Tara Brach - Part 1: Beyond the Fear Body (2015-06-03)

Episode Date: June 6, 2015

Part 1: Beyond the Fear Body (2015-06-03) - A central part of spiritual awakening is recognizing and befriending fear, and in the tender intensity of fear, discovering the awakened heart.  In these two talks we explore the suffering of becoming identified with the fear body, and the skillful means that enable a full and liberating presence with fear. Your support will enable us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time. Visit: http://www.tarabrach.com/donate.html. With thanks and love, Tara

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste and welcome. In Asian art, when you enter a temple, and often you'll see this in the mandala's, as the kind of entry to sacred space at the center, there are these depictions of what are described as animal-headed goddesses or deities, and they're fierce, ferocious, angry, jealous, passionate, and they represent the shadow side. And the deep understanding is that to arrive at home,

to arrive in sacred space, to come into love, we need to be able to engage with the shadow deities, with those elements of our being that we maybe have pushed away because it's felt like too much. It felt scary. It's felt threatening. And each of the shadow deities, as they're displayed in Asian art, whether it's fear or anger, whatever, is infused with an enlightened quality. Again, the understanding being, if you engage with these deities,

there's a transformation. And the enlightened quality of wisdom or love or creativity is, it's transatlification. is it's transmuted into that. That's what you emerge with. So the simple way of saying this, which I like the best, is no mud, no lotus. You know, that we have to go through the muck in a way what has been unexamined, untouched, unfelt,

to flower, to fully open. Now, if you look at what's most difficult, if you take where your life gets most squeezed or, whether it expresses as depression or it expresses as shame or in some way you feel like you're unable to stop with obsessive thinking or addictive behavior. If you look under, you'll find fear. That's the shadow deity that's at the core in a way of all that's difficult. And just to say the reason the word shadow is,

because it's unpleasant, intense, raw life energy, so elemental, that our conditioning is to push it away. So it becomes a shadow. We're only partly conscious of it. So we can sense that fear. Sometimes, for many of us, it spikes, and there's times when it's really overt. And we really get it.

We're really anxious and nervous. At other times, it's more of a background hum of restlessness, unease, but it's there. And in a way, I'd say in most every spiritual path, there is an understanding that there's no way to come home to the wholeness of who we are, to fully unfold ourselves without befriending, recognizing and befriending. that background agitation of fear. So the given for most of us is that fear brings us to our knees.

It's that the given is that our human ego, the ego self can't navigate successfully. In other words, we can't bargain with fear. It just doesn't work. So the ego gets brought to its knees in dealing with fear. and what we find out is that in order to begin to transmute fear, we have to call on something larger than, deeper than, more profound than this ego self. One of my favorite stories that illustrates that is about Ram Dass, who many of you know of, is kind of an icon of kind of the generation of spirituality and Dharma,

the last maybe four decades. So Ram Dass explored practices from Buddhist, Hindu, Advaita, and many other traditions. He really has amassed a tremendous wealth of practice and wisdom, a real teacher for many, many people that I know. And some years back now, and I'm probably about 10 years now, he had a massive stroke. And he had it when he was alone. And at the time of his stroke, he was an utterly helpless state.

In fact, he describes lying and looking at the pipes up on his ceiling. And no uplifting thoughts, no inspiration came to him at all. So again, think of it. We practice so that, you know, we're going to be able to call on something when the hard stuff happens. But as he described it, he was unable to relate to what was happening with any mindfulness or any self-compassion. In fact, when he summarized looking back at that crucial moment

of what he calls being stroked, he says, I flunked the test. So first, I want to say, I feel like that's a really big deal, that we have this notion of these spiritual teachers as at difficult moments, being able to kind of pull out of their repertoire just what's needed to really gracefully navigate,

