasons and the dying of our old jobs and the loss of our body and our mind, it's all can be part of waking up. And I suspect there's many of you that have been with people who are dying and watch them wake up as part of dying their hearts, right? Because we start being, it's like almost this body mind becomes more transparent and spirits start shining through and dying, you start realizing, well, this identity is not with the solid temporary body.

There's something much vaster and more profound, that's who I am. Realizing that, the shift in identity from the fearful self to that mystery and vastness is what gives us freedom from fear. So yeah, about to grow. Now I want to make clear that as I speak and as we talk about the particular tools that help us to face fear, I'm not talking about traumatic fear or panic because we still have to face all the ways that fear lives in our body. I always use that phrase, our issues are in our tissues.

But when there's trauma, we need to do it in a way that's more gradual and with more resources and support than we might for the fears that many people experience day by day. So we're not focusing on traumatic fear. And as I mentioned earlier, there will be next week a conversation with my friend and author Jim Gordon about his book on Healing Trauma that will round this out some. Another piece to say is that when we get into fear and we really get locked in, we're in a trance. And you know what it's like. I mean, there's nobody here probably that hasn't felt fear and sense that shrinking and how we get small and how our view of the world gets

small. It's not like we're remembering how other people are doing and concerned about, them and it's not like we're enjoying the stars in the night sky. It's like we are small and self-focused and cut off in a way from our resources. So it's a trance but not all fear creates a harmful trance. Fear is sometimes described as nature's protector. So it's universal because it's built into our nature's. nervous systems to be a signal to let us know we need to do something to avoid threats to our body and mind.

And we're supposed to narrow our attention and get focused for a time period. We're supposed to narrow our attention and scan for where the source of the trouble is and we're supposed to armor ourselves and we're supposed to have blood rush to extremities so that we can, you know, run, run, run. that's supposed to happen. If you are in a car and the driver's been drinking, you're supposed to feel fear. And if, you know, if medical needs and insurance won't cover, or if you see child playing on dangerous, slippery rocks or whatever, you're supposed to have fear and do something. Fear turns to suffering. It turns into a trance that binds our life when it oversteps

it's bound and by that I mean when our fear response, the on button gets jammed. And so we're not just responding to something that's really a danger but everything's triggering it. We're triggered all the time and that happens for many of us when we have a regularly repeated experience of threat early on in our individual lives or if we're in the non-dominant population we're in a culture that is regularly threatening our survival and well-being, our bodies will learn fear and it locks, it can lock in overtime so that on button is just the accelerator gets jammed, we're always on. And it takes over at least partially in an unconscious way so that we're busy trying to control

things but we're not aware it's going on. So here I want to pause and reintroduce something I speak about. about once every couple of classes which came from Joseph Campbell and he describes this big circle with a line going through it and it's a circle of awareness and the line going through it means that whatever is below the line is unconscious and whatever is above the line is conscious and much of our fear the thoughts and the feelings around fear is often below consciousness. It's driving us, totally affecting us, shaping us, affecting our body and our mind, but we're not aware of it. And in order to face fear we have to bring it above the line.

We have to shine the light of attention on it. So that means we have to begin to see where it is. And I want to give you a bit of a kind of a walkthrough of the expressions of trance. So, you can begin to identify fear where it's living in your body mind. Some people call this the body of fear when you're habitually caught in fear but you're not aware of it and it's controlling your experience. And there's, you can see through your body, your mind and behaviors, these patterns. Now what happens to the body when there's fear? especially fear from an early age is the body gets really tense or it gets really numb.

Either lose contact with it or it's really, really tight or both. Shoulders can get knotted up and raise the head forward, back hunched, chest sunken, the heart and billy, you know, heart armor, the billy tight. And in a way it's like we put on a permanent suit of armor. And we all, you might be listening and you might say, check, check, check, check. We all have it to some degree. I mean, we all have, the on button is pushed on for a lot of us a lot of the time. One Tibetan teachers said, we're like a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.

