Tara Brach - Part 2: Beyond the Fear Body (2015-06-10)

Episode Date: June 14, 2015

Part 2: Beyond the Fear Body (2015-06-10) - 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. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste and welcome. This is the second class two-part series, and again, if you didn't hear the first, you can catch up on it, and hopefully this will stand alone. The title is Beyond the Fear Body. So if you were at part one last week, I kind of expected not as many people to show up. fear is not the most popular sometimes. I was putting together my notes on Monday night.

Those in the DC area know there was a pretty fierce thunderstorm. And it reminded me of a story I'd heard years ago about a mom describes her young son's very upset during a thunderstorm. So she spent some time in his room with him, trying to calm him down. And finally, she kisses him good night. And he kind of in a trembling voice says, you know, won't you stay with me? And she goes, oh no, honey, I need to sleep with your daddy. At which point he says, I'm the big sclerity cat.

So as I mentioned in the last class, if we look underneath any of our emotions at the core, we're going to find fear. It's really kind of at the heart of everything. It's this sense that around the corner something can and well go wrong. and it's our perception of mortality. I can sense in myself when I'm feeling in some way restless or uncomfortable, there's some fragility about life

that I'm just attuning to. And I sometimes think about Steve Wright has this kind of one-liner. He describes how he's hitchhiking and a hearse stops. And he says, no thanks, I'm not going that far. So we hope. but our nervous system is designed to detect threats and our brain this human self-reflexive consciousness has the capacity to look ahead in time and

perceive mortality so we're the most existentially scared creatures on planet earth and as we'll explore more our fear results in excessive violence it's just how it goes the more afraid we are the more violent we are So to the degree that as individuals or as a collective in our societies, we've lived with a lot of a sense of threat. And, you know, some cultures have more fear in them than others, some families. But to the degree that there's been a living with threat and a feeling of the fear that comes from perceiving threat, we develop what is sometimes called the body of fear or the fear body. And the fear body includes this physical body

that every time that we encounter a thread and we go into fight, flight, freeze, there's a corresponding tension of certain muscles in the body. And if they've been happening a lot, we develop a kind of armoring. And for some people, it's the shoulders go up and forward and get knotted. And for others, the chest sort of caves in.

And there are a lot of different versions of how we carry tension. But what's interesting is our body's tension becomes so familiar that we're often not aware of it. And it's often not until we start practicing mindfulness or doing some yoga and we start realizing, wow, I'm always carrying around this tightness. So that's part of the fear body is a lot of physical tension which of course creates obstructions in the body. There's a lot of health problems that come as we know with chronic stress. Then there's the thoughts, which is part of the fear body, and we know that when we're

in anxiety mode, our thoughts have a certain tenor. They're worry thoughts and they're planning thoughts and they're obsessing thoughts and the mind gets narrow and fixated. And then part of the fear body is our behavior in the world. That when we're living in fight, flight, freeze and we're in a reactivity, how do we then interact with others. Well we're not as sensitive. We certainly don't, we're looking for what's wrong, we're not taking in the world in a very open way and we tend in our behaviors to either to do whatever we can to diminish the feeling, the raw

feeling of fear. So what do we do? Well one big one is we overeat or over-consume or do something to dull and numb and so on. We distract ourselves mightily. We try to move our attention however we can to what's outside us. And we basically pounce on others or withdraw from others, but we don't engage in a real open, easy way. So that's the body of fear. And I often call it a trance. And just to say why, and you can feel it if you really compare yourself

when you're caught in fear to when you're not. When we're in fear, and you can think of it in terms of the brain, the limbic system, the more primitive part of the brain, is kind of hijacked things. It's in charge. And there's not so much access to the more recently evolved part of the frontal cortex, which is responsible for empathy and compassion and mindfulness. So what does that mean?