And he says, I flunk the test. And here's what happened over a bit of time. He said for several days he was really caught in anguish and in powerlessness. And he began to reflect on Maharaji, who was his guru, died about 20 years earlier. He had a picture of him. And Maharaji represented really a portal to unconditional love. So he would bring to mind this being who just emanated love and reminded him that he was love and he just talked to his guru's picture and just called on him and he said he sensed him

all around just in the vibrantly surrounding him. He says he was there as fully available as ever and that it was pure grace and it was that it was reaching beyond his ego's efforts to find spirituality. It was tapping into something larger that ended up reminding him in a way of that sacredness and that depth of being that could hold even being stroked. So this class and then the one after it

will be exploring what I consider kind of the central exploration really for most of us on the path, which is really how do we change our relationship to the shadow deity of fear? How do we go from the habit of being possessed and acting out of fear to relating to the fears that arise with a real quality of wisdom and balance and compassion. How does that happen? And as I said, it's really the central inquiry for most of us on the path. And sometimes it's in the background. Sometimes we're kind of just mandering along and we haven't been like, we haven't gotten those spikes in fear, but for others and for each of us at times it becomes really, really acute. I was thinking as I was

really reflecting on this a couple of years ago. I was teaching a workshop on fear and one woman and it was a large number of people there and one woman it was very courageous she described how she had breast cancer

and she had gone through a number of rounds of chemotherapy and she said you know I'm living with utter uncertainty and then she looked at us she kind of brought her hands up like I am doing right now. She looked at this, she goes, I'm only human, and I am so scared.

It's like so many of us teared up because it was in that, it was just so striking that, of course, we're scared. Of course it's part of our organism to hold on to and want to live and to receive that it's utterly uncertain. The only uncertainty is that we will lose this body and this life and those we love, and it's utterly uncertain how, when, where. So we're living with that. So if we want to define fear, it's our anticipation of loss.

It's how this bodily organism in a biological and psychological way experiences that anticipation of loss. And as I said, from the view of the separate self, from our egoic view, we are on a trip and we know that it's going to end. And this is one of the things that the human self-reflexive awareness knows. We know mortality is real. We know there's painful losses on the way. Victor Yalom, who's a psychologist and also a cartoonist, has a wonderful cartoon of somebody's seeing a therapist on the couch and you see the therapist talking and then you see the response and the one on the couch is the grim reaper.

And he's saying, no, doc, I'm afraid it's your time that's up. That's so good. You've heard of all the research about ranking fears. you know, what's worse fears that we're afraid of and so on. So Jerry Seinfeld reminds us that according to most studies, the number one fears public speaking. And this is what he says. He says, number two is death.

Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. Yesterday, I want to tell you that I heard another version that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of snakes. And then somebody says, it doesn't seem to make sense.

I mean, you don't see someone walking through the desert and suddenly shouting, watch out, a podium, you know. You know, even really bad humor is a good way to defend against fear. Or the fear of talking about fear or whatever. So here's what William James put this out about all religions.

And he said, the beginning of all religions is the cry help. I think that really makes sense that it's our existential predicament that we perceive the groundlessness of our life. We perceive that deep down we can't control anything.

I mean, we try like crazy to control things, but deep down we get it that we can't. So that's like primal cry is help. And it shapes our entire life experience. I mean, you can feel that help when you get really sick and don't know what's wrong. Or when somebody you love is in a lot of trouble. And you can feel that call for help when you're lost or when you're really hurting. Or when you feel you're failing.

So this is the survival brain of the separate self. and it's trying to navigate an uncertain world. So how we respond to that help? You can almost look at the shape of your life right now and it's correlated to how you're responding to that inner predicament. And if we're resisting fear and trying mightily to manage our life and avoid things in numb,

that's one expression of responsibility. responding to help. And as we'll explore in this class in the next, if we can find our way to presence, that doesn't mean dive right into the center of fear as we'll explore, but find our way to more and more presence where we're really embracing the life that's here. There's really deep healing and freedom. In fact, all the qualities of our being that we most want to see unfold, begin to unfold the more we turn towards or lean into what we're running from.

