Tara Brach - Finding The Juice Inside Fear

Episode Date: September 7, 2011

2011-09-07 - Finding The Juice Inside of Fear - Learning to bring a mindful presence to fear is an intrinsic part of spiritual awakening. In this talk we look at the ways we get caught in the trance of fear, and how the two wings of presence--clear recognition and openheartedness--can free us. This process of facing unmet fears is necessary not only for our own healing, but for any possibility of peace and the healing of our planet. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Many of you, especially if you're from this area, know about stinging nettles. And we have an amazing batch of them right near us by the river that I am really careful not to touch against, because if you happen to glide against a stinging nettle, it stings. It really hurts. I was walking with a dear friend, Janie Zitlo, who was up visiting and Jonathan this summer. And Janie said, ah, stinging nettles, I love them. And she described how she makes tea from them. But she also described how if you get stung by them and you have a glove and you hold on to the stem

and you slice it open, the juice from the stinging metal is the perfect antidote to the burn and sting and rash that the needles cause. Okay. Now you might anticipate the Dharma teaching in this. You know, Rumi says that the cure for the pain is in the pain. So what I'd like to explore tonight is how that's true with fear,

that when we bring presence to fear, that we find within the fear itself, the very juice that frees us. And the background to this is that if you look at any emotion, plagues you. Let's say it's depression, or let's say it's shame, or let's say it's an addictive behavior, or whatever is going on, and if you unlayer it, what you'll find underneath is fear, is the anticipation of future pain. So fear is very much at the root of all of our experience. Now, just to say that if you don't have fear, that means you're brain dead.

Okay? Really? Fear has been described as nature's protector, and it's absolutely essential for us to be able to have our nervous system rigged in a way that we know what to do and what not to do. It's part of surviving. So the only time that fear becomes troublesome is when it oversteps its bounds. So that's what we're going to explore is how it can overstep its bounds and rather than being part of our survival equipment become something that possesses us and actually shrinks our sense of who we are in a way that causes profound suffering.

Part of the reason I chose tonight to talk about this is because we're approaching the anniversary of 9-11. And to me, 9-11 and the horror and the pain of 9-11 all arises out of unmet fear. It's a culture and a clash of cultures that have not been able to pause and have the courage, and skill to face the fears that are driving the cycles of violence. Does that make sense, just as an overview? That our violence, our aggression, comes out of fear. In a similar way, what feels very current to me is that our unfaced fears are responsible for the ways that we are violent towards this earth.

that our fear of not having enough to consume, our fears of the economy, the greed that is kind of the flip side of fear, then ends up driving decisions to drill more, driving decisions to not regulate ozone that's destroying our climates, to make decisions that allow for the make possible catastrophic environment, damage. Those decisions come out of fear. So I want to really talk about how there's in our lives as individuals and as a culture, if we want to sense this evolution of consciousness that actually

moves us towards peace and towards the potential of healing our earth, we have to face our fears. and we need to do it in an active way, in our communications with each other on a societal and cultural level, and it has to happen within each of our own consciousness. So I call it basically training and mindfulness of fear, but it's really looking at how all are patterns of not facing fear. Again, Rumi, says this reminds me of the mother who tells her child when you're walking through the graveyard at night

and you see a boogeyman run at it and it'll go away. But what replies the child if the boogeyman's mother has told it to do the same thing? Boogie men have mothers too. So how do we, when fears come up rather than react out of them and go into whatever our reactions are to help us sue the fear, How do we stay and have the courage to open? That's the question.

So again, I want to say that fear is natural. And so many of us when we feel fear think, oh, something's wrong with me for feeling fear. You know, we think that we're in some way malfunctioning. We're supposed to feel fear. But when it takes over, what happens is our identity shifts. And if any of you think about a time recently when you were really anxious, when anxiety was really kind of clutching at your chest,

you know what it's like to start moving through the world and how everything that goes on is going on. There's this small, tight self and a world out there. And there's a tremendous feeling of being separate, of being isolated, of being inside your own little drama. Fear shrinks our sense of our identity. Rather than those times that we're feeling expansive and a sense of belonging to nature, to each other, to this life,

