Tara Brach - Worrier Pose – Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear (retreat talk)

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Worrier Pose – Finding Freedom from the Body of Fear (retreat talk) - While fear is a natural part of our make up, many of us suffering when the "on" button gets jammed. This talk looks at how our fears generate habitual patterns of physical tension, anxious thinking, emotions and behaviors; and how this constellation prevents us from inhabiting our full wisdom and love. We then explore two interrelated pathways of healing—unconditional presence, and resourcing, or cultivating access to safety and belonging (from the Fall 2018 IMCW Silent Retreat).

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit Tarabrock.com. So, good evening, welcome. I want to begin by really honoring your practice. I've been loving being with you all, whether it's in groups or in the hall. There's just a sense of earnestness and it's just very sweet. stillness that we have together, so I'm grateful. And I've noticed in the groups and in myself and in the field that we, a lot of different weather

systems going through. And no matter how much you feel like your mind has been wandering, I suspect you've been more aware than you might have been of the different moods going through. And at one retreat a few years ago, one man when he was leaving described just the whole array, you know, that he had been ecstatic at some times and really in a deep kind of grief and anxious and had gone through all the different, all the different mind states and he said, you know, the joy isn't getting real. It's just the being with them.

and you might be listening and thinking, well, I'm not quite getting that joy yet, but you might have a few more days of getting real ahead of you. So one of the stories I've always loved is of a sage. People would have to go through quite a difficult trek to get to him across kind of torrential streams and up this rocky hill to his mountain hut. and they'd get to him and they'd go and bring their deepest questions, and he would get them to sit quietly, and he'd swear them to secrecy before he was going to be willing to respond.

And then his response was a question, which is, what are you unwilling to feel? And I feel like that's a really powerful inquiry, because if we look really into any of those weather systems, will often find that underneath them is fear and that we'll really do anything but just open to the fear. It's always about loss in some way that we're going to lose connection with others or we're going to lose a sense of our own security or lose approval, some separation from the life that we love. So there's a little story of three friends

or in a small plane and the plane crashes. And so then they join up again as in an orientation in heaven. And the angel asks, well, when you're in your casket and your friends and family are mourning, what is it you want them to say about you? And the first woman says, well, I'd like them to say that I was a great doctor and a devoted mom.

And the second guy says, well, I want them to say I was a loving partner and a schoolteacher who made a really huge difference to children. And the last guy says, I'd like them to say, look, he's moving. It's really anything but lost. So we're going to be talking about fear, and I sometimes share that whatever I seem to land on

for a Dharma theme comes true. I end up having to take more of a dive than I expected. last night, as happened sometimes at retreat, I didn't have a great night's sleep. I was up a lot. And then today, finally this afternoon, I had a good window for a nap and I could not sleep. And I remember at one point I told Jonathan, I said, I am desperate to go to sleep. And when I lay back again, I thought, wow, desperate, that's a pretty strong word. And I found that underneath this urge to be able to sleep,

was this fear that if I didn't sleep, I'd be tired and vulnerable and really not be able to be, I'd fall short in talking to you tonight. So there was this fear piece. And then the first thing that came up when I said, oh, there's fear there was, oh gosh, I gotta get rid of this fear now, so I'll be free to talk about fear. And this is such a classic thing, especially in us mindfulness folks that we say, okay, I'm going to be with it, so it'll go away. But it knows.

So it comes back to really being with. And what we'll explore tonight is how fear can truly be a portal to the most profound spiritual awakening possible, truly be a portal. In Asia, and a lot of the art of Asia, and this is in the mandalayas and in the entrances to the temples, there'll be these very fearsome deities, deities that are meant to inspire fear and express the energy of fear, anger, aversiveness. And the wise understanding is that to enter the temple or to get into the center of the mandala, we have to engage with the fearful deities.

If we're in a human body, we have fear and if we don't engage mindfully, heartfully with the fear, we can't find our way to that space of formless and loving presence that's really at the center of the mandala and that's the heart of and the gift of our path, really. The way one friend puts it is that when fear comes up, it's like a little message going, about to grow, you know, it's, we're on our edge, something is possible if we open. There's a teaching that is attributed to the Buddha, who knows, but it's that our fear is great, but greater yet is the truth of our connectedness. And what it points to, and I like to think of it in a kind of evolutionary terms is that every one of us has a reptilian brain and a limbic

system that produces fear and it's strong and it governs a lot and it shades and governs and shapes a lot of our experience. So that's a given. Our fear is great. And we each have the evolutionary potential built into our brain of our, of the evolutionary potential of waking up this prefrontal cortex and integrating our brain in a way that we can directly experience our interdependence, our connectedness, and really the unitive quality of the universe, the oneness.