Here's how Rumi puts it. He writes of night travelers who search the darkness instead of running from it. A companionship of people willing to know their own fear and in their presence with the tenderness of pain, these night travelers discover the awake. heart. So this is Bodichita, the awakened heart that's available. As we face the shadow deities, we come into that sacred space. So first to clarify now as we get the kind of big picture that this doesn't mean that we

ignore the message of fear. You know, fear is an evolutionary part of our being, its message is to protect in the face of threat. So it's nature's protector. And it lets us know when we need to do something to protect our bodies and our minds. So fear turns to suffering. In other words, we lock into a kind of a shadow energy when it oversteps its bounds.

And that happens when there's a repeated threat to us, when we have that sense of health, helplessness over and over again and the fear doesn't have a way to get processed or released. And that could happen because of trauma, war, fires happening, natural disasters, and often it happens because of a repeated sense of being threatened or helpless as we're growing up in our family situations. But for whatever the cause, when that happens, fear locks in. And what happens is that it's like this on button's always on. So that whatever comes up in our lives,

we have that same feeling of disaster in some way, that something terrible is happening. The accelerators jammed on. The sympathetic nervous system's always going, which of course undermines our health in every way. So again, it's when this natural response, nature's protector, fear is aroused, but there's no way to process it.

And it's so interesting, these animal studies that have come out in the last decade or so that show how animals get traumatized. You can see videos of it. Animals getting traumatized going into total freeze. Then they have a way of shaking and moving and shaking it out, processing it, and then moving back into their life without PTSD,

post-traumatic stress syndrome. But we don't. or many of us don't have good ways of being able to process intense fear. So what happens is when fear takes over, it takes over our sense of our identity. And we begin to perceive ourselves more and more as the fearful self, the victim self, the self that's out of control, that's constantly threatened. and the shape that takes is sometimes called the body of fear. Our Eckertoli coined the word the fear body.

And so the beginning of waking up out of the kind of grip of fear is to sense how in yourself there's been a contraction into the fear body. And every one of us, unless we're free, has a certain amount of identification with a fear body. Does that make sense? So what that's saying is that, I mean, if we're very free, that means that fear comes naturally and it goes,

but there's none of our sense of who we are that's wrapped around it. But most of us have some of that jamming, some of that sense of getting caught in fear, some unprocessed fear. So the first step in engaging the deities and moving towards sacred space is getting more awake to our fear body. And if all I did every class was talk about the fear body,

I mean there's a million different ways to talk about it, just that reflection, just becoming familiar with and learning how to shift how you relate to the fear body is liberating. Because so much of our identity is organized around it. So what is the fear body?

Physically, if you pay attention to your body and you really start paying attention, you'll notice that there's tension in there. Okay? Does anybody pay attention to your body and you can't find any tension? Anybody?

So there's tension or else there's numbness, that too. I mean, think of what tension is, Tension is tensing against. It means that in some way when there's tension in your body, you're tensing against the present moment, you're tensing against what feels unsafe right here. It's a way to try to control things. But when we do it chronically, remember that accelerator jammed on,

then our body is chronically tense. And for some, it means the shoulders get nodded. I can feel how my shoulders have become increasingly raised from forward. You know, just as a kind of tension-stress thing, the head comes forward, that's another chronic kind of way of tension. Our backs have become kind of hunched or chest a little sunken because this is vulnerable right here, so we're protecting it. The belly too.

So it becomes a permanent suit of armor and it's so habitual that most of the time we go through the day and we're not aware of our fear body. not aware of it. It's just we're identified with it. It says, Choghim Trunkpa put it to bed and teacher. He says it's like we're a bunch of tense muscles defending our existence. So that's the body part of the body of fear, but then there's the mental fear body. It's not just a state of body, as you know. We have these neural pathways of repeating fear thoughts about what's wrong and what's going to go wrong. And it takes the shape usually of worrying, judging, obsessing. One of my favorite little stories of a woman who writes an email to her

son and she says, start worrying, details to follow. But we think it's going to help us. You know, we think that if we can, you know, get ahead of the game and get that worrying going, you know, then we'll be protecting against the problems that are coming. You know, the Buddha taught that whatever it is you regularly think about, that will become the inclination of your mind. And of course, the mind, when it's thinking worry thoughts, is sending off messages to have the biochemistry of fear. So we lock it in.