we're tight and small and separate. One of the useful distinctions I found, because I call this a trance of fear, when we're caught in this very small sense of separate, is to understand that while the affect of fear, this necessary part of surviving, is this evolutionary response, the trance of fear is sometimes called the body of fear. It's conditioned. It's conditioned through our culture. It's conditioned through our families so that we end up having a chronic sense that something's wrong. Rather than appropriate fear, okay, there's really somebody that's

threatening us and we're in danger, there's always a sense that around the corner something's going to go wrong and I can't handle it. This is the body of fear. Now, if you examine your fears, if you think back through today and yesterday and the last week or so, you might, you might, ask yourself how many of my fears were evolutionarily appropriate, you know, were letting me know of danger. We're part of surviving and thriving. And how many of them were kind of this habitual trance, were just kind of the habit of anxiety. That's just something to track for yourself. It's an important question. Some of you might know that the The word worry is derived from the word to strangle.

And isn't it like that, that when we're worrying, the spontaneity and freedom of our spirits kind of strangled. Many of you know this one liner I like to tell of a mother sends her son a telegram. Well, I'm going to update and says a mother texts her son and says, start worrying details to follow, you know, but it's like that. It's like we're kind of fear that something's going to happen and we don't know what, but there's some readiness. And so we develop a body of fear. So what we'll do is I'll just describe a little of this body of fear. And as a way of exploring it, you might close your eyes and take a moment to

sense something that you know brings up anxiety in your life. And I won't leave you too long having to think about anxious things, but just for now, pick a situation that brings up fear. I know when we think of these situations, it's sometimes we don't always contact the experience fully, but just to begin in your life to become mindful of the body of fear, you might notice what happens in your body when you're thinking of this situation. To consider that when a child is young, a child's relaxed and awake in his or her body. But over time as fear becomes habitual, there's a chronic tightening and the shoulders might become raised and nodded, the head might move forward, there might be back getting hunched or the chest sunken. What is your body?

do when you're feeling afraid, endangered, anxious. For most of us, we're not even aware of it, but we have a permanent suit of armor that's our body of fear. And we don't notice it. It's this chronic tightening as if we're tensing our muscles to protect our existence all the time. Okay, so the body of fear physically is this tightness, but it's also a body of fear that has to do with our psyche. What are the beliefs going through your mind when you're anxious? What are you believing is going to happen is wrong? The body of fear is sustained by certain kinds of fear thoughts and fear beliefs. Very useful to identify if you know they're happening, you won't get so caught in the

trance. So once we know that, then we find, well, what's the body of fear like emotionally? For some of us, it plays out a lot as fear itself. For others, we kind of go into a depression. We kind of sink. And there's a kind of covering over of depression. So we're not feeling the fear, but we're just tired and we're kind of hopeless about the future. Very often, depression covers over fear. For others, it's irritation. And if you look under the irritation, you'll find fear. Often it comes out of shame.

The fear is really something's wrong with me, and it just locks into shame. So this is part of the body of fear also, and I invite you to start exploring for yourself this constellation. If you'd like to open your eyes, you can. When I explore for myself, when I find I'm kind of churning and tight, and I start tracking the thoughts, the beliefs,

and I start feeling the feelings in my body, what I discover at the core is a sense of the fragility of life, that there's sense of fragility that at any moment, you know, everything could crack open. And this body of fears in some way trying to come. control and manage and hold it all together, protect me from what can go wrong. I think that most of us in some way have this fear of great loss. Some people would say, well, I don't fear my own death, but there's something about loss of what we really cherish that's behind it, that it's all

very fragile. And for sure, we want to feel safe. I mean, somebody once told me, define death, and the response was Patrick Henry's second choice, you know, and so, and so, and so, we want to feel safe, I mean, somebody once told me, to find death, and So this is, I liked that. I thought that was really kind of clever. This is Steve Wright. He says, I was hitchhiking the other day and a hearse stopped. I said, no thanks. I'm not going that far.

So we go around feeling in some way chronically unsafe. This is a bit of the human condition. And when we fixate on that and we get into a cycle of reactivity, we're in a kind of chronic trance. where we're always kind of in some way defending or protecting. And the strategies that we use, I often refer to them as false refuges.

