Tara Brach - Part 1: Relating to the Fearsome Deities

Episode Date: August 23, 2013

2013-08-21 - Part 1: Relating to the Fearsome Deities - Our relationship to fear shapes our life experience. If we are unconscious, and reflexively try to manage fear, our identity takes the shape of the body of fear. If instead we learn to attend and befriend fear, we discover the freedom of our awakened heart. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

So last week I was out in Colorado at a wake-up festival in the Rockies that was sponsored by Sounds True. And I did a talk on shame and unworthiness, and then I followed that with three workshops on fear. So I contributed to a festival, you know, real upbeat kind of curriculum. But actually, it did have its upbeat side. Some of you might know that in Asian art, the, um, The shadow emotions are presented as animal-headed deities in the mandalay. As you enter into sacred space, you have to go through the deities. And in a similar way, the temples, to enter the temple,

you go through these wrathful deities, the fearsome ones, the passionate ones, the jealous ones, the angry ones, to get into sacred space. And the teaching is that really, It's by engaging with the shadow side, engaging with these deities, that we actually become infused with the pure enlightened energy that runs through them that's not available until we're actually not resisting and with them. A more simple way of saying that is on a bracelet that I saw on a friend

and says, no mud, no lotus. So you get the idea. If you look under what is most difficult, If you look under depression or judgment or obsessive thought or addictive behavior, you'll find fear. And even when we're not in difficult circumstances, if you take the time to pause, and I'm sure many of you have noticed this, just stop doing. And then check into your body, and you'll find there's this background hum of anxiety. It might show up as restlessness or unease, but there's something wide.

in that keeps us vigilant and not totally relaxed. So we're often not aware of it and as a result we don't realize how many of our thoughts and our behaviors are actually being driven by this kind of hum of fear in our nervous system. So in a way I think of fear as kind of the black hole of the shadow deities. It's the one that every other expression of difficulty and challenge emanates from. And in these workshops, the basic understanding was that if we want to awaken to a kind of wholeness of being, it requires a real intentionality.

It takes intentionality or conditioning as to pull away an intention to lean in and engage with the fearsome deities. So I explored this with the group and in the midst of one of the workshops a woman came up to me and she shared that she had breast cancer and had just gone through a round of chemo but things were painfully uncertain and that she was there's a kind of the clause of fear were really really strong she was living living with it and she kind of raised her hand and shook her head and said, you know, I'm just, I'm only human. I'm afraid. And for a bit we just held hands and just were quiet in that understanding. There were some tears that it is a part of our humanness, each one of us, to have to face loss of everything, of our own minds and bodies.

And also through, if you experience yourself as a separate self, it's through this whole life. We kind of think of it, it's a trip, and its destination is the end. You know, it's, then it's done. So we live with that. And fear is our anticipation of loss. Some of you might remember one of my current favorite cartoons by Victor Yalom has a psychologist and then his patients on a couch doing therapy.

And the patient is the Grim Reaper. And the line says, no, doc, I'm afraid it's your time that's up. So we're all living with that. And some of us, it's more right in front of us than others than our nervous system is really in the grip. But it's for all of us. And that's why William James, in the last century, wrote that every religion begins with the cry help.

That we humans, because we have a self-consciousness, recognize our mortality. And from that perspective of, I'm separate, I'm going to die, there's a part of us that's always trying to sense, well, how do I navigate? You know, how do I avoid the losses best I can? And how do I buffer myself from that, the anguish? Because fear is incredibly uncomfortable. We get organized around avoiding it. So, in a way, how we respond to that very human cry of help totally shapes our experience of living.