Okay, so there's the body, the fear body, the body, the fear body, the body, the fear body, the mind that's worrying and planning and obsessing. And then there's the fear-based behaviors and that's part of the fear body too, that we all have them. We're going to do a little reflection and a bit on the fear body, but emotions drive fear-based activity. They're our way of trying to reduce fear. So today you might have been anxious and found you were working harder or moving faster. are consuming more. And we see it with each other that when we're anxious, our behaviors

we don't listen so well, we cut people off, we try to prove ourselves, when we're anxious we try to defend ourselves, and when we're anxious we are aggressive. We pounce. Again, we'll talk more about that I'm speaking individually now but I want to name that this fear body, we're kind of looking at it from an individual lens, is also a societal fear body. And when there's a lot of fear on a societal level, what happens? That background hum of fear and restlessness has us consume more. It's like we're on this kind of grind of ever-increasing, consuming, building more, using more fuels and more fossil fuels, destroying the earth. You can see the track we're on. It's that undercurrent of something's

wrong, not enough, need more, damaging the planet. And then we can see fears and tribalism stoked in ways that generate war. I mean, how does war happen? It's just like, It's like this reactive patterning that just once it gets triggered off the fears, they just keep setting off more violence which creates more fear, sets off more violence. I think one of the best descriptions I've heard is from Daniel Siegel who's a psychologist who, and some of you might remember and if you look at my hand, this is described as the brain stem in this part here of my wrist leading up to my thumb which is the limbic. okay, part of the brain and then these four fingers of their frontal cortex.

And when we're operating from a wholeness of being, okay? These are the more primitive parts of our brain, the brain stem of the limbic, but when the frontal cortex, the more recently evolved part of our brain is informing, giving information down to the rest of the system, then we can make wise decisions. In other words, if fear as nature's protector, up, the frontal cortex says, yes, this is a serious situation, let's do something about it, or else it says, uh-uh, this is past stuff, it's okay, just breathe, right? But what happens when we get a strong jolt of fear and we don't have much stability in terms of that mindfulness,

we flip our lid? Okay? Right? And when we flip our lid, what's happening then is we're hijacked by the survival brain and we act as if, you know, it's life or death and we act in all sorts of ways that cause harm and we have no access to perspective, that's the frontal cortex, no access to perspective or mindfulness or compassion in those moments. Now most of us have that flip-lid experience somewhat regularly but not with super-dramatic kind of situations. I mean, you know, we don't necessarily throw a bomb or something. But sometimes you can see very much in your own life close in how you flip a little and you end up coming from a more primitive place

and that just triggers off another person and how many of us have had that happen even in the last week? Most of us, right? We know that. So that's what happens in our larger world in a way that's heartbreaking. I had a friend sent me a video that I saw just this morning. I wanted to share it with you because it affected me so much. And it shows an altercation between a policeman and an African-American woman.

And the police have been called to the school parking lot by a white woman. She and this African-American woman had gone to an argument of the white woman, you know, called the police. and so first he listened to the white woman's grievance and then he went over to the African-American woman and asked her her name and she refused she was very freaked out that the policeman was asking her name

and she got on her cell phone and said I don't think I have to tell you that and he said why are you resisting and she said let me find out if I have to tell you so he said okay you can have two minutes she's on her cell phone well within about 30 seconds he and this other policeman grabbed her arms, put them behind her in handcuffs and threw her to the

ground. She was eight months pregnant. And she's screaming and the more she screamed and the more they said, why are you resisting and the more they said why are you resisting? But there she is on the ground and they're telling her to get up and she can't get up because her hands are behind her and she's pregnant. And I don't need to say a lot more. It was an awful, awful thing to watch. and you could feel how it was fury activity playing out in all ways. And you can feel how, by the way, the ACLU said that she was in her right, she did not have to give her name. It was complete violation.