We want to feel more safe. And so we're in some way trying to do whatever will help to soothe our nervous system at the moment. You'll find yourself kind of randomly going online, and if you decide sometime not to do what your impulse is to do, and just pause and feel what's going on in your body, you might find that sense underneath of that kind of restless, anxious feeling.

Your going online was a way to soothe it, to get away from it. We tried to get away from the raw feelings of fear a lot of the time. So different ways that we do it. Most of you are very familiar with your patterns, at least to some degree. I think a big one is controlling.

That when we find ourselves really tightly trying to control other people, how other people act, how other people are thinking about us, when we're tightly trying to control our schedule and what can happen and what's going to happen in the future, that's a sign.

That's a false refuge, that tightness. Little story, I like a couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, their domestic tranquillities been the talk of the town, local newspaper reporters inquiring as to the secret of their long and happy marriage. Well, it dates back to our honeymoon, explained the man. We were visiting the Grand Canyon and took a trip down the bottom of the canyon by Pack Mule. We hadn't gone too far when my wife's mule stumbled. My wife quietly said, that's once. We proceeded a little further when the mule

stumbled again. One more time, my wife spoke quietly. That's twice. We hadn't gone a half a mile when the mule stumbled a third time. My wife promptly removed a revolver from her pocket and shot him. I started to protest over her treatment of the innocent creature when she looked at me and quietly said, that's once. I debated sharing that because I don't like anything that has any cruelty in it, but it really does give us a sense of controlling, right? How that goes. Okay, other false refuges. We try to always play it safe. We don't take risks. We don't take risks to show others what we really feel or to express what really is important to us. So we don't reveal our authentic self. We take false refuge by overconsuming.

And many of you know that, that when we're anxious, we overeat or use alcohol or drugs. We take false refuge with aggression. And again, this brings us back to 9-11, that whether it's the aggression of when we're anxious judging someone or the aggression of lashing out or the aggression of really violating in a big way, that is a response to fear. Now, we also do the exact same thing to ourself. If you are really constantly attacking yourself in some way, there's fear. It's like in some way, if I don't keep attacking myself and judging myself,

I'll never get better enough to be embraced by other beings. Judgment. So I want to name, there's many more, but again, part of waking up from the body of fear, see what your strategies are for getting away from fear. Most of us, it's like being on this bicycle, we're bicycling away from the present moment, and the more fear we have, the faster we bicycle. Our minds speed up, we try to do more, get more done,

defend ourselves more, we just go faster. The reason I call them false refuges, and there's many different ways of describing these escape modes, I'm going to give you three major reasons. And the first one is pretty obvious that they don't work, that drinking alcohol is not going to heal our fear, and NARA is judging someone else, and NAR is attacking another country.

There's no war to end all wars, right? The false refuges don't work, because we can't stop loss and we can't stop dying, so we can't get rid of our fear that way. The second reason that the false refuges, I call them false refuges, is that the more that we keep doing them, the more we keep our pattern of avoiding fear, the more we're locked into a very contracted sense of identity. We're not able to discover who we really are because we're the fearful self, we're the addicted self, we're the judgmental self, however it plays out. understand that if we play out these false refuges, our sense of our being becomes very narrowed. And then the third reason that false refuges cause suffering is because in any moment that you're

playing out your false refuge, your need to prove yourself or defend yourself, in that moment, you can't come home to the one place where you can find freedom from fear, which is present. in any moment that you're playing out your false refuges, you're leaving your one potential place for freedom. Lely Tomlin puts it well. She says, the trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

So fear, as I've mentioned, is nature's protector, but we overdo it and we get locked in this trance. and the most fundamental inquiry of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha to be, was this. He said, given that it's inevitable, the loss we fear is inevitable. Everyone that you love will die. This body, if you happen to get older, will get older and die. We lose everything that this self wants to hold on to. given that how do we find happiness and peace and freedom here and now that was his big inquiry

now i'd like to offer a metaphor because we're really talking about how to turn from our habitual false refuges the fear reaction how do we stop and instead come into presence and bring presence to the raw experience of fear. That's the shift. And one of the metaphors that many people find helpful is that if you put salt in a sink, you know, put the plug in and you fill the sink, it's going to be very salty water. Put a cup of salt in. But if you put that same cup of salt in a lake, it's not going to have the taste of salt. And in a similar way, fear can be here as long as our sense of our own being is large.