And if we respond in a way that's unconscious and reflexive, so we feel fear. and instead of paying attention, we just act out of it and we try to get away from it and we try to control and manage our life and whatever our version is. What happens is we get armored and cut off from our full aliveness and our capacity to love fully. In other words, if we respond to that help in an unconscious way, we're cut off. It also bears, if you think of it on a societal level, a society where we haven't faced our fears as a society that will be a warrior culture, or else, if not a warrior culture, you know, a culture of victims that are feeling vengeful. If we haven't faced our fears, we will oppress the unreal other, the minorities that we're in relationship.

and if we're really not aware of our fears, we will overconsume so massively, so as to destroy this living planet, our external body. So not facing fear has ramifications personally and in larger circles. On the other side of it, if we sense that cry help and we sense the fears in us and we choose instead to face them to in some way not necessarily all at once but gradually embrace the life that's here. There is the deepest of healing. That the shadow deities, the fearsome deities, there's a transforming that goes on and we

discover a real inner freedom and peace. Rumi describes it as that we're night travelers when we're doing this. He says there are night travelers that search the darkness, instead of running from it, a companionship of people willing to know their own fear. And it says, in their presence with the tenderness of pain, these night travelers discover the awakened heart. So that's the gift of facing the shadow deity of fear, is that we discover the awakened heart. That's our refuge.

So this path of embracing fear, engaging the deities has been very alive for me over the last decade. And I've shared with many of you and through writing, going through quite an extended period of physical illness, I'm very much better now. And I feel like it's important that I say that because I get so many people coming up and sympathizing and saying, you know, and giving me ideas on how I can get better and I'm much better. better. But I'd say for about seven or eight years, I was living in that kind of uncertainty and that downward track that I didn't know if I'd regain much mobility. I didn't know if I'd end up being in a wheelchair. I would imagine my son having children, having grandchildren,

you know, not being able to pick them up, not being able to play with them. So very easily my mind would spiral into the kind of obsessing about losses to come, the already existing losses, and feel that grip of fear. So it was that experience that really deepened my path in a way. I'd say that's what gave rise to writing the book True Refuge. And it gave a very direct, visceral experience of engaging with the fearsome deities. So I'm going to come back to that, but I want to first say that, because I'm fairly open with my own story, a lot of people tell me their true refuge stories, you know, what they ran into and how in that experience they discovered a presence, a formless, loving awareness that really felt like home,

but they couldn't have discovered if they hadn't engaged. and that's the common denominator of each of the stories, that it was through some willingness to say, okay, I'll be with this fear, that the waking up happened. So, by way of clarification, fear is an evolutionary message to protect something.

It's nature's protector. So the point here isn't that we should just ignore the message of fear message of fear and just be with it. We are absolutely supposed to be listening and avoiding threats to our body and psyche. The trouble happens. It only becomes a fearsome deity and takes over when it oversteps its bounds, when fear locks into overtime. When we overreact in the on button of our fight-flight, freeze makeup just doesn't release it. We're just stuck and we're always anticipating what's going to go wrong and our whole sense of who we are

is a self that's threatened by what's around the corner. That's when we are in a trance of separation and fear and that's when really our path if we want freedom is to listen to that help cry inside us and not run away. So the first step and the first step and the So this is our exploration tonight. And just reflect on some of the things that have really become more clear for me in working with fear. And how do we engage with the fearsome deities? How do we do that? And the first step is to get really mindfully aware of what's sometimes called the body of fear.

The body of fear is physical, mental, behavioral. It's all the patterning that we lock into that create a way that create. an identity of a fearful self. You have to be aware of that body of fear to be able to to wake up from it. So we begin to sense our body and that's why we meditate and we scan our body and we begin to sense from the inside out the habitual ways we hold ourselves and for many you might notice that the shoulders become nodded and they become raised and the head comes forward and the back gets hunched and the chest can get kind of caved in, sunken. And we don't

usually notice it but it becomes like a permanent suit of armor that we're living inside. Choggi M. Trunkpa described it like we're a bunch of tense muscles defending our existence. And we're in a defensive posture. So that's the body just to keep sensing over and over again how we contract in some way. And then the mind gets small. and contracted in the body of fear as we keep cycling through the same thoughts that have the flavor of something's wrong or something's going to go wrong. And if you scan today, for many of us will notice that that flavor is alive and well in a lot of big proportion of