We have that capacity. And really the teachings of the path are to wake us up so that we can sense who we are in that. But there's not this separate self, that there's a resting in something larger so we can relate to the fear, not from the fear. Okay, so that's our little map. I hope that that's clear where we're going is how to wake up our brain and our consciousness in a way that we can, another way to say it is be the ocean and relate to the waves but not be caught in the waves.

including the ways, we're not making fear go away. We're just not defined by it. We'll explore this a bit more. There's an evolutionary psychologist Luis Cozalino and he says, we are not the survival of the fittest, we are the survival of the nurtured. And I think this points to similar understanding that when we're nurtured and when we nurture ourselves, that the beautiful practices of self-compassion, we wake up into a field of tenderness that has room for this living, dying world. Survival of the nurtured. When we know our connectedness, we can handle the fear.

So one of the key realizations that happens as we wake up and we move through this portal, I see it happen at workshops when I do it on fear. Sometimes I'll do an exercise and I'll have everybody write down a handful of their fears on little pieces of paper, fold them up, put them in the middle of a circle, maybe there'll be eight people in a group or something, and the papers get all tossed around,

and then everybody picks a few. And they just go around the circle reading fears. And what happens, what people report, is this growing sense of it's not my fear, it's the fear. And when we can really get that, when fear comes up and we can get that, okay, this is this limbic reptilian brain is issuing forth fear and it's just the fear and we're in it together. We're all waking up through that portal together.

There's really a sense of potential resilience and beauty that goes with it. Often the metaphor for the spiritual path is that we're climbing up this mountain and we're trying to transcend things and in a way we're all separate, we're hiking up, we've each got our equipment and we're trying real hard to get somewhere. And I think a much more powerful way to consider it is that we're kind of going down and in and in and it's together and Rumi has a beautiful way of describing this is that we're night travelers. He says this. He says, we're night travelers who turn towards the darkness and are willing to know their own fear. He writes, life water flows from darkness.

Search the darkness. Don't run from it. Night travelers are full of light and you are too. Don't leave this companionship. So there's two messages and one is to turn towards the fear. But know that we're a companionship, that it's not your fear, it's the fear. We're in it together. So right tonight in this talk I'm addressing fear, the individual fears that come up through these body minds. And just to say, as I think we all can feel in the wider field, that when their survival brain dominates, humans need to dominate each other.

humans need to dominate other animals and violate. And for societies that haven't faced their fear where instead there's addiction and war, it keeps on cycling. So we have to face our fears, individuals and also in collective ways. So we do this, we do this for the healing of our world so that we're able to participate in those more collective ways. Because the reality is if you look at so many of the things that cause us pain when we think about them, the building of walls, how prisons are becoming privatized, the disproportional

number of people of color in prisons, when we sense all the different ways that hatred and anger plays out, we can sense that what's underneath it is not being attended to. I think James Baldwin says it best, he says, I imagine one of the reasons that people to their hate and prejudice so stubbornly is because they sense that once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain. What are we unwilling to feel? One important shared understanding is that fear is healthy and natural in its basic expression, it's sometimes described as nature's protector.

We are meant to have fear to alert us. that we need to do something to protect ourselves. So just to name that we're not, we'd be brain dead without fear. As with every intelligent emotion, there's an intelligence to fear. The problem is that it gets out of control. So there's healthy fear and there's unhealthy fear. Somebody sent me this a long time ago. It's called the five types of fear.

Terror, panic. Username or password is incorrect. We need to talk and 14 missed calls from mom. So one of the challenges really is that a lot of the fears that were important fears to warn us to hitched to predators stalking in the jungle no longer exists.

So there are real things to be afraid of. You know, when we get cut off on the beltway or a diagnosis of a serious disease, it's natural and healthy to feel what's there. But unhulsome fear occurs when the fear reaction gets habituated. In other words, when the on button gets jammed and all the chemicals and thoughts and everything keep going, but it's no longer associated to the particular actual danger. So when the on button is jammed, it's like anything related, associated can trigger it off. any person that reminds us of that bully, our situations where we failed in the past,

are all the endless stories about how we can do something wrong. So, what I'd like to frame that all is as the fear body, that we get habituated in a fear body, and it's made of these feelings, these emotions, these thoughts and behaviors that keep on playing. And when we are identified, identified with our fear body and the moments we're in the fear body, our whole identity contracts into, I'm the judgeer or the judge, you know, I'm the failure, I'm the victim, I'm the threatened person.