So that's the way the body reacts when we're in that transofeer. It armors itself. Well, what does the emotional body do? It's interesting, if you have any really difficult emotion and you scratch below the surface, you're going to find fear. Any, it's like all roads lead to fear. Fear is the existential experience that is impacting everything. So when fear is unprocessed, when we haven't faced it, it's like kind of a, it's there in

our body, it's like imagine a flow, it's torqued, it's like a hose that's gotten torqued, so that energy isn't able to, it's not in our full consciousness, it's kind of being resisted, but the water's still running, so it takes different expressions. Unfaced fear turns into physical illness, we know that. I mean, there's tons of research of the effect of stress and what happens when we are in a stress reaction for too long. So there's the physical illness. It takes shape as chronic anxiety and worry. Anger is a big one.

Look at anger and the look underneath and you'll usually find your way to fear. And then of course when we really push it under, it turns into depression. So there are a lot of expressions in the trance of fear that don't initially look like fear. And then of course we lose our sensitivity when we're armoring our own. our heart so we lose our empathy and our capacity for joy. Okay. So we've talked about how the physical body goes and the emotional body, then there's the fear-based behavior.

So when we're afraid we start busily trying to control things. And there's a whole body of work called terror management theory which is all the ways we try to control things so we don't have to feel fear. I think one of the biggest is we just work harder and faster. We just are constantly trying to do things. The other big one is that we overconsume. We numb. The fear doesn't feel good so we try to numb it with drugs and alcohol.

Then we act out trying to, we either defend ourselves or try to prove ourselves. We pretend that we know things we don't because there's a lot of fear of being shown to be stupid. I read this, that children were asked a question, named six animals which live specifically in the Arctic. And the response of one child was two polar bears and then three and that's crossed off four seals. What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for? He is a noted figure in history because he invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles. What is a vibration? Well, there are good vibrations and bad vibrations. Good vibrations were discovered in the 1960s. What happens during puberty to a boy? He says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery.

So there's the whole thing of presenting ourselves, which we know. We know part of our control mechanisms to present ourselves. And I just think it's interesting how often it's to seem knowledgeable in certain areas. A big one is aggression. that when we're feeling afraid, we get aggressive. And I'm primarily talking about on the individual level, but we can see it of course societally, how fear leads to aggressing. And of course, then there's a feedback loop because we get afraid, then we act aggressively towards somebody and then they get defensive or aggressed back and then around and around it goes. And there are different ways that it plays out.

When we're afraid, there's a story some of you might remember from a long ago where there were 11 people hanging onto a rope suspended from a helicopter. Ten were men and one was a woman. They all decided that one person should get off because if they did and the rope would break and everyone would die. And so the negotiation began but no one could decide who should go. So finally the woman gave a very touching speech saying how she would do. give up her life to save the others because women were used to giving up their life for others, for their partners and their children giving in and not receiving anything in return.

And when she finished speaking, all the men started clapping. So there's aggressive and there's passive aggressive. So I'm being playful because, you know, we all have these terror management strategies where we're just doing the best we can to try to get away from feeling fear. We all do it. Then we have fear thoughts. The fear in our body could not be sustained if we didn't keep on cycling through our worry thoughts, our fear thoughts.

It just they keep going and going of what's going to go wrong and the judging and the obsessing about what we're afraid of. Buddha wrote that, or didn't write it, but taught that whatever you regularly think about, that becomes the inclination of your mind, which is common sense if your sense of neuropathways and you just deepen the grooves. So then we start sensing, well, what was I thinking about today? And we know how much of the undercurrent of worry, well, there's not going to be enough time and will I get it done? And am I going to miss this, you know, thing from happening?

And am I going to fall short on that? We know how much is in there on these areas. So what do we fixate on? It said there are five types of fear. Terror, panic. Username or password is incorrect. We need to talk. And 14 miscalls from mom. So, the deepest, the kind of root of fears is that primal, I mentioned earlier the primal

mood of the separate self and the fear is losing life. The fear is a threat to existence and that's at the reptilian level, this fear that we're going to not make it. I saw many years ago this is Victor Yallam. He does these little cartoons and he did one that says he's got a psychiatrist. I'm a chair and then lying on the couch is the Grim Reaper. And the Grim Reaper is saying, no, doc, I'm afraid it's your time that's up. And that's the fear, you know, is that we're going to lose our life.