Well, we're in a kind of trance, because most of our world is being kind of shaped and fashioned by the limbic system. We're living in a smaller domain. Does that make sense? So maybe a brief reflection right now so that you can kind of ground this in your own experience just to take a moment, close your eyes and check in. Again, just to consider that fear, another way of describing it, is the apprehension of loss, that something's going to go wrong.

that we're going to lose something we value, whether it's our health or job or steam or another person, or lose control of life. But it's a loss that we're apprehending. And you might pick a recent time when you were caught in some level of fear, and I wouldn't pick traumatic fear for right now. This is just a little exercise. Okay? So just when you got nervous about something, it might have been on your way to something social, it might have been something to do with work, maybe a certain person you were about to be with that you feel uptight around. See if you can bring up a situation in your mind when you were frightened or anxious in some way. When you know

you went into some level of the fear body, you were kind of caught in it, identified at it. And take a moment to just reflect. So how has your body, what happens to your body when you get tight in terms of anxious? Do you have a sense of what happens? your body? You might even experiment right now and just tell yourself, okay, I'm scared, I'm anxious and just feel like how does your body tense? What's your particular constellation of tightening? Do you have a sense of that? And as you're examining when you're in a situation where you're anxious, what is your mind like? What does your mind fixate on? What kind of thoughts are going through? So we're just examining the fear body.

How do you behave? Do you get more speedy? Do you get more critical? Do you get a little more sloppy in terms of what you do when you're anxious? Make more mistakes? Do you get more defensive with others? Here's the deepest question. When you're caught in the fear body, when you're in one of those situations that I'm calling a trance,

what's your sense of yourself? Are you feeling victimized, oppressed, insufficient? alone? How do you sense yourself at those times? Now be aware that you're sitting right now bringing a mindfulness and bringing a witnessing to a trance state that comes up and relax back into the witness. Just know you're here again and take a few full breaths so that you're inviting yourself back. You might inhale deeply and do that very slow exhale, sense of sounds around you so you can feel a sense of the space that's here. Invite your heart to relax a little. Invite yourself home to more of a fullness of your being and just sense who are you

right here? What's your sense of your being right now right here is you're exploring and you're investigating and you're bearing witness. Just feel yourself right here and sense your own being. See if you can get a kind of a felt sense of the difference of the difference between this, this kind of presence right now and the who you are and how you are when you're in the fear body, when you're really caught and cut off and entranced. You might consider that the more we avoid facing fear, the more it becomes like I described in the last class a shadow deity, a force, but an unconscious force that keeps us caught in that body of fear. if you'd like to open your eyes please do

let me just check how many of you got a feeling that it really is a trance when we're caught inside that fearful reactivity can you raise your hands high so I can just see so you can kind of feel it's like you're caught in something smaller than who you are yeah thank you for those that are listening to the podcast that's probably about 90% of us we know

so this is important that we know that we lose living moments of our life when we're inhabiting a smaller sense of who we are than the truth of who we are and yet this is what that sometimes called the big squeeze we know the sense of you know our capacity to be present and loving and more here and yet every day we get hooked in to some degree into that smaller sense of reactive self that's the big squeeze. And the more that we avoid facing fear, the more of that becomes a pattern that really dominates our life. There's a lot of very extreme ways that it shows up when we don't face our fears. When we don't face fear, it drives addiction. Now, sometimes it's the real

overt addictions, but we all know when we're honest with ourselves how addicted we are on many levels. We just know whether it's to email or to being judgmental or angry or to eating too much chocolate or whatever it is. We know our addictions. And for many, many, many of us, they're very big addictions. And we know that if we don't face our fears, we're going to be in conflict with others. And if we don't face our fears, we're going to be at war with ourselves. If we don't face our fears, we get more controlling. How many of you have noticed? how controlling you get when you're feeling anxious. Hand raise, it's okay.

I'm joining in. One of my favorite illustrations is a story of there's 11 people that are hanging from a helicopter and they're dangling on a rope. They're all holding onto the rope, okay? And it's agreed, no, by the way, there's 10 of them are men and one's a woman. And they agree that someone has to drop off

or the rope will break and they'll all be killed. Okay, so that's a lot of back-forth that goes on and finally the woman says okay okay I'll be the one to do it and she goes on to say how this is what women do they sacrifice themselves for the well-being of others they do whatever they can to ensure that others are taken care of and by the time she was done speaking all the men started clapping so when we get caught in the trance in the fear of body we do get manipulative because we're in fight-flight freeze and we're navigating and trying to survive we've lost touch with something that makes us more whole. So what we've really lost touch with, and you've