And I think of the fear body as in a way that we're in a chronic warrior pose. You know warrior pose, right? This is warrior pose. So what we're going to be doing, and the title of the talk is going to have to do with waking up from warrior pose is investigate how do we each get caught in warrior pose and how do we wake up from it? And Jonathan described that that beautiful metaphor of the circle and the line, how do we come above the line so we can recognize, oh, caught in warrior pose and in the moments that you recognize

the fear, there's some choice to relate to it and not from it. So what is your version of warrior pose? Well, the body, when we're anxious or fearful, contracts or gets tense or gets numb. And so just like a child's relaxed and awaken their body over years with fear, there's a kind of defending against vulnerability and the shoulders can become nodded and go forward, the chest concave, those are the head can go forward, those are kind of signs where we're getting this permanent suit of armor. One Tibetan teacher described it that we become a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.

And you might be sitting here and start to notice places of chronic tension or tightness that you didn't notice because you're paying more attention and also because when we sit a lot they come into our awareness. But we all have that kind of that armoring that get solidified over time. So that's part of worry or pose. And then there's the mind, the mind gets tight, these kind of neuropathways of repeating fear thoughts and you know which ones yours are. There's a story of a mom texting her son saying, start worrying, details to follow. We're fear ready to happen and it would glom onto any.

So that the mind starts spinning in fear thoughts and the underlying theme is there's a problem. Houston we've got a problem and how many moments do we move through life in some way feeling like there's a problem? Have you noticed that? How much there's a sense of a problem to solve? So worry-pose includes this tight mind that's problem-based and then the The emotions keep looping because the thoughts of what's going to go wrong trigger the biochemistry,

creating the emotional state and then more thoughts, more biochemistry. So whereas an emotion, according to neuroscientists, typically would last 1.5 minutes if it's uninterrupted. 1.5 minutes, it gets sustained. We get into a certain emotional state and it keeps going. How come? We keep having the thoughts that loop into the body, trigger the feelings and we're on and on and on.

That's part of where we're opposed and then there's the behaviors. Our fear-based behaviors, it's our fear management strategies really. And what are they? They usually fit into our flight behaviors, the different ways we're avoiding feeling fear, which could be oversleeping, which is a big one, getting one. lost online to dull out and not have to feel what's here. Consuming, over-consuming. Sometimes it's addicted to certain kinds of medications to numb. Just to say that I think that there is, for a lot of people, there can be a real appropriate and healthy use of medication. And it's really a personal

weighing things out. Having said that is just one story that I remember. remember being at a trauma conference and different people had posters about trauma. And on one poster, it said, you know, if there was Prozac back then, you know, and it had a picture of Karl Marx and saying, sure, if we tweak capitalism a little bit, it could work out, you know. The best, though, was Edgar Allan Poe. And he's looking out the window saying, hello, Bertie. So flight is avoiding in different ways, staying busy.

It's that kind of denial of any problem. You know, who me worry? It's like the guy that jumps from the 10th story and is falling to the ground. The woman at the fourth floor sees him and says, how's it going? He goes, so far, so good. It's that. It's that kind of real denial. There's lying and misrepresenting the truth.

and that is a pervasive thing we do that we don't notice, the ways we exaggerate or stretch the truth because in some way we don't want to be seen as we are. And then there's fight or aggression. And that's the controlling others out of fear, the lashing out, the judgment. There's a roomy little roomy verse that I think is so good on aggression and fear. He says, which reminds me of the mother who tells her child when you're walking through the graveyard at night and you see a boogeyman, run at it and it'll go away.

But what replies the child, if the boogeyman's mother has told it to do the same thing, boogeymen have mothers too? So this little sweet verse, and yet you can see the cycles of violence that our conditioning is, you're scared, go attack something. I'd like to pause here and invite a reflection, if you will, just to bring your attention inside. So we talk about the body of fear and we talk about warrior pose, just to check yourself

and sense how your own body of fear expresses. And even as we begin that, just sense your intention as one, you know, that about to grow, you know, curiosity, gentleness, friendliness, take a moment to bring to mind a situation that can arouse some fear and not traumatic fear, more of a kind of middle range, maybe on a scale of 1 to 10 would be a 4 to a 6 and bring the situation close in so that if it's something coming up that you're anticipating, something that gets you nervous or scared, you can see the people and the setting involved, the faces, maybe the words that might be shared, who's saying something to you, what you're supposed to be doing, but you

Let yourself go to the most challenging part of that situation that arouses fear. And with interest, check your body and notice how the physical body of fear is experienced. You might check your throat, your chest, your belly. You might check your mind and sense, well, what am I believing? Whenever we're caught in suffering we're believing something that's limiting, it's not true, and yet it's something that's contracting us. What are you believing? What's the fear thinking that goes on?