You might think of it this way, that if you know you're the ocean, if you can remember this vastness of being, this presence, this love that's here, if you can even touch that sum, there's room for the fear. Now here's the deal. The fear,

doesn't go away. It doesn't mean there's not necessarily a kind of sensation of clutching, doesn't mean there's not that uncomfortableness or that pounding chest. That can be there. But what you'll find is that when you're in touch with a enlarged sense of who you are, it's really okay. It's like any other weather system. It comes and it goes and there's still a sense of this sky-like awareness, you're okay. So how do we open to a true and vast sense of our beingness? How does that happen? Especially when we're caught in fear. What I'd like to put out as a reminder, some of you might know, of what the Buddha described as the two wings of present. are of awareness.

And it's a really valuable kind of way to consider this, and we need both wings for the bird to fly, to be free. And one wing is this wing of really seeing and contacting and being in touch with what's right here, knowing what's here,

the wing of mindful awareness. And the other wing has the quality of allowing. It's allowing, it's accepting, it's a space of compassion. So there's contacting, like contacting a wave of experience knowing what's happening. And then there's the letting it be, this ocean of presence.

And we need to have both qualities in order to get that juice I described of fear, to discover the freedom inside fear. So a lot of our training that we do here is learning both how to see what's happening and the question you can ask yourself, if you just close your eyes for a moment and wanted to turn these two wings into questions are, in this moment, what is happening inside me?

What is happening inside me? So that question has the power just to directly bring your attention to contact what's here, the sensations, the feelings. That's what I'm calling the wave. mindful awareness of this immediate experience. What is happening inside me?

The second wing, the question is, and can I let this be? Can I just let it be? And that letting be has a quality of openness and of space. And when we truly let be, and this might feel like a jump for some of you, but just to put it into your, just to seed it, when we truly let be,

truly let be, when we pay attention and truly let be, it unfolds into love. Anybody you pay attention to and you're really paying attention and you fully let them be just as they are, and you're paying attention, the heart will feel a tenderness of love. In time. Okay, so we begin with this training of fear, and I'll just to give you these components, you might think of one one of the wings as recognizing. recognizing what's happening and the other wing is allowing for now okay and many of you are familiar

with this because this is the basic core of the rain acronym we're learning to recognize fear and allow it okay so how does that happen some of you might remember the story of

Mara visiting Buddha Mara is the god of greed and hatred and delusion the shadow side and he was visiting the Buddha after the Buddha was already awakened. But he kept coming around. And the Buddha took to having this kind of ritual where when he'd become aware of Mara, you know, presenting himself, he'd say, ah, Mara, I see you. Come on in and have some tea with me. Okay. He'd invite him to tea. He'd recognize him. I see you, Mara. Okay. And he'd invite him to tea. Ah, this allowing space, letting him.

be. Now I think that's a beautiful kind of way to capture these two wings. One Zen teacher says that when he meets fear, his response is, I agree, I agree. Just that. I know that Henry David Thoreau said that when you see a dog, run at it, you know, whistle for it, bite it in, you know, let it come. So we begin this training, having this intention, when fear arises, okay, fear, name it, just to contact it, and truly say yes. I agree. I agree. So a woman came to Wednesday night class a number of times and heard these instructions. And she came up after class one night and said, my daughter is struggling with a number of times. addiction and she's been on and off the street and I have a fear of disease and a fear of her future and she was very distraught and she said I've done everything to work with this fear I possibly

can I've done everything I've tried meditating with it I've tried to lean in because part of contacting the fear sometimes we lean in as a way to really contact it she said I've tried to lean into it fully I've tried to breathe with it but Tara it's still here so what What was missing? What was missing? She was trying to make it go away by doing everything, right? And that's not truly letting be. It's completely understandable. So what I wanted, the reason I wanted to share that little vignette is because we don't like fear. And part of recognizing fear is also recognizing, I don't like this. Letting be doesn't mean you like it. It just means, that there's a wisdom in you that knows this is what's here,

and there's more freedom, there's more truth by just staying. So I'm just going to let be. Maybe not forever. Maybe I'll get worn down and I'll decide enough already, right? And by the way, that's a totally appropriate decision at times. And if there's trauma, these guidelines aren't even that useful right now. But if it's a fear that you can work with, you just say, okay I see you and truly it's okay right now you can be here

and when she when I talked to her about that I had her go inside and get in touch with her fear and I had her ask a question I sometimes have people ask of their fear which is how do you want me to be with you how do you want me to be with you so if you feel fear and you say well how do you want me to be with you or you say what do you need for me it's a similar question Well, for her, her fear just wanted her to accept that it was there.