noticed this, I'm sure, when we're afraid we don't have access to our full intelligence. I mean we just act stupider, right? We don't have access to our creativity when we're anxious and afraid, when we're caught in that trance. We're not spontaneous and our hearts aren't open. So there's a lot of suffering. Now what we look at, I'm talking about on the individual level we can see in our wider society and it's really important to see the effect of unprocessed fear on a collective level. It's really important to understand it because it's the cause of all war. If we're afraid, if a government wants to get its people rally behind a war, all they have to do is whip up a sense of there's a really threatening enemy out there.

That's how we get wars going. There's been a lot of, it's very interesting research looking at economic stagnation in poor countries and how the fear of increasing deprivation is correlated with increased chance of civil war. When we're afraid, we get violent. There's research I read a few years ago in the New York Times. It describes the correlation between droughts and witch killing. droughts and witch killing

when we're scared we get violent and what happens is we are afraid and we try to gain control by assigning blame so we feel fear and we make the other into something you know we attach something's wrong with the other out there so whether it's making somebody an other that's bad and dangerous

because of their religion or because of their race or because they're a witch in some form, whatever it is. In the moment that we do that, in the moment that we make another and are afraid of them, we are capable of violence

because it's not hard to violate another that doesn't feel real. That's why we can go to war and drop a bomb. It doesn't feel real. We're not connected with the suffering. So a key part of the spiritual path for everyone I know. The key part is this evolving

so that we're shifting from the trance of fight-flight freeze where we're in reactivity, we're caught in the fear body, to what is sometimes described in evolutionary psychology as a tend-and-be-friend. It's usually described as tend-and-be-friend, but I think a tend-and-be-friend is just as good.

This is key for everyone I know is beginning to really say, okay, for the sake of waking up, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of truth, for sake of love, for the sake of being more spontaneous and living from my full potential, I'm willing to go ahead and hang out with fear. Because it's already there. It's, are we doing all sorts of false refuges to avoid it? Are we willing to pay attention? There are two key training pathways that will explore for the rest of our time in this class on how we wake up beyond the fear body. And one is really the ground of all these teachings, which is a very pure, unconditional, radical presence.

Contacting and feeling what's here. And one of the descriptions from a Zen master who's asked, what would you do if a dog came running at you? And his response was, I'd whistle for it. You get it? It's kind of like leaning into the curve. Leading into the skid, excuse me, but you get the idea. You're going right for it. So that's one of the pathways.

You really contact it. But the truth is, that's not always possible. Given our nervous system, given that we can get over, given that we don't sometimes have what we need to be with fear, we need another pathway too. And that's something I call resourcing. There are other names for it. But what it means is that we need to redirect our attention in ways that build some of our strengths so that we can be with fear. We need to redirect our attention so we can remember what we're connected to and what we love and what loves us. We need to readderect our attention. We need to read

redirect our attention so we can remember our strength. We need to redirect our attention so that whatever the positive mind state is, the faith or steadiness or calm, that we find access to it. Okay. Now there's one name that's been assigned to this is positive neuroplasticity. Because we know that our brains are plastic. We know that there's, we can change our habits, right? There are currently neural pathways that we're moving, that keep moving through and moving through that assign blame and try to soothe and run away and so on, and don't trust ourselves so we can train our attention to have a different experience.

The phrase used by neuroscientists are that neurons that fire together, wire together. So if you consistently learn to pay attention a certain way, the remind you that love is here even when you're feeling scared, because that's really a big one. That love is available even when you're scared. Then every time fear is triggered and you get a little more access to remembering that, you have a little more space to be with the fear. Where attention goes, energy flows. So you can train your mind and that's resourcing. Now, in the mythology of the Buddha, he used both pathways. He practiced direct presence and he also trained his mind in the ways I'm talking about.