thoughts. And what happens when we're in that, when we're mentally judging or obsessing or our planning or worrying, it creates a bodily state of anxiety. It fuels that. One person sent me this, he says, I recently picked up a new primary care doctor and after two visits an exhaustive lab test. He said I was doing fairly well for my age. I just turned 60-something. A little concerned about that comment so I couldn't resist asking him, do you think I'll live to be 80? He asked, do you smoke tobacco or drink beer, wine, or hard liquor? Oh no, I'm not doing drugs either. Do you eat ribby steaks and bar? I said, not much. My former doctor said that all red meat is very unhealthy.

She spent a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, boating, sailing, hiking, or bicycling. Nope, don't do that. He just do gamble, drive fast cars, or have lots of sex. No, I said. He looked at me and said, then why do you even give a shit? So we lock ourselves in. You know, they say that we have like 80,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them we had yesterday. So we keep recycling these thoughts. And the Buddha had a really powerful teaching,

which is that whatever you think about regularly, that becomes the inclination of your mind. And that makes sense. I think we can intuit that. Whatever we regularly think about that becomes the habit. So what happens if it's fear-based thinking? Some of you might remember the bit of neuroscience that our fears, when we have an end,

emotion actually it's natural courses 1.5 minutes but most of us it's it's much longer how come we fuel it with our thoughts all you have to do is keep on having thoughts of what's going to go wrong and you'll keep on triggering a biochemical release and sustaining the fear in your body so that so we've we've talked about we have a body of fear in the physical body the mind and and it's habitual ways of worrying. And then there's the fear-based behavior. And these are the different ways, in a way,

some of them fit into fighting, fleeing, and freezing. But it's the ways that we try to get away from the fear by acting. And sometimes we do it by judging and attacking others. Sometimes we do it by distracting or staying busy for many. It's some sort of addictive, self-soothing with consuming. And often, there's a lot of, is some way that we're trying to prove something.

But humans, I mean, fear is, you know, in all different levels on the hierarchy of life, but humans, we have fear-based behaviors in all sorts of versions and expressions. Some of you will remember this. It's one of my favorite little essays of teaching. And it goes, if you can start the day without caffeine or pet pills, if you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, if you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time,

if you can overlook when people take things out on you, went through no fault of yours, something goes wrong. If you can take criticism and blame without resentment, if you can face the world without lies or deceit, if you can conquer tension without medical help, if you can relax without liquor, if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, then you are probably a dog.

So what happens when we have all these different ways of behaving, what happens when we act out of fear? Well, one thing is that we know is that fear and this kind of speeding up and the narrowing of attention does not help us be more graceful or effective in what we're doing. Probably notice that when you're anxious,

you make more mistakes that's one of the ways. But more even than that, when we're anxious, we can't connect with each other. Have you noticed with your children or with friends or whatever that when your system is on fight-flight, very hard to pause long enough to even really notice, well, what's life going on for this person? We can't listen. We're not in touch with ourselves in a lot of different ways. And the more that's a regular, the more fear is a regular part of our nervous system, the more we lock into patterns with each other that really block any real connection. One of the stories years ago, someone sent me about a couple celebrating their golden wedding

anniversary, their domestic tranquility had long been the talk of the town. So a local newspaper reporter was inquiring as to the secret of their long and peaceful marriage. Well, it dates back to our honeymoon, explained the man. We visited 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 and the mule stumbled again. My wife spoke quietly.

That's twice. We hadn't gone a half mile when the mule stumbled a third time. My wife promptly removed a revolve 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. It's a pretty terrible story, I know. And the teaching point behind it is that we actually do control each other with our anger and our judgment and our threats.