And of course it extends into fears about sickness, things go wrong and we immediately perseverate and it goes right into a deadly disease. But it also goes into the loss of our home and our job and our emotional, our physical security threats to our finances and so on. So anything to do with security and safety can go right down to that deep survival fear. I remember reading a while back, I don't remember from where Joseph Campbell saying that the very beginning of all religions is the cry help. That we all sense it's out of control, that we're all impermanent.

And there's some deep place in us that's looking for some way to make it and not be terrified by it. This life is a test, it is only a test. If it had been an actual life you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. So you get the idea. So that's the core level of what we're afraid of. Then when it's not a life or death issue, this is very interesting.

what primates do our default when it's not life or death is that we start comparing to others and sensing where we're going to fall short. And each of you knows in your own heart of hearts and mind of minds how much comparing goes on and whether it's to do with our appearance, our intelligence, our success in the world, our personalities we are constantly comparing. And as mammals and primates, we have a fear of failure in the relational field. We're pro-social creatures. So, it's another form of death.

It really is to not belong, to feel rejected. So that's another domain of fear is that I'm not going to succeed, I'm going to fail, I'm going to be rejected. So I've been talking about the fear of thoughts and those are the kind of, those are the thoughts that can predominate when we're in the trance of fear. Worry thoughts, fear of failure thoughts. And unless they get brought above the line, unless we start becoming aware of them, they control our biology and they keep us as a scared, small self. So, a story you'll find in true refuge, was of a man.

who was a lobbyist for an industrial trade group and he was a workaholic and that was his one fear management strategy but he was always scanning for what would undermine his reputation as a very powerful connected person and he'd also, so he was always competing with people another management strategy and finally he used alcohol and cocaine to kind of rev himself for different meetings and so on. This was fear of failure. It all came down to fear of failure. That was what was going on behind it. But it caused trouble.

He basically became addicted and he was on the verge of losing his marriage and his job so he had to go into recovery, kind of got forced there. But then it turned out to be grace because he was basically having to bring above the line the whole tangle of the trance of fear. the whole tangle of his body's armoring and the whole tangle of all the thoughts he had about failure and all his strategies to control things had to start coming above the line. And he described a gift from his sponsor who taught him the phrase, not my will, but my heart's will.

And I'm sharing that with you because when we get into these control strategies, my will is the ego saying you're going to fail if you don't do this and you have to do that and it's okay to have this drink. That's my well. And for him every time he saw himself about to say something or about to enter into his old control strategies he'd say not my well, my heart's well. And that started to bring the whole thing above the line. He started to see how many of his thoughts were keeping him completely

in that trance of fear. One of my favorite of all spiritual teachers, his name is Srinar Sargadata. He wrote a book, I Am That. And he has a line that just comes back to me over and over again. And it's that the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. Our minds keep us in the trance of fear. Our minds tell us you're not good enough.

Our minds tell us what's wrong around the corner. Our minds tell us what we've got to do to control things. That's my will, my ego's well. It's the heart that begins to sense that if we want to be free, we have to come into presence, we have to face what's here, and we need to do it with the help and support of each other. The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. So, we're going to now shift and look at how do we, how can you, over these next few weeks

start practicing once you sense that you're in that trance of fear. And sometimes your indicator will be that you're just physically tight, sometimes you'll be sensing fear thoughts, sometimes you'll see the control behaviors, any of them is the entryway. Okay. This is the trance of fear. If you're not familiar with the acronym Rain, it's a weave of mindfulness and compassion and the letters stand for, R is recognize, oh, recognize, fierce hair.

A is allow. That means don't go into the control strategy, just pause, give it space. The eye of rain is to investigate and it's not mental, it's not like saying, oh I'm afraid because my father treated me this way and now somebody else has his tone of voice. That's not the eye. The eye is investigate, okay, where am I feeling this in my body? What am I unwilling to feel? Okay? It's like really getting into the body. The N is to nurture, is to bring kindness and care to that process. Then there's in rain, what's called after the rain, is notice the shift that's happened in presence. How much?

by being, bringing above the line, attending and investigating and nurturing, notice who you are at the end. Notice the shift from the scared self to the fearless heart space. So that's the rain process in a nutshell and what we'll do in this, for the remainder of our time right now is just look at the recognize and allow because that alone is incredibly powerful at bringing things above the line. But just before we start, I want to name that with rain, even though it seems sequential, the N or nurture, you need all the time, you need the end before you start. You need to even engage at the very beginning with kindness.