If you think about the story of the Buddha's life, one of the great myths that many of you might remember is that Mara, which is the god of the shadow side, you know, greed, hatred, fear, anger. attacked the Buddha. That's like your own difficult emotions attacking, rising to the service. And the Buddha's response was to bring a strong presence to them. And in fact, it's described that the Buddha would be teaching, this is after's enlightened, and Mara would be hanging around in the outskirts of where he would be teaching. And the Buddha's loyal attendant Ananda would say, oh my gosh, Mara is here. Like, this is a terrible, terrible thing. And the Buddha would say,

it's okay. And he'd go right to Mara and he'd say, I see you, Mara. Come, let's have tea. Now this represents an evolutionary jump from responding to fear with fight, flight, freeze, to attend and befriend. I see you, Mara. Let's have tea. This is a very powerful part of a mythology that represents an evolutionary shift in our own psyches of being hijacked by our Olympic system to start to have access to the more recently evolved part of our brain and this mythological story in the Buddha's life really expresses that so that's one approach is can we be present and we say I see you fear come on let's let me get to know you let's be together let me

feel you but here's another thing to consider. What enabled the Buddha to be so gracious? Well he had done a ton of training before that to get his mind steady and calm and to wake up his heart. In fact, one of the final parts of his of his awakening was he got attacked by doubt. That was the form Mara took. And the Buddha, when he was attacked by doubt, which is considered to be the most challenging of the challenges, put his hand on the ground and he called on the earth goddess he called on this whole web

this whole living universe to bear witness to his goodness he reached out to the sacred web of all of life and in those moments as they say there was thunder and lightning and the heaven shook and that's when Mara finally withdrew and the Buddha was fully awakened

and free So let me just translate that to say, because we're talking about these two pathways, rather than bringing full presence without, the Buddha reached out for help. And that's part of the training, is that sometimes we get caught and we reach out to what we perceive as larger, to help us reconnect with our wholeness. Okay, so we're going to take these one at a time, this being present, bringing presence to fear, and also learning to resource. And just to say, as you're continuing to wake up from the trance of the fear body,

they're intimately interconnected. That the moments that you start resourcing and feeling more love, that allows you to be more present. And the more present you are with your fear, the more you feel love. So they play off of each other. And you'll see that in some of the illustrations I give. So we'll begin just with the metaphor of ocean and waves when we look at it, that when you are being fully, fully resourced, when you're remembering, you're remembering the ocean. You're remembering, oh, I belong to this living universe. You're remembering love. You're remembering that universal intelligence that lives through you.

When you're not, you know, when you're remembering you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves, right? Okay, so that's resourcing. But presence is going ahead and being with the waves. And if you don't really be with the waves, you'll never truly embody and understand the ocean. Okay, so we need them both. It's made me think of Swami Sajed Ananda as a Hindu yogi and teacher.

And I remember at one health food store, there was a big poster of him. And he was on a surfboard, on the ocean, doing a yoga posture. And the caption underneath is you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. Come meditate with yogis, Satchad ananda.

So you get the idea that, you know, we can wake up from the fear body. We can't stop fear, but you can wake up from the fear body. And you can do it by these two ways, by full presence, and also by resourcing yourself. So full presence first.

Here's a poem for you. Suppose what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris. Then you would have the courage to go everywhere in the world, all the directions of the compass open to you, except the degrees east or west of true north that lead to Paris. Still, you wouldn't dare to put your toes smack dab on the city limit line, and you're not really willing to stand on a mountainside miles away and watch the Paris lights come up at night,

and just to be on the safe side, you decide to stay completely out of France. But then danger seems too close, even to those boundaries, and you feel the timid part of you covering the whole globe again. You need the kind of friend who learns your secret and says, see Paris first. So the beginning of really waking up from the fear body

is to say, okay, there's a fear body. And just to say, okay, it's here. It's right here. As you practice, the basic elements of presence with fear is to wake up out of your thoughts about what's going on and come into the body and directly feel fear as a constellation of sensations in your body. Okay, that's the basic instructions. Come out of the thoughts, come into your body,

and feel fear, well, what's it really like? how does it feel in your body? Touch in some. Now the places to check for fear that are the most common are throat, chest, and belly. And as you can imagine, we're going to practice in a moment just a little bit.