And out of fear, we are control. become the victim, actually we can be either in the role of the victim or the perpetrator out of fear. And it's very, very common. There's an equation, it's a kind of faux equation that I find really useful, which is fear times resistance equals suffering, that our habit is to resist, to do anything we can but sit down into fear. That's just, it's not our fault, that's just the way we're conditioned. But it's that very resistance that actually locks us into suffering. You know, what we resist persists. Anything we try to move away from fear in some way it re-kind of affirms that there's something dangerous we need to move away from. So it's locked in there

in our nervous system. And even more, the more that you in some way are driven by fear and try to avoid experiencing it. The more we try to control our life, actually the more identified we are with the fear, the more at a very core level we are a fearful cell. One of the interesting bits of research I heard about a few months ago, they had these very cute little rat pups in a laboratory and they would play and frolic and you know that I got a sense that those working in the lab became very fond of them. And they took a cat hair and they put it into the pen.

And from that point on, those lab pups never played the way they had. And so the big inquiry is where is there a cat hair in our environment, our inner environment, to really start getting that there's these triggers for us that keep us from playing. And playing is a big deal, from our spontaneity, from our wildness, from the freedom of our heart to love and not hold back, when there's a cat here, we contract and become small. We enter the body of fear.

So from an evolutionary perspective, it's completely natural, it's not a mistake that we're rigged with fear. We'd be brain-dead without it. So we have this reptilian brain, and we have all the reactivity that's there, and then kind of placed awkwardly, on top we've got the mammalian brain and then we have the most recent part of our brain and they're all different kinds of messages they're coming through but we've got a real

strong conditioning as soon as we detect something that we perceive as dangerous to either run away or fight and be aggressive or freeze so that's one piece and it can go on to overdrive depending on our environment where we were brought up how we were brought up. So we get locked in. So there's always a sense of a cat hair there. And as I alluded to, it's part of our evolutionary development also to have in, it correlates with the most recent part of our brain, the neocortex, to have this capacity instead of fight-flight freeze to attend and befriend what's going on. So we're both rigged to be at war with the shadow deities. We're rigged to and

in some way avoid the fearsome deities and we have the capacity instead to attend befriend and to sever that sacred space, that freedom of heart, that really is our homecoming. So the inquiry is how do we move when our habit is fight-flight freeze to more and more of attending and befriending? I really think this is the inquiry that most of us are in in some way. How do we move from our habitual reactions that keep us small, that keep us in a narrative and an identity that's less than the truth of who we are, that keeps us from our intelligence and our spontaneity in our heart? How do we attend and befriend?

And for the rest of our time, I'd like to explore in this class to interest, interweaving pathways for attending and befriending. And one of them I think of as resourcing, where we're not directly trying to be present with fear, but rather we're cultivating our inner resources. We're finding our pathways to feeling some remembrance of connection, of calm, of safety, of love.

These are called in the Buddhist tradition the skillful means, that we're doing whatever we can to take an imbalance reactive body of fear and help to create some resilience. How come we can't just go and do the second way, which is mindful presence? Because we don't often have the balance or the clarity or the resilience to be with fear. And what happens when there's not enough of that resilience is that we actually get the learning that fear,

fear is in charge. In other words, we're not able to be present. So these are two pathways, resourcing and a mindful presence. And begin just maybe the metaphor that I find most useful is that with resourcing, if you think of our being as an ocean of being with ways of experience, resourcing is a kind of remembrance of our ocean-ness, a remembrance of a larger belonging, a remembrance that there's something, some love, some awareness, some belonging to others that can help to create safety. And it's very, you know, in terms of scientific research over and over again, we find that when we feel connection with a dog, with each other, with the earth, with nature, it calms

down and quiets the amygdala and it quiets the parts of the brain that when activated correlate to fear. So connection matters. So resourcing is remembering our connections. My teachings for myself, one of the main domains is through kayaking. And when you're kayaking and the water is moving very fast and you feel like, you know, it's going to be too much and you're going to lose control and so on. It's really helpful to find a rock because if you tuck right behind a rock, it's kind of a still area. You can just rest. And when you find that resting spot, it's the time that you can reconnect. And for me, I can look around and see the river and sense a larger perspective and sense how to navigate

and I can catch my breath. And I can remember again a quality of balance. and I get more resilient. And so after I've kind of tucked in that still spot, which is really a part of resourcing, I can go back again and navigate with more presence and balance and strength. So how does that work with fear when we're actually triggered?