Of course she was afraid for her daughter. Just accept I'm here. Don't try to get rid of me. When she heard from her own fear that it wanted acceptance, something softened. There was more space, and she began to bring a kind of healing presence to that fear, so that rather than reacting, she had a little more space to respond. to respond wisely to the situation. Just by asking that fear, what do you need for me?

How do you want me to be with you? So I'm sharing that with you because it's a very valuable tool if you're working with fear. Sometimes it's too much to touch into the fear right away. One woman I know had a lot of fear she was working with and her strategy, which worked quite well, was she would imagine sitting on a park bend, sitting on a park bench and she'd say, okay, fear, you're going to sit over here. I can't

let you be inside me fully right now. So you're sitting over here and she'd put the fear next to her. Okay? And then she'd meditate and she'd say, okay, I'm here and you're here. And she'd let herself know everything that was in the environment. She'd imagine sky and trees. And if there was somebody that, you know, she wanted in the environment that was a pleasant person, have them there. But mostly sense the space. surround her. And then gradually she'd say, okay, now I feel that space. Now I'm going to just touch in a little bit to what this fear is like, but she'd keep it next to her. And gradually, in time, if she kept reestablishing that sense of space, she could then begin to feel that fear

be inside her, not next door, but gradually. There is a way that we can breathe with fear that actually trains us to bring these two wings together in a freeing manner. And I'd like to just share that with you. You might close your eyes right now and we'll just try it out together. Now this is a way of breathing

that allows you to contact the wave and remember the space, the openness, because we need both. And it doesn't matter whether it's with fear or anything. You can use this breath with anything. The invitation right now is sense any physical experience that might be predominant in your body. And if it's unpleasant, that's quite fine. If it's really, really unpleasant, then you might not want to use it.

But you're picking a whatever stands out as maybe some discomfort could be physical or emotional. You might scan your throat, your chest, your belly. and begin to breathe in and with the in-breath have the intention of having the breath and your attention directly contact that unpleasantness and if you happen to be someone here with no unpleasantness then just have it directly contact the feelings in your heart whatever feelings are there so you breathe in and let the breath contact the actual sensations in the body and then with the out-breath sense that those sensations could just dissolve into the space around you. Just be aware of the space around you.

Sounds openness. Breathing in, letting the breath contact directly the unpleasantness or whatever's predominant, the wave. And breathing out, sensing the ocean, sensing the space around you, sensing openness. Breathing in, feeling if it's fear, our sorrow, our physical tension, feeling it. breathing out, feeling space, openness.

Continue like this so that the in-breath you're contacting your body and the sensations in your body, whatever they are. And with the out-breath, you're letting go into the realm of space. Perhaps you can listen to the sounds and let that help to connect you with space. Moving from contact with the in-breath to space with the out-breath. Now, keeping this in mind, and you can open your space. your eyes. Maybe next time you feel some anxiety, you simply let this breath help you to breathe in

and contact the wing of being in touch with what's right here, what's happening, breathing out and sensing, okay, space, openness allowing. Just that can be a useful tool. Now, what's helpful to remember is that sometimes we have to, because we're so out of touch with our body, we have to learn to lean in and contact the experience right here. One of the metaphors I found really useful on this is what's called a keeper's hole, and it's in a river, kayakers know this language, it's that swirl that ends up catching a boat or catching a body and bringing it down so that you drown because you keep stuck in the

swirling current and you can't get out of it. and the only way out of a keeper's hole if you get stuck in it is actually to dive right into the center down as far and deep as you can towards the bottom because if you can get to the bottom of the river you can come out one of the sides so you do the opposite of what all your instincts are your instincts are to fight your way to the surface it won't work you'll keep getting swirled down dive down into the hole same with fear our instincts are to pull away