And at any point during the process, if you're feeling caught, again, it's the quality of kindness and there's many different pathways to kindness and many ways that you You can offer some calming and soothing to the body and the heart in the process. So nothing is formulaic. You each have to customize for yourself, but this gives you a structure that's useful. To keep in mind that fear, I think of it like a wild, shy creature that's in the woods and it's like we're standing in the meadow and we're saying, come on out, I'm here to be with you.

And, you know, it just takes inviting with real gentleness and kindness and interest. And then we see what happens. But the beginning of rain is to, when you sense fear, to name it and to allow it to be there. The shaman say that when you can name a fear, it loses its power over you. to just say, okay, fear, fear, unpleasant, it loses its power. Not all the way, clearly, but some. And there's a lot of science that correlates that shows, this is especially from UCLA, that by mental notation naming what's going on, you activate the prefrontal cortex and that

quiet solymic system and there's more, you know, coming back online with executive function, with compassion and mindfulness. So, naming helps. Now, the example that I share with you on Recognize and Allow is my very favorite example, something that I have remembered now for decades. And I wrote about in radical acceptance a man who was at a retreat and in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And he needed help getting around the retreat, his wife was there to get him to the meditation hall and to the dining room and so on. And when he came in for an interview I was surprised at how upbeat he was and I asked him, you know, given, because he was a psychologist, he had been meditating for a number of years but he knew what was going

on. And he told me that it was like the fall time when the leaves are falling, it's not bad, it's just what's happening. Which I thought was, wow, that's pretty wise. Then he shared something that happened in the onset of the disease. He said he was teaching. He went to a place to give a workshop, about 100 people there, and he was about about to start and he went totally blank, like completely blank. He had no idea what he was going to say. In fact, he didn't know what he was doing there.

He didn't know why people were looking at him expectantly. So, that was the situation and of course his heart starts pounding. So here's what he did. First of all he didn't do anything, he just paused. And then he started naming what he was aware of, pounding heart. And then he kind of bowed, scared, bowed, feeling a clutch right here, embarrassed. This went on for a while, just naming his experience and allowing it. And then finally, you just looked around and he said, well I'm sorry.

And you might imagine a number of people actually had tears in their eyes, you know, that, you know, because they had, one person said it, they said nobody's ever given us the teachings in this way. And what had he done? Well, he sensed the trance of fear about to take over. and he paused, instead of the control strategies, he paused, and he named, and he just kind of allowed what was there to be there. The bowing is another way, I think, of saying yes, and it doesn't mean yes, I like this,

but yes, this is the reality of the moment, let it be here. Or I use the phrase, this belongs. It's just part of what's happening right now. No resistance. So that's what recognize and allow is. And when we sometimes don't even need to go beyond that. If you can just recognize and allow the play of fear, it shifts you from that resisting scared person to the space of presence that has room.

And this is the gift of a mindful attention. Recognizing and allowing is the ground of mindfulness. that when you're mindful of something, you're no longer, it's no longer under the line, you're no longer inside it, you are bigger, you've enlarged to the presence that can include it. And I mentioned at the beginning that this is really the practice that everybody on a spiritual path if we want to keep waking up needs to do, otherwise we're living in resistance. There's a poem I like called Fearing Parish. fearing Paris. Suppose that what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris. Then you would 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 leads 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 just watch the Paris lights come up at night. Just to be on the safe side, you'd have to stand. 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. Don't you like the way the siren is saying, yeah, that's right, see Paris first. So of course we need to regularly visit

Paris because the more we do or whatever you want to call your fears, what happens is that we start developing a kind of space for them that can tolerate them, that we're not tightening against them and we're not closing our heart against ourselves or others because there's kind of openness still and a flow. And if we start developing that tolerance, we start, our behavior start changing because we're not having to run away from the present moment because most of the time we're running away from the present moment because it feels uneasy and out of control and has some fear in it. So it's a regular practice and it's an on-purpose practice. I can say for myself, I often I'll either sit down in my cushion at home or I often meditate.

as I've shared with you all by the river and I'll come into stillness and I'll ask, you know, what really wants attention right now? And I'll feel inwardly or I'll ask that question, what am I unwilling to feel? And quite often there's a kind of clench in there and I've learned to not think something's wrong. I just figure, oh, that's the fear clench, the fear. Not my fear. it's just that universal fear clench.