But the key to full presence with fear to seeing Paris first, first of all, you have to kind of get used to being in your body and that's sometimes a training unto itself. Many of us, because fear is so strong we've left our bodies. Forgive that. I want to say that up front. Forgive, forgive it. If you find you're trying to feel fear in your body but you're numb or cut off, then part of

your practice right now is just to gradually practice reentering your body and know it's going to be gradual because at some very early age the fear was too much and you did the best you could by leaving your body and we all do it some. And if you forgive yourself, you'll have a more smooth re-entry. Okay? So that's the first thing to know. So we're easing into our body to feel how fear lives in it. And the two qualities that really have, an interest, a kind of curiosity.

Well, what is fear? What does it feel like in my body? And a real quality of gentleness, a kind of a friendliness. You're kind of keeping company with yourself. What you'll find is if you're sensing where it is in your body and you try to sense what's the texture like, the density, how does it move? And it'll morph, it'll change. But just be real interested.

And you have to keep coming back to it because your mind will like keep zinging you away because we have billions of mind moments of conditioning to leave fear. So much conditions. You keep forgiving that and say, okay, I'll come back and check it out again. And you keep coming back until you start feeling it as kind of a rawness, but you also sense that right in the interior of the rawness there's space and that the rawness is floating in space. And you begin to get in touch with both the rawness and the space,

and you find it's okay. So that's the preview. Let's check it out a little, okay? This is going to be very brief. I just want to give you enough of a sampler that you can practice more fully on your own. as you come into stillness you might bring back to mind a recent time when you felt anxious and again not this is not picking something that's major it's a workable one so this isn't panic or trauma a workable fear or maybe something that's

coming up for you in the future that you know brings up anxiety something you're afraid you'll not perform well at, something your afraid is not going to work out for you well, a person you have to be with that brings up fear, and see if you can move close in enough to the situation, whether it's a past or a future one, to sense what you're most afraid of, what most can go wrong. And direct presence with fear begins, but you just name it, just say, okay, so this is feeling some anxiety here, feeling some fear. Just the way the Buddha when he saw Mara, he said, I see you Mara. Just begin by just, I see you fear.

So name it. And then let your awareness come into your body, come away from any of the storyline and just sense, how does this fear express in my body? Where do I feel? Is it like a clutch or a pressure or an ache or soreness? is it in my throat, my belly, interested and gentle, and you can use your breath to help you stay with it. So if you feel, let's say, a gripping of fear in the heart, you can breathe in and let the breath help direct you right to where you feel it most strongly with the in-breath.

And with the out-breath, just let it float. To breathe into the part of the body you feel fear the most strongly, exhale, let it float. And as you keep your attention there, see how much you can notice about it. How does it move or change? Does it get more intense or less? Is there a shape, a texture? If you want to deepen your attention, if you feel you're in contact, you can let the energetically say yes to the fear and see if you can let your attention sink right into where it feels most raw.

breathing in, contacting the rawness. As you breathe out, let it float and see if you can sense the space that's inside the fear and around the fear, so you really let it float. So you're breathing in and feeling the sensations of rawness, but you're breathing out and sensing that it's also space. There's space inside, there's space around. This is a poem by the poet Paviri. It says, 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 asks 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 wise stillness underneath. We close with just a sense of breathing with fear. the possibility of just in a very simple way this presence that lets you be with and find some space

sense that you're more than the fear body opening your eyes now as we've been exploring you can work with workable fears and get more and more skill at pure being with at leaning into the skid or however you want to describe it but there are many times for most of us that fears too much and we need to get stronger.

So the last part of our time together will be how do we do that? How do we resource ourselves? And just to know that for each of us it's different. There's different pathways. We have different personal histories and bodies and so on. So we have different ways of remembering love or safety. There's two primary ways I found it's really useful to really resource and one is to offer inward some sort of nourishment or support to ourselves and the other

like the Buddha when he touched the ground is to reach out and both of these can be done while we're meditating so we're going to I'm going to give you a little bit of examples of both of these and then we'll practice together now often offering inward so you see mara you're quaking you know you have to go face something that's really difficult you're really nervous you want to invite more at a tea, you want to attend and be friend, but first you need to steady yourself. So this is like, how do you steady yourself? And in the last class, I named some of the most basic ways by grounding, in other words, by feeling your bottom on your chair, your feet on the floor, your hands on your legs, feeling gravity, knowing you're sitting here. Okay, that

really helps. It helps to name fear. It helps just to say, okay, afraid, afraid. For some For some people slowing the breath down, it actually stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and tones down the sympathetic. In other words, it reduces stress, just breathing more slowly. For some people putting their hand on their heart, their belly, are both. There's nexus of nerves that the actual contact begins to quiet down the fear response. In a very basic way, the fear place in us needs a reminder of something it's forget Like when we're hijacked by the limbic system, we forget we belong to something larger. We forget what's okay.