And one of the simplest way to think of it is that there are many still ways to have a still spot. You might call them anchors. that you can find that help you to rest for a bit, that help to deactivate the sympathetic nervous system and activate the parasympathetic, which really, it puts the breaks on the sympathetic. The parasympathetic is where we have a little more calm and ease.

So the training in resourcing with fear is to choose an anchor, and you might, I'm going to name a few, few and you might sense these right now as you're sitting, that one of the anchors when there's fear is called grounding where you actually feel the pressure of your bottom on the chair or sense of gravity. You can close your eyes as you sense this and you might feel your feet. Those are anchors for that still spot. Just realizing, okay, sitting, gravity, earth, feeling the feet. Another anchor and you can do multiple anchors is the breath just to let it be slow and full. Because as you slow down the breath and let it be full, that too

activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It brings us to a still spot. Another anchor that is very useful is if you bring one hand and just touch your heart. lightly. You can bring the other hand and touch your navel and sense which hand wants to go where because there's actually each of us has our own preference. So just experiment. And there's a nexus of nerves at the heart area and the belly that when there's the warmth of touch it actually calms down the whole nervous system. This is another example of an anchor. Fear comes, you can sit, you can feel the feet, the weight on the seat. You can feel the breath getting slow and full.

You can touch the navel and the heart with the hands. For others it might be helpful to use a loving-kindness message. There are so many, in some ways it might be that you wish yourself, may I feel free from inner and outer harm. May I be safe? May I be peaceful? So you might pick three phrases and just say them. So the practice in finding the still spot and working with fear that we're calling resourcing

has two pieces and one of them as you find that, you find an anchor, multiple anchors, and the second is you keep moving from your thoughts which will keep on triggering the fear state to that anchor. Now that is a lot of the training we do in meditation is learning to come from the thoughts to an anchor that's either neutral or pleasant. When it comes to fear it's incredibly powerful. That if you're caught in fear thoughts and your system is really activated, to say, okay, come back right here and start feeling a long slow breath, sit and feel the weight of your

body, place the hands as I just described. These are different ways that you can shift from that kind of out of control spiral or fight-flight freeze and arrive, as I described, kayak and kind of behind the rock, get a chance to get your resilience and strength back. One man a couple of years ago had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was in one of the, you know, wait and watch modes. I have a number of friends that are in that. And for him, a lot of obsessing thoughts and a lot of fear. And so what he would do, his anger was when he had those thoughts, is he tried to come into stillness physically and he'd come out of the thoughts and he just would offer himself these

phrases. He said, may I feel held in love? May I feel protected? May I touch peace? And he would just say it over and over again. And that became more of the habit of his mind. obsessing thoughts. And he's still watching and waiting, but it's just not, he's living his moments more, which of course is the gift, which I think you understand, that when we're

not caught in running from fear, when we begin to anchor ourselves and find some resources, we get to live our lives. Okay. So again, the reminders that wherever you put your attention, that grows stronger. If you run the worry thoughts, you'll keep on strengthening those neural pathways. It's really where attention goes, energy flows. If you decide instead to pay attention to grounding, to feeling yourself solidly on the earth,

to offering the kindness of touch, to offering the loving kindness or meta, that's where your attention goes, that kind of energy begins to flow. So this is the possibility and due to neuroplasticity we can change our patterns and how we respond to that help. Thinking about also a woman who had PTSD and if I had said, okay, so there's a lot of fear there, just open and be with the fear, it would have just created more trauma in her body. So we resourced and for her, her way of resourcing was that she would feel the fear and she'd imagine she was on a park bank

and she'd imagine that the fear was sitting next to her. Okay, this is what she would do. And then she'd feel the grounding. She'd ground herself, fear's still sitting over here. She'd imagine the trees and the sky and the birds and the space. So she'd really create the setting, the fear is still there, and then gradually she'd agree to feel the fear. Resourcing. You can put the mind wherever you want to.