breathe right into the fear open to it keep saying yes to it contact it okay so that's the message of the keeper's hole if you find you're one of those people that's very dissociated part of your training and facing fear is going to be to directly

contact it to dive right in leaning in now there's another thing happens is some of us are so possessed by the fear that there's no way to catch your breath. We have to find some space. How do we find some space? So another metaphor from kayaking. Okay. And in this metaphor, and this is something I found is really useful because I kayak a lot myself, is that Jonathan and I'll go on the river and we'll be going up against the current and sometimes it gets really strong and we get really tired and it's in its

really rough going. We know that if we pull right behind a rock, so the current's throwing right over it, but you pull right behind it, there is absolutely still space. Absolutely still space. And that's where we can catch our breath, kind of regain our strength, kind of check out the river and where we need to go, and then we can start paddling back into the currents again. There are times with fear that you can't just stay inside it, that you need to pause and remind yourself of where the space is, where you can catch your breath, where there's some openness, and most importantly, where you feel a sense of safety and love. And that's going to be the last piece I'd like to talk about, which is when you pull behind the rock, how you can begin to contact a sense of safety, a sense of ease. Without that, it's very hard to stay present with fear. Okay?

So this is the last piece. The Buddha, when the monks that he sent out, they had gone to a rains retreat in India, this is over 2,500 years ago, and they had gone to meditate and were totally frightened because they felt there were ghosts and demons in the woods that they were meditating in,

they came back to him and asked him if they, you know, told them they didn't want to be in those woods anymore. And he said, you need to go back. But here's something that'll help you when you return. And he taught them the meta, our loving kindness meditation. And a meta meditation in a broad way is any way that we pay attention, any way that we pay attention that helps us remember love. And for each of us, any of us dealing with fear. You cannot deal with fear unless you have some way of remembering love. That's the primary thing when you go behind the rock, when you want to contact space, it's going to be what lets that space really be nurturing. It's going to be what lets you get the

juice out of fear. Okay? So how do we do that? Certainly part of working with our fears in the world is developing our relationships with each other. And I don't have time to go into that. That would be a whole year, three years of Darmatox is how we cultivate loving relationships. So I'm just going to name a little bit about ways that we can begin to when we're caught in fear, find a sense of loving presence that's available to us.

All right, when we're in the thick. So here we are. We know we need these two wings. We know we need to contact it, but we fear, but we also know we need to have some resourcefulness, some space, some love. I'll give you a story, and this will be in true refuge when it comes out next year, of one woman that I worked with who had gone through a lot of fear and a lot of abuse. So this story has some trauma in it, but again, you have to work very carefully with trauma.

For this woman, she had just broken up with a boyfriend who was very abusive and was very afraid of vengeance. And so she was living in a lot of fear. And so I asked her questions I often ask, which have to do with what gives you a sense of safety? When do you feel safe? In other words, how, when you're in the midst of fear, what could you remember? What could you remind yourself of? What could you reflect on that would help you to feel connections? The Buddhist basic teaching is fear is great, but greater yet is the truth of our connectedness.

What would allow you to feel safe? When I asked her this question, and this was after we had, you know, we started working together, she named her sister and she named a very good friend, and then she said she felt a real good connection with me and that she felt safe in my presence. So I had her begin a meta meditation where she would close her eyes and just imagine the three of us surrounding her. You can imagine, you can use your mind

to contact a very visceral, a live sense of safety to imagine the three of us around her holding her in care and to just relax into that just kind of like a bath, a warm bath, just let herself be held. And she practiced that every day. She practiced invoking the three of us and feeling that and feeling herself held and safe. And she found that to be very helpful.

Then we started practicing when she felt fear. But the major time she had a breakthrough, because she had felt like when she gets caught, I mentioned our identity contracting. She said, when I'm caught in fear, she said, Tara, I feel like I have no soul. There's just this hollow pit inside me. and I've lost any contact with anything

in terms of being a being with soul. The time that she got really overwhelmed, she had gone over to stay at her friend's house because she knew that she couldn't handle how much fear was there. A friend had gone to sleep, and then the stories in her mind started whipping up a frenzy of fear. So that's when she sat up, and we had done enough rounds of this loving kindness meditation

that she called to mind her sister, her friend, myself. She visualized us there. She visualized that we're in some way holding her. And then she said, okay, let me feel this. Okay, she agreed to feel it. And she said it was like, you know, like glass crashing and breaking open in her heart. And it just tore her open.

