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

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Facing Fear (Part 1) – Awakening Your Fearless Heart - Fear is a natural and universal part of our incarnation, and, when it goes on overdrive, we get imprisoned in the suffering of separation. These two talks explore how the RAIN meditation can help us face fear, and discover the boundless loving awareness that includes but is not contracted by currents of fear.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. 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 a 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. There were 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 for us. 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 it 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. 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.

This is the lead-in to two-part talk. I'll be doing part of it tonight and then in two weeks the rest of it. It's called Facing Fear, Awakening your fearless 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. 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. 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 facing, 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. I do workshops on fear now and then and one of my favorite of the exercises that I'll have 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. 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 they're very overlapping. 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. 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 to be. 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. Night 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. It's 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 who 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 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 that you're 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 a very clear that 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 or 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 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, okay?

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 that 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 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. All 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 its bounds 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 and 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 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 walk-through of the expression, 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. 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

belly tight. And in a way it's like we put on a permanent suit of armor. You might be listening And you might say, 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 teacher 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 trance of fear. It armors itself. Well, what does the emotional body do?

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 torched, it's like a hose that's gotten twerked. 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 heart so we lose our empathy and our capacity for joy. 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, you know, 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 and are 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 for 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 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 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 of thoughts. The fear in our body could not be sustained if we didn't keep on cycling through our worried 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. The Buddha wrote that, or didn't write it, but taught that whatever you regularly think

about, that becomes the inclination of it. your mind, which is common sense if you sense of neuropathways and you're just deep in the grooves. So then we start sensing 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 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 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 sitting in 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. 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 that what primates do are 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 to be able to be, we start to becoming aware of them, they control our biology and they keep us as a scared small self. So, story, this is a story you'll find in true refuge. It was 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. So he was always competing with people, another management strategy, and finally he used alcohol and cocaine to kind of rave himself for different meetings and so on. Anyway, this is fear of failure. It all came down to fear of failure. That was what was going on behind it, but it caused trouble. Like 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 will.

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 will, 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 Srinor 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.

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 transe 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 an entryway. Okay, this is the trance of fear. If you're not familiar with the acronym, it's a weave of mindfulness and compassion and the letters stand for, R is recognize? Oh, recognize, fears here.

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? 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 by 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, 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 N 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 in many ways that 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 this 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 it takes inviting with real gentleness and kindness and interest and then you 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 quiets the limbic system and there's more 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, 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 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. 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, feeling a clutch right here, embarrassed. This went on for a while, just naming his experience and allowing it. And finally he said, you know, he 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 one person said it, they said nobody's ever given us the teachings in this way. And what did he done?

Well, he sensed the trance of fear about to take over and he paused, instead of the control strategy, he just 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, 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 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 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. 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 in a flow.

And if we start developing that tolerance, our behaviors start changing because we're not having to run away from the present moment because most of the time, we're, we're 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, 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 warmness. 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 feeling.

here Trant 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. 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 one to ten a ten, something is more like maybe a five or a six because it won't serve you right now as we do this light rain with fear. So it 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 up. 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. It might be hurt. Vulnerability. Whatever you notice. And keep paying attention.

Just recognizing, naming, allowing it to be there. Maybe there's that clench. And 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 investment.

Investigating, just to really sense, you know, where is it and where is the most vulnerable place and 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. 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. I'm 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 an awakening through fear. All of us evolving from that fearful separate self to this heart space, the shared heart space. The poet Hafeus 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.