But you can see history. Of course she's terrified of the police, because look how much police violence has happened to African-American people. So of course she's terrified before he's even walked over to her and of course that's going to energetically be showing and of course there is in the white policeman the kind of things are getting out of control and the fear of not being able to control and dominate

the fear of things are way way going out of control okay, impose, violate. This happens, whether you look at it in terms of racism, sexism, whether you look at it in terms of religious hatred, the survival body, the fear survival body, gets activated and we flip our lid both as individuals and in a societal way for repeating cycles of violence. So we have to dress it societally.

When I talk about meditation practice, it's not meaning, oh, let's just go back to our individual lives. We have to do it on all the levels. And if we who care about waking up don't turn to face our own fear, we can't help the evolution of consciousness in a more societal way. So, the equation in a way to consider is that fear times a resistance, when we're not willing to look at it, fear times resistance equals suffering. That what we resist persists, the more we try to manage our fears, run away from our fears, numb out our fears, the actually the more we get identified with them. The more we get imprisoned by a very limited self whose thoughts and actions are governed by fear,

we're caught in fight-flight-freeze. That's when the system's been hijacked. So, as I mentioned, when fear locks in, when we kind of got our foot on the accelerator a lot of the time, our fear is hitched to anything that's really going on, you know? It could be life or death or we could be late for a meeting. and there's still that feeling in our bodies. Do you know how that is? It said that there are five types of fear, terror, panic,

username or password is incorrect. The fourth is we need to talk. And the fifth is 14 miscalls from mom. So it's silly, but you get the idea that, you know, it really does range from, I think of it as like free-floating anxiety that really hitches to anything going on in our life, becomes the cause for feeling like something's going to go wrong. And I know for myself that when I'm, when I check in, and I can check in at almost any time, and if I really listen inwardly, I can feel in my heart area a kind of

squeeze of anxiety, like at any time. And if I really deeply inquire, it's about a kind of existential sense of fragility of just around the corner, anything can happen. And I find a really interesting when we first wake up, do you know that experience of when you first wake up, you can have a real sense of kind of terror, like real wash of anxiety? How many of you've had that? Can I just... Okay, I just... I just want to feel totally alone and talking about it. So this is before your world's come into shape. This is kind of like, ah, you know.

And then what happens is very quickly your mind comes online and sets all its normal filters and orientations and you're back on the map of, okay, here I am and here's what's happening today and I'm coming from there. But you can sense how we use all that to block out that sense of wide open groundlessness and disorientation. So, the evolutionary potential is we are very habituated to fight-flight-freeze, we easily flip our lids and we do have this newly evolved part of our brain that has the capacity to notice all of this, has the capacity to actually bring kindness to all of this, And the more we activate this newly evolved part of our brain and meditation is really a practice of paying attention and activating this part of the brain.

The more we in a stable way can then inform the more primitive parts of our brain as to when it really is helpful to act and when it's okay, hon, this is just a habit and you're really okay. we can start knowing the difference. So the rest of this class and next time will be really the shift from being identified with the fight-flight-free's fear body and really moving towards attend and befriend. So that fear comes up and with it there's a sense of, oh, about to grow. It's like a little signal in the brain

because fear has to do with what's unknown. And rather than that being bad, we sense that as we encounter fear, oh, like those shadow deities, oh, coming into sacred space, just need to stay, stay. There are two basic pathways when we explore engaging with the shadow deities. And one of them is the simplicity of mindful presence itself

where you're noticing how it is, your witness to it, and your intention is to offer a very gentle, non-judging presence. The other pathway, and these are completely synergistic, is what I often call resourcing, where you're sensing the fears there, and in those moments you know you need to draw on something larger than your egoic self. You need to draw on the strength, the love, the trust,

the faith, the light, the warmth of your more whole being, you need access to that. I often think of it in terms of ocean and waves, that presence is like really being with the changing waves, just the way the fear body is experiencing. And that when we're resourcing, we're trying to remember the ocean, the vastness of it all, you know, the infinite potential we have, the love, so that we can be with the changing waves. So let's just take a moment. I'd like to pause and we'll do a little bit of a checking because the beginning of working with the deities