What's the circling thoughts? And when you tell yourself those thoughts and you're believing your thoughts, what's the experience in your emotional body? What's the felt sense of the fear? What kind of behaviors come out of it? Do you try to get away from it by going online, by being busy? by doing more, by sleeping, by eating. What happens?

And sensing yourself here, witnessing from that space of interest and kindness, witnessing the body of fear, warrior pose, from a space that's larger than the self and the story. Notice your experience of your own being right now, just witnessing, bringing it above the line, relating to this constellation of patterns not from it. And also sense as you do that others here too, your fellow night travelers, witnessing not my fear but the fear in the different ways it expresses. So this is in a way part one of our... exploration of fear is to sense that there's this body of fear and we begin to get above

the line as we notice that I'd like to now move into the two main pathways of working with fear and one of them will call pure presence. It's kind of like one Zen teacher said, you know, if a scary dog's running at you, what do you do? Well, you whistle for it, you know. So, presence with fear, this willingness to be with and to be with mindfulness and kindness. And the second pathway, and they're very interrelated, I'm something that's called resourcing, and I'm not the only one, many people use that term. And resourcing means that sometimes the fear's too much to whistle for it, you know, and it's not kind or wise to do that.

In fact, it does not help at all to lean in. First what we need is to establish more resilience, more of a sense of connectedness, more strength. So we resource first. One friend told me a story of her son when he was six, he had a recurring nightmare of being chased by a monster and it was just, it was big and dark creature and no matter how fast he ran, it was right behind him. It was very terrifying for him and it appeared so frequently, he started being really afraid

of going to sleep. And so one time, one night at his bedtime she held his hand and she said, you know, if that monster turns up tonight you can try this. She said instead of running, turn around and just see what it looks like so you can tell me. And he said, okay, try. So early the next morning he runs excitedly into her bedroom and he had faced the monster and voila, it wasn't real.

In fact, he told her it was an oversized bad guy from his favorite video game, and he looked it right in the face and it dissolved. Now, so you hear that story, and you might be thinking, yeah, it's one thing to face and imagine monster, and it's another, what about real danger? But here's the thing,

whether it's a trumped-up danger or something right there running and resisting only contracts us more, keeps us more identified with a frightened self. And being able to pause and open and contact what's going on inside us allows us to find that portal into the presence itself that can let us respond intelligently, wisely. So let's look at a little more how we do that. I sometimes call it the U-turn that rather than all of our strategies to get away from fear. And the body of fear, by the way, is just a cluster of strategies to get away from fear.

Each one of those. The tension in the body, we're tightening against the fear so we're not to feel it. The busyness of the mind, we're worrying and problem-solving, obsessing, so we don't have to feel the fear. All the behaviors. So, what we're learning is to make a U-turn and rather than running away from the fear, it's really what are we unwilling to feel, come back in and connect with it. And I find that rain is a really useful handle sometimes when we're afraid because when we're afraid we lose contact with our frontal cortex, the limbic system takes over and if you

have a very simple, do this, this, this, and this, it can actually bring you back online, reconnect you with the frontal cortex. So I'm going to share one example of one woman's way back named Brianna. She was hired as a marketing vice president in large corporation, and she came and talked to me because she was completely freaked out by the CEO. This corporation was more corporate than, she had come from a job. She had won an industry. She had won an industry award in her last job. She was a very competent person, but in this atmosphere, she was really intimidated. So she wanted to know how to deal with these meetings she'd have with a CEO where she'd go into a brain freeze and just could not access her capabilities.

So we explored rain, and I had her get in touch with what it was like right before going into the meeting, and she said, well, right before the meeting, she could feel the anxiety, building, so she would be kind of getting into a frenzy of busyness, reviewing reports and trying to mark on what she'd make comments on, but she couldn't be productive because she was already spinning. And so we talked about pausing. The beginning of rain is to pause and say, okay, we're going to do some of the rain practice. And I said, as you pause, your first job is just to recognize what's going on. Ask that question, what is happening inside me? Okay?