So imagine us all, all of us here and those that are listening online, if we're all just practicing with fear and when you are practicing, think that there's hundreds and maybe thousands of other people right now that are practicing going, oh, there's that fear clench. And what about if we just breathe with it and what about just feeling the feeling and being kind. You can even put your hand where it is. There's a lot of evidence that if you just touch yourself the warmth of the hand right here at the heart, helps to bring some comfort. You can breathe. You can breathe long and deep a bit. Anything that calms you down, that could be helpful, but stay and feel where that clenches. Visit Paris. So, the starting place

for us as we explore this on the spiritual path, this evolving consciousness by opening to our fears, is wherever some expression of that fear trance shows up. And we named a bunch of them, whether it's the armored body or the worried thoughts or the controlling behaviors, and take some time to pause and ask yourself, what am I unwilling to feel? and bring kindness and curiosity. We'll just practice a little bit of that right now as we're together sitting and I invite you to take it home and explore it for the freedom of your own heart and it also a freedom

that ripples out to others. So please sit comfortably and close your eyes and take a moment to let go of any unnecessary tension or tightness in your body. And as we did at the beginning of the talk, I invited you to scan for where you might have some stress in your life that brings up anxiety or fear. And again, invite you to look for that, but not something that's like on a scale of 1 to 10 a 10, something is more like maybe a 5 or a 6. Because it won't serve you right now as we do this light rain with fear.

That might be something that's coming around the corner where you're afraid, some gathering socially or something to do with work. Or maybe it's some in an individual relationship, some confrontation coming out. Maybe it's your fear for another person, what they're going through. Let yourself get close in with what's going on so you can kind of sense the worst part, like what is it you're really afraid, it's around the corner. Maybe there's a belief, you're going to lose something, you're going to fail. So you're beginning to notice the fear beliefs in the mind.

Maybe you're noticing that you can begin to come into the body and ask yourself, what am I unwilling to feel? Recognize, just name what you're aware of. Maybe what you first come to is anger, it might be fear, might be hurt, vulnerability, whatever you notice and keep paying attention, just recognizing, naming, allowing it to be there. Maybe there's that clench. To allow means just really let it be there for now. Now if it helps you though, putting your hand on your heart or wherever you feel strong

feelings you could put your hand on your throat or your belly, you're beginning to accompany yourself in the process. This is the beginning of nurturing as it's going on, which can only be helpful. So you might experiment. What am I unwilling to feel? To feel in the body, to recognize it, to allow it, and to deepen with investigating, just to really sense, you know, where is it and where is the most vulnerable place? Let whatever you discover belong here.

Let it be here. So if you're bowing, you're saying, okay, this too. Investigating it, feeling it. And I describe those wild creatures in the forest, just sense what this part of you might most need to feel embraced and held by you, to feel welcomed, to feel cared about, accepted. So you're asking, well, what does this fear part need? How does it want me to be with it? And that'll guide you in nurturing and just offering a really kind presence.

You might sense as part of after the rain even just for these few moments the difference between the scared self and this growing heart space, this kind presence that's attending. This is the beginning of freedom, that shift. You might sense that you're with others, hundreds or thousands of others that are like the night travelers facing fear. Maybe you can think of one person in your life right now and the fears they're feeling and let your heart include them. So it's not my fear but it's the fear, the clench that we're all feeling.

All of us. All of us. Facing and awakening through fear. all of us evolving from that fearful separate self to this heart space, the shared heart space. 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.

As we close, you might sense your own intention to bring that light and that care to the fear that is universal and living through your body, mind and others. Your intention to discover the heart space, the fearless heart space, that can include fear but not be controlled by it. Namaste and thank you for your attention.