So offering inwardly means offering some reminder of what we've forgotten to ourselves when we're scared. And I remember how valuable this came for me when about, I think it's about five or six years ago, I had had a very bad concussion and then some months later I landed up in a hospital and they did not know what was wrong. not know what was wrong but my heart was my pulse was really low and I was really really sick and weak and they did huge amount of tests and still didn't really really know and so I started getting the but the fear body started generating thoughts like I'm only gonna get sicker I'm gonna have to stop teaching I'm gonna I was already losing some physical capacities I'm gonna you know I'm not gonna

be able to walk you know it was I was really and then of course my body would get agitated and this went on I mean I was in the hospital for almost a week at the cardiac unit Fairfax Hospital and I remember remembering in my mind a short phrase that Choghim Trunkah Tibetan teacher had given that that our path is to meet our edge and soften to meet our edge and soften so I decided every time the thoughts were going on I would come into my body and I'd meet meet that and soften. And I started doing that, but as I was, I'd soften, there was such a sense of huge fear. I started feeling into, you know, what is this fear most need? And it really needed to

feel a sense of loving presence. So that's when I put my hand on my heart and I think I used the phrase, it's okay, sweetheart. Some, just some loving phrase inward. And the more I said it, the more softness and space I had for the fear. In other words, resourcing in that way, let me open more deeply into the fear. And then the fear turned to grief, which was just the grief of loss, just the sense of loss. And I became increasingly tender until the fear and the grief really was just floating in tenderness. I could just breathe with it then. But I share this because I couldn't just meet my edge and soften. I needed to have some resourcing of a feeling of connectedness to love.

And in this case, I offered it to myself. There are many times that I can't even offer it to myself. There's more of a reaching out. But that's just an example that when you're feeling fear, just ask, well, what is that part of me most need? How does this fear want me to be with it? Those are questions that really help. And then listen in because it may just be just an offer of love

or just even one friend said as soon as she could accept the fear. Say, okay, it's okay that you're there, then there was space. Just accepting it. Acceptance, understanding, forgiveness, love. See what the fear needs. And then explore a message or a touch that helps you to be with it in a way that's resourceful. Okay, now, the second way that I mentioned is reaching out.

And this is the Buddha touching the ground and calling on something larger. When we're caught in trance, we're caught in the limited part of our being. So it feels like we're reaching out to something on the outside, but we're really reaching out to the wholeness of what we are. But it doesn't matter whether we call that wholeness God

or Buddha, or Jesus, or the divine mother, are some particular person, we're reaching out to reconnect with the whole field of loving presence. And I think that Rumi puts it beautifully, he says, in times of sudden danger, most people call out, oh my God, why would they keep doing this if it didn't help? Only a fool keeps going back where nothing happens. The whole world lives within a safeguarding, fish inside waves, birds, bird, birds held in the sky, the elephant, the wolf, the lion, the water, every spark floating

up from the fire, all subsist, exist, are held in the divine. Nothing is ever alone for a single moment. All giving comes from there. No matter who you think you put your open hand out toward, it's that which gives. Reaching out. So this is going to be our last practice of the class but I'll give you just a brief example that I included in true refuge on reaching out which is one woman who was parole officer in a state prison she had been a she had been molested at the age 11 and she was currently in an abusive relationship and so if I asked her to get in touch with her fear it was way too traumatic she