is getting to know the fear body. So let's check in with the fear body and see how it's presenting itself right now. This is often when people decide to leave the room. So as you pause, bring a sense of real curiosity because your interest is one of the strongest tools you have right now. And sense that kind of witnessing that with curiosity and kindness

you can bear witness and just notice how it is right now. Be curious and see if there's any habitual tension in your body. You don't have to do anything, just kind of scan your body. You might notice, as I described before, whether there's a kind of habitual holding in the shoulders where you're holding up the world, you're holding up your life, or you're feeling weighed down or oppressed. Just notice if there's tension there and the shoulders. You might sense if your throat is tight at off. Sometimes fear and the different nerves and fear pathways in the body where the felt senses,

sometimes the throat can get tight. For some, if you feel the heart, as I mentioned for myself, I can usually feel a kind of hollow, achy, sore. It's just the way the sympathetic nervous system has this kind of squeeze in the heart area that lets us know that there's the presence of fear. And more subtle and yet very, very persistent if you check in as the belly. We have a real plate of armor usually, a defective. offendedness at the belly. And if you begin to soften the belly, you can actually sense the tension there, just how much tightness is there. You might notice the hands and whether the

hands are tense at all or whether they're soft. And then part of the check-in and the fear body is to sense the mood of your mind and you might just notice today. Let today be a kind of area to contemplate how you move through the day and whether your mind was filled with worrying or planning with the kind of overdoing of it whether you move to the day trying to figure out things or kind of fixating on what seemed like a problem whether there was a lot of judgment those are signs of the fear body in a mental way whether you were preoccupied Again, witnessing without judgment, just curiosity. So it's this fear body.

You can witness also your behaviors of today or yesterday, how you moved through. Was there a restlessness or anxiousness that led to eating perhaps more than you wish you had? Alcohol, marijuana. whether behaviors like working harder, driving faster, moving faster, was the fear body there as you were with other people? Was there a sense of being defensive, self-conscious, uncomfortable, proving, trying to control others?

So just to the degree that you can sense, okay, so this is how the fear body expressed expressed through this body mind, just to notice. I'm going to take a few full breaths. There are times when just noticing, really witnessing, lets us know that we're more than the fear body, that you are the witnessing, the awareness. And in the moment there's actually some more space with that. But there are other times that when we're really caught in it,

when we're right in the middle of those worried, anxious thoughts, or when something happens that really throws us off, that we need a conscious intentional pathway back to presence. And that's what I call resourcing. And the metaphor I like to give, some of you may remember, is I do a lot of kayaking on the Potomac, and sometimes, every time actually,

there are places where the currents are going really fast and I feel like I'm not, you know, I need a rest, I'm going to get off balance, I need to see and plan a little bit how I'm going to be able to move down the river more. So I'll tuck behind a rock. And behind the rocks when you're in a kayak, there's actually a place where the currents flow around them but there's an absolute still spot. And in a way I feel like that's what resourcing is. It's that when we feel that we're being hijacked and when we feel that we're about to get into a chain of reactivity, it's a quick way to tuck behind a rock and find a still spot so we can reconnect with our intelligence and our balance and our compassion and the bigger picture. And if we're in a relational conflict

and we're getting triggered, we can reconnect with our highest intention. Does that make sense? It's like that pause. And so as we continue to explore this together, what we'll do is explore how can we find some anchors that are like that still spot behind a rock? And I'm just going to give you a couple of examples, and we'll close the class with just practicing with those,

that one of the ways that many people find it really helpful to come back to that still spot is called grounding. And it's quite simply if you can come to physical stillness and you can just close your eyes and feel it right now and you can just scan through your body and sense as you're sitting here that there's weight on your seat. In other words, feel the weight of your body on the seat and feel the contact of your feet with the ground.