It was really, really frustrating. And yet she stayed and she stayed and she said she kept feeling the fear and just surrendering it into this ocean, into this larger sense of us being there. And she said, finally at one point she realized she was surrendering it into her own open heart. And she said, Tara, that was the moment I knew my soul was back. She was no longer this victim that was terrified and fighting the fear. She wasn't running from fear. She wasn't using, and she had other false refuges I haven't gone into, but she wasn't using her other false refuges.

She had stopped behind the rock. She had remembered her allies, called on love, and directly contacted fear. She found the juice. She found the juice in fear, which was her own soul. Her own soul came back. I want to read you. This is the poet Kaviri. I search for a buoy in this storm as the black waves threatened to kill me.

The mind buoy has me swimming in 20 directions, my muscles cramping and fear. The body buoy asks me, just float, 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 wise stillness. underneath. So as a way of closing, we can begin to sense in our own lives the 20 directions. We know we run in a lot of different directions. We run away. And it's okay. It's not to then get on our case for that. That's just another way of keeping ourselves small. Just to have the courage to say, okay, what would happen if I stopped running in those 20 directions?

As Kaviria describes it, that we recognize what's here. We recognize the worries, the fears, contact them, and let them go into something larger, to remember this larger belonging, to breathe in and feel what's here, breathe out and let go into the love and the presence and the vastness that's our true home. So I'd like to close with a very very big.

brief guided meditation. So as a way of opening tonight, I described those stinging nettles, and the world triggers off fears in us all the time. It just happens. Fears just, you know, our nervous systems design that way. But if as you sit here, you feel that sincerity that one of my friends says that when fear comes,

there's a part of us that goes about to grow, that knows if you feel that sincerity that wants to find the juice that even right now you can pause just invite yourself to be here and we'll just take

a very few minutes to explore what it means to bring these two wings of presence to fear so let your body arrive you've been listening bring your awareness fully into your body

but your shoulders relax a bit. You might soften your hands. Just take a few full breaths. And just invite whatever part of your life where there may be some fear that you'd like to learn to meet more fully. Whatever situation might bring up fear, come to mind. And as you think of the situation,

you might sense what the worst part about this is, perhaps what you're believing about what's going to happen. And to recognize the body of fear means to really feel your body as you reflect, your throat, your chest, your belly. Those are the main areas we often feel fear most directly. The two wings are really that question. So what's happening inside me right now? Can I feel this body of fear? And not to, not to, if you've chosen something that's traumatic that feels like too much,

To put it aside and we'll just do that breath that I described earlier, it should be a fear that's somewhat manageable, that's not going to send you off too far. But to feel in your body how it's presenting and to feel your intention to bring presence. And you might start this breath of just to breathe in and see how fully you can contact it, to really feel it in the body.

It's like you're completely agreeing without resistance to feel the fear directly, the rawness. Then breathe out and sense the space, the space that's inside it and around it, sense the space of tenderness, your own care. For many it helps as you begin this breath of breathing in and breathing out. Just to put your hand on your own heart will help you to connect as you breathe out

with the sense of the love that's holding the fear. So you're breathing in and touching the waves that are right here. And you're breathing out and sensing the space that it's in, the sphere, the space of the ocean. And if it helps to feel somebody that you know that loves you, just infusing that space with loving presence, that's fine. So that you breathe in and contact the fear,

and breathe out into loving presence, into that open heart, that open space. Just your own intention to be kind will help you to find the space around the fear, breathing in and touching what's here, breathing out, dissolving outward, letting go into the space around you. I search for a buoy in this storm

as the black waves threatened to kill me. The mind buoy has me swimming in 20 directions my muscles cramping in fear. The body buoy asked 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. I'd like to close with a loving kindness prayer. Remember the love and the space that allows us. to open to fear. May all beings wake up, pause, and face

the fears that are in these body minds. May we come home to loving presence. May we live from loving presence. May there be peace on earth and peace everywhere. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington,

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