could not meet her edge and soften. She couldn't do direct presence. So we resourced for months. And she picked certain people that she felt safe with and she imagined them around her and she imagined them holding her with love. You can resource without being with other people. Of course, being with other people is another way to resource. We know that a hug helps bring up oxytocin if it's for 20 seconds. Research shows that if you hold hands with somebody that you trust, it reduces your fear level. but you can also use your meditation to reach out. So she reached out to a sister, a friend, and myself, and imagined us around her,

and she said it was like she felt like she was in this warm bath of water, just let the fear had more space to kind of melt some. And she practiced that a lot. And then at one point, she wasn't with me in a session, but at one point when fear kind of broke through, she reached a kind of critical point with her boyfriend. She called on us, and she felt that,

that we were around her. But then she had to actually feel the fear, like breaking glass, and shards and very, very raw. But as long as she keep remembering us, there was enough space for it. Until gradually she described it

that those broken shards of glass were floating in something larger. And the way she put it, when she had first come in for therapy, she was so cut off, so caught in her fear, body, she said she had lost her soul. After this experience of being with fear but feeling held, she said in that space that the fear was floating, she felt the light of her soul shine through.

She recovered her soul. I share this with you because as we close this class, what I most want to communicate that it's not a problem that fear is here. It's that fear is a portal that when we instead of running away, are going into trance, when we let it be the place we pay attention, it actually wakes up love. It wakes up presence. It wakes us up to wholeness. It is the path. So we'll do our final practice together with this kind of sense of just willingness just to explore and open a little. And as you set yourself, I want to give you a one example that I thought was really interesting, which is the Impala. You all know that the African Impala can jump 10 feet high. It can jump a stretch of 30 feet. It can be put in a zoo,

and there can be a four-foot enclosure, and it will not jump because the Impala won't jump if it can't see where its feet are going to land. In working with the fear body, and starting to come into presence, resourcing and then coming into presence, we don't know where we're going to land because the very nature of fear is that we're about to grow,

we're about to stretch into something unknown, a larger sense of our being, but we don't know what that's like. So it takes a real devotion to being all you can be to go ahead and choose to pause and be with fear. Choose to be with something when you don't know what's going to happen. So it's in that spirit. We'll just take the last few moments together.

If you will, just come into stillness and close your eyes. I invite that part of you that has some vulnerability, something's going on in your life that you're feeling afraid of, or feeling separate, feeling raw. to the extent that you're in touch with it, just invite that forward. And it may be that right now you're not in touch and that's quite fine. It's still helpful to move through the elements of this. But just sense the place in you that feels unsure or vulnerable or scared or hurting in some way.

It gets caught where you feel you're in your fear body. And just feel into it, just feel into it as if you could ask that place in you, You know, what's the resource that's needed? What do you want to feel? Is there a longing to feel embraced or loved, understood, accepted? You might as you do this just put your hand on your heart and if this is the first time you've done it let it be a real curious experiment to see how tenderly you can touch your own heart and sense that part of resourcing is keeping company with offering company

to a place of vulnerability. That's what you're doing right now. And if you need some support in offering company, you can reach out. You might feel, whether it's a mother or a friend or your dog or the Buddha, just sense the loving presence of some other being or the universe, let that flow through your hand.

So you're kind of offering inwardly. But if you need to first reach out to do that, that's fine. Just offering care, you might have a message to the vulnerable place. You might send some words that most that place wants to hear and feel. It could be, it's okay sweetheart. It could be, I'm sorry and I love you. It could be, may you be free from suffering? Sandy words, or forgiven, forgiven.

You'll be a resource a bit and then just to feel your way into that direct, contact, the ultimate loving presence is just to feel the place of fear in a direct, intimate way. You might breathe in and just feel it as rawness, tenderness, and breathe out and sense the space it floats in, keeping company with fear. When there's any avoidance of fear, we're living in the trance of the fear body, oppressed and victimized. But in these moments, as we often, offer a kindness and a presence to fear. We begin to inhabit something larger than the fear body.

We begin to come home to a timeless presence, a loving presence, that has room for this living dying world, our true home. It's closing in a simple way offering whatever wish, what your deepest wish is for your own being right now. And widening the attention to sense that this heart, this edgeless heart, is a field that holds all beings and just offering your wish, your prayer, for the benefit of all beings. Namaste and thank you for your presence. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington,

please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.