So you're feeling gravity. you're feeling yourself sit on the earth. Grounding is very, very helpful because when we're in fight-flight-freeze, we've lost all orientation and we've left our bodies in a way. So feel your feet, feel the weight on your seat, feel yourself sitting on the earth. Now if you can slow down your breath, very, very consciously, slow down your breath, that's another way to come back into balance. What that does is it shifts you away from the sympathetic nervous system's activity of actually speeding up the breath.

So long, deep, slow breaths. Now I'm giving you a handful of anchors, you don't have to use them all every time. For some people putting their hand on their heart and the other hand on their navel area, and you can try that, there are nexus of nerves in those. areas and the warmth and the pressure of touch again sends a message to the parasympic nervous system to activate. So that's considered calming. And lastly, be aware of the sounds around you and if you even open your eyes you can be aware of the visuals around you so you can sense, oh you're here right now. You're not

off in that place where bad things are happening necessarily. You're just re-grounding with the visuals that are around you. So keep those in mind for now and I'm just going to give you one kind of story that happened to me last year where I got a phone call from... It's actually two years ago. I got a phone call from my mom

when she was up at Cape Cod and she told me that my son was visiting her. He was at the beach and she had just heard that a man at that beach, that same beach was bidden by a shark. And so she said, have you heard from Narayan? Because she was obviously afraid that he was that man

because he was swimming at that beach where there was a shark. So, of course, when I got that phone call, it didn't matter that there was probably hundreds of other people at that beach or whatever was going on. All I knew was maybe my son was bitten by a shark. and my body went into the strongest fear response.

It got catapulted in a way I just, you know, you know what it's like. It's just complete biochemistry. And so I immediately tried a cell phone, no response, more spiking a fear. I could not talk myself out of it. Nothing rational made a difference. So I said, okay, you've got to pull out all the techniques. So I sat and I said, okay, grounding. I mean, I literally went through the list

and it's not easy to go through a list because when you're like that, you don't have much access to your frontal cortex but I taught it enough so I said, okay, grounding, feel your feet. Okay, I feel my feet. Feel your seat on the cushion. Okay, feel, feel your hands.

Okay, so I did that. Started doing the really slow breath, did this and then I just looked around I just named the things I was seeing. I literally named the things in my living room. I'm seeing that plant. I'm seeing the stones around, I'm seeing the wood-burning stove, you know, literally the things are in my living room. It sounds so elemental, but it's actually for five minutes of just breathing and then naming some things and breathing some more slowly.

I still had a lot of fear in my body, but I wasn't flipped. It still felt terrible. So again, I'm not saying that this is a recipe to get rid of fear because that's not the point. The point is that at times we need a way to get our brain online again in the sense of more wholeness, more sanity. We need to pause. We need to find that still place. So I'd like to close another just coming back again so that you can experience a little bit of how you can bring that kind of an ease when it's less dramatic,

just when you're sitting here and you can just sense even some degree of the fear body, how you can begin to resource to again let the attention go inward and just sense whatever part of your body might be asking for attention where there may be some vulnerability, where there may be something going on in your life that's got you in the background or in the foreground triggered. And this isn't a time to purposely bring up traumatic fear. Rather, this is a time just right now sense what's real in your body,

where there may be some vulnerability or some restlessness or anxiety. And you can feel your throat, your chest, belly and then just sense this possibility of feeling that but also anchoring yourself a little, grounding, just sensing your sitting posture, the weight of sitting on the earth. And you might just in a gentle way put your hand on your heart, your hand on your belly, nice, long, slow, deep breath so that the currents are still flowing, the currents that sugar the fear body are still out there. The thoughts, the situations, but you're right here, grounded in contact with your heart, breathing in a way that can reconnect you with

that still spot. Bringing some warmth and bringing the light of awareness, that witnessing to the fear body that helps you remember that you you're more than the fear body, that there's an ocean that has room for the waves. You have a way home. The poet Hafei said, he said, 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. You might close by sensing to whatever degree you're in touch with the fear body, what your wish or your intention is in encountering the fearful deities. What's your intention? Thank you and namaste blessings. The teaching you have received has been freely offered.

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