Now, as I mentioned, mentioned, ultimately, the freedom in engaging with the fearsome deity is when we completely engage. So the resourcing is a way to enable us to then be fully present. There's often a back-forth movement between full presence and then realizing, oh, I need to resource them. Does that make sense to you, just that we go back and forth? There is a shadow side with each one of them that I want to name because there's an art to being in this dance with the fearsome deity. If you get into resourcing too much, it just becomes another way of resisting. You just get hooked on every time fear starts arising, okay, breathe long and deep, okay,

I'm going to do that, say the phrases. It's basically just you're another way of going like this, stay away. And it deepens the identification. On the other hand, if you, try to force yourself into an engagement and there's a should about it and you know you kind of like okay you know tear yourself wide open to the fear that's there and you don't have enough of a sense of grounding or connection or sufficient level of safety then you actually risk retramatization where you again feel that sense of being helpless and it just teaches more to stay away So you might be wondering for yourself, well, how do I know?

You know, how do I know when to open and when is it too much? And I can't really tell you that because there is no formula. But I can say that the key is your attitude. And if your attitude is one where there's, you're honest with yourself, you're attending, you're looking, because your deep aspiration, really, really is freedom. Your deep aspiration is to discover who you are beyond the fearful self. Discover that larger space of being.

If that's your aspiration, then you'll notice when you start attaching yourself to the resourcing. Or you'll notice when you're pushing yourself into presence in a way that's unkind. And you start finding your own rhythm. And it'll keep on being an account. experiment throughout. Every day for me it's an experiment. How much do I do skillful means? When do I just open a choiceless awareness? Just keep experimenting. Ultimately to know that what liberates us is the presence that is possible.

And again from kayaking, the other metaphor I really love is this, that you can imagine with kayaking that you have to enter the stream to really live it fully. You just have to let go into the currents. You have to be one with the currents. And sometimes with the currents turn into, not very often, but it's a possibility is what's called a keeper's hole. And a keeper's hole happens when the water flows over a rock or some object, and then there's this spiral. And if you get caught in it, you keep getting spiraling and pulled down. And you can't get out of it. If you try to get out of it, you get pulled down more. And as you can imagine, the teaching with the Keepers Hall is go right down, down, down.

Don't resist it because at the bottom there's a natural way that you open out into the waters again. You go down. You don't fight. So, again, you need a certain amount of strength and balance and resilience to even remember to do that. And when we get hit by fear, because all the primitive reactivity of our brain is going on, get confused and we go right into the old conditioning. So the last piece that I'd like to bring to your attention is how we can gently lean in and really move towards that presence where we're staying with the fear. And if you take the acronym Raine, which many of you are familiar with, some might not be, which is really an acronym of mindful presence, it's helpful

with fear. Whenever we are most in reaction having something to help us remember, how do you come to presence? It's a real gift. And Rain, this is what it stands for, for those that are not familiar. The R is recognize, okay, fear's here. The A is allow, let it be here. The I is investigate, get to know it, but bring in intimate attention, a kind attention. And the end is the freedom we experience when we've engaged with the fearsome deity in this way we're not identified with the small self. We're back to our natural whole awareness,

that sacred space of the awakened heart. So I'm going to slow it down a little bit and say that the beginning of rain if all that you practice for a while is the R and the A, to recognize fear and instead of running right into your habitual activities

you just pause and say okay I'll let it be here even for 20 seconds even for 20 seconds just allow it you have interrupted a pattern in a way that's opening the door to freedom if you just recognize and allow for 20 seconds

you have interrupted a life pattern and open the door to freedom. One Zen teacher was asked how he deals with fear and his response was, I agree, I agree. For one woman that I was working with, she, you know, we talked about being with fear, just recognizing, allowing it. She goes, for me, it's just not minding that it's there for just a time. And that's all you need to do. You don't have to say forever I'm going to live with it, just for now, completely just allow it. to be there. Then we get to the eye and the eye is to investigate. It's, some of you might

remember the classic Buddhist story where Mara, which is a representation of all the shadow deities, of greed, hatred, delusion, fear. So Mara appeared over and over in the Buddha's life. And when Mara would appear, the Buddha's loyal attendant Ananda would be kind of freaked out. He'd go, oh my God, Mara is here and you know, kind of put up this. But the Buddha in his own kind way said, chill out anand, it's okay. And he'd go to Mara and he'd say, I see you Mara.

Come, let's have tea. And to me, that's what a brilliant and beautiful metaphor for attending and befriending. You recognize, oh, I see you Mara, and you allow that, it's okay. Fear is here. And then investigate, invite to tea. get to know, befriend.

Let's have tea. So you have tea with your fear. And it doesn't mean it's not a false thing. Like, oh, I am so happy fear is here. It's more like, okay, I'm interested. This is a, these are patterns of experience that I'm going to bring my attention to. So how do we do that?

How do we have tea with fear? How do we befriend? Well, it begins with just that interest, that inquiry. Okay, where is it living in my body? If you can't feel the fear in your body, you will not be able to truly engage with the fearsome deities. Now, for many people, that's the stopping point. They're so practiced in dissociating, and that's many of us, that right there, that's where the practice is, just coming into the body again and again, coming into the body when there's not so much fear

activated and just getting familiar with feeling the aliveness in the hands, the feet, feeling the breath deep in the torso, beginning to feel inside the shoulders. So we begin gradually. That might be the place of your work. But when we're having tea with fear, we have to sense where is this? What does it feel like? Is it moving? You might ask, Is there a color to it or density, a weight? So fear feels like this. Find out. We also look through fear's eyes.

So what's fear believing? If you had a friend you're having to you with you, you'd want to know what's your perspective? So fears believing something bad is going to happen around the corner, or maybe I'm going to fail, whatever it is. Find out fear's beliefs that'll help you to be with it more fully. And then I think the most deep question is, what is this fear place most need?

How does it want me to be with it? And that's when it may be that you actually put your hand on your heart and you offer in a little bit of nourishment. Like I care about this suffering. I'm here. When you recognize and allow and then have tea, befriend, bring that investigation, there's a shift that happens.

And rather than being the fear, you become the awareness, the awareness and the kindness that's relating to the fear. This whole deal is not about getting rid of fear, it's about changing your relationship to fear. When that shift happens, there's the taste of freedom, not identified. So I'll give you an example from my own experience and then we'll just practice a bit together as a way to close. Okay? And since I brought up the the fear that I had for probably, you know, behind the lines there over a bunch of years

about would I ever recover. It peaked one time. I had a concussion when I was at at a retreat in Colorado. And for the six months afterwards, I hadn't known about concussions to realize this. I was experiencing all the symptoms and, you know, fatigue and confusion and just, you orientation and my blood pressure and pulse were really whacked out. I landed up in a cardiac unit over here at Fairfax for a week. I had to cancel my teaching at our New Year's retreat and instead I was in the hospital. And so I was there with at the peak of having no idea what was going on with me, no idea what was going wrong. I was told I needed a pacemaker. They realized that wasn't true. But everything was up for grabs. And so this is when my

mind, the fear just, my mind was just churning and churning with, you know, what was wrong with me. Would I ever be able to teach again? Because I kept having to cancel things. And I tried to deepen attention and say, okay, so let's be with this fear. And I'd name it and it allow it. And it would last for about two and a half seconds and my mind would be spitting off again. I remembered at one point, a line from Chogium Trunkpa, he says, the whole of the spiritual life is to meet our edge and soften. And you know how sometimes you get a certain language just helps to cut through? Well, for me, okay, recognizing and allowing, meeting my edge and just softening. So that agreeing. So I began to do that, which allowed me to deepen my attention and start

investigating and I found that there was this gap if I opened to the fear there this gaping whole of grief and then the fear became that I would just die of it that I just die of this pain and and I just kept sensing okay so what's needed and clearly what was needed was some sense of some presence that cared and so that's when I started just simply saying it's okay sweetheart I just said that it's like that was my meta, that was my loving presence to the life that was inside over and over again. So I kept noticing and allowing and being with and offering kindness until I could really allow the whole of grief to be as vast a chasm as it was and to let go into it. It's okay,

sweetheart, let me let go into full presence with the fearsome deity, this child. chasm. And in that letting go, I discovered this, it just things shifted. In the letting go, it's whatever I thought I was, all there was was this vast, edgeless tenderness. It was wide open and absolutely suffused with a tenderness. And I could still sense the thoughts and the fears and the waves of experience moving through, but there was no longer any identification with that. So it went from being caught in some very, very painful waves to this oceaness that could include the waves. And what I want to share before we practice is that that lasted for a few days, that every time

the fears would come up in some way, I would really pause in a very deep practice. It's okay, sweetheart, I'd open to the kind of churning and then discover that openness. And then it became less available and then I just kept on practicing until now there is a trust that that's more true, that presence, that vastness is more true than any story in my mind about a small self who's crying help. But that doesn't mean that there's not getting restuck, it's just that there's a... there's a quicker, less lag time in remembering what's true, which is the gift of engaging with the deities.

We get to discover that faith that there's a refuge, and that makes it possible to live our moments. Okay, so we're going to practice just maybe conclude by saying that fears the primal mood of the separate self. And as long as that's our exclusive, of identity we're going to be caught. But it's possible to discover a larger being. So, as you sit here right now, just to come into stillness, to let yourself collect a little with the breath, and sense in your life a situation where you know there's a cat hair,

you know, you get provoked, but not a situation that feels traumatic. It won't. help you and this right now we're just going to explore this template you're going to practice on your own really just get a taste so picking a situation that triggers you you get anxious might be with another person that you think is going to be judging you or might be a situation at work and see if you can let yourself sense the presence of that cat hair close in so that you're aware enough of if it's another person to look on their face or the words they'd say or if it's a situation where you're going to be having to present something or complete a project

and you're not sure you have enough time or let it be like right front and center for you right now enough close in so you can feel the fear or our anxiety around it and the practice is very really quite simple we begin by just naming that okay fear just name the fear and for now allow it. So you're not in any way trying to resist or get away. This is an encounter with the fearsome deity. Then just deepening the attention, investigating and sense the possibility of an intimate attention. Just notice what it's like. Fear is like what? Like this? What's the body of fear like? You might exaggerate a little, maybe let your body posture take the posture of fear and maybe your face the face of fear.

You might tell yourself what you tell yourself when you're afraid. So you kind of get into it and say, okay, it feels like this. And if it feels very strong, then resource yourself. It feels very strong, then rather than a direct presence, this would be the time to take some long, slow breaths, perhaps to put your hand on your heart and your belly, ground yourself. But if you can, if it doesn't feel like it's too much, investigate. Rumi says, keep your gaze on the bandage place. That's where the light enters you.

Notice what happens if there's no resistance. There's just simply in allowing the experience to be here and perhaps offering care in some way. And you might experience. explore how can you offer care or kindness, just some gesture of kindness. Sense who you are when there's simply a presence and kindness in relating to fear. Who are you? Who are you when there's a gesture of kindness, when there's presence with fear? Just take these final moments to sense that formless, caring presence. It's really your home.

It's a space that opens up when you willingly engage with the deities of fear. And if you found in this little reflection that you felt fear was strong or you got confused, still honor your intention to wake up in the midst of fear and trust that you have that capacity. all you need is that sincerity that longs to wake up. May all beings everywhere realize the loving presence that has room for this living, dying world. May we realize and live from loving presence. May all beings touch great and natural peace. May all beings everywhere 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.