Anxiety. And the second question, can I let it be there right now? And that second question of rain, allow, does not mean that we're going to embrace it right away or that we're doing anything other than just letting it be there. As Ruth said, it's such a beautiful image is, let it be right maybe next to on the cushion. Or I have one woman that I worked with that imagined herself in a park and she had the her fear sitting next to her in the park bench. So we recognize and we allow, we just pause on everything and it's that willingness to

start being with. And then rain deepens with the investigating. So once you've asked, okay, so what's happening inside me and you've allowed it, what's really happening inside me? Then we start deepening with the investigating. And when I asked her that, she said, Let's see, she told me she had a dry mouth, a really tight chest, my heart's hammering and she said, oh yeah, my stomach's in knots.

And I had her put her hand on her belly and just start to breathe a little more of that matched, you know, counting in six counts, counting out six counts just so she could feel the breath and hold a steady attention where the fear was. in investigating, I asked her, you know, what did that scared place inside her most need? And I want to repeat that to you as one of the most valuable parts of that inquiry that you can do when you're caught in an emotional squeeze like fear. What is that fear place need? How does it want me to be with it? Well, when she asked, the response from the fear place was just to accept that it was there.

just to accept that it was there, that it was okay that it was there, not to make it wrong that it was there. So I asked her, okay, so from the wisest, kindest part of yourself, how do you want to respond to that part of you? How do you want to offer that acceptance? And so she felt her hand on her belly and she just very gently, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay that you're here. So that's the ring.

She recognized it, allowed it to be there. What's really happening inside started investigating and then nurturing, it's okay. It's okay. And she found in those moments after the rain there was more space. Having more space is a sign of coming above the line, okay? That you're beginning to relate to and not from. And this is what was the case for her. So her practice was when she was in those meetings, she would practice before the meetings,

but when she was in those meetings and she'd have some spike, it didn't have to be a long, drawn-out rain process. It was she was recognizing and allowing that, okay, a spike is here. She would just, and not even necessarily with her hand, but she'd breathe into it and send the message, it's okay. It's okay that you're here. She updated me about three months later saying that the anxiety had not disappeared, but it had less than some, she said, more important, she said, it doesn't feel like such a big deal.

And I think that's really important that we're not trying to make the waves of fear disappear just to enlarge our own sense of beingness so they're not overwhelming us, so they're not dominating us. For her she said that she actually was free enough to start being really creative in the meetings and she was excited about some things that came on. In fact, she said she was feeling the anxiety and excitement were actually commingling. So a couple of comments on the presence approach to fear. The first is if fear is really strong and overwhelming, we have to resource first and we're

going to get there. So I don't want to make it sound simple that whenever it happens you just turn towards it and be with it. But when you can, learning to stay is where it's at. It's gradual the depth of our presence. The reason I like rain so much is that it doesn't assume we're immediately going to be able to offer a lot of compassion to fear. At first it's just, okay, fear's here and let it be here.

And then you kind of gentle into it. Once you've let it be there, then okay, so where do I feel it in my body? can I breathe with it? What does it need? And then from your own wisest place, your own loving part of your being, offering some care. Now we're going to move on to resourcing. The metaphor I like for resourcing, resourcing is basically so we can get ourselves safe enough. So, sometimes describes we have a window of tolerance and when we're way outside our window of tolerance for fear, we have to kind of come back within those river banks. The metaphor I'll

share as a river metaphor, Jonathan and I both love kayaking. And one of the tricks in kayaking is that when you're going upstream and the currents are coming heavy and you don't want to be turned sideways because you can get flipped, if you tuck behind a rock, the water goes around it and there's a still place for a bit. It's a kind of refuge where you're going to, You can see the river and plan we're going to go and catch your breath, you basically can resource yourself. And in the same way, when we're getting knocked around by the waves of fear, we need to have some sort of an anchor or a refuge or something that can help to bring a little more stability,

a little more sense of safety and connectedness, safe enough, not really full safe, but just enough so then we can call on our presence to be with. So what are some of those, what you might call safety anchors? Well for some people, if there's a lot of fear, just very consciously grounding yourself so that you, as you're sitting right now where you are and if you close your eyes you can sense with grounding, imagine gravity and just feel the pressure of your bottom on the cushion or chair and the pressure of your feet on the floor and where your hands might contact your thighs and really sense yourself on this earth. Another part of grounding and feeling safe is if you open your eyes just to notice

something that's actually physically right here in the room. Okay, a window, cushion, for me podium. So you're basically getting the mind from doing all its looping, the whole warrior pose to there's this and there's this and there's this and it begins to stabilize the mind. Other anchors for safety and there's many of them and we have to explore is an image that is calming and reassuring. It might be an image of a person that you trust and love and that you feel real connected to or a place that's beautiful or a place that's a sanctuary. And then there's words. There's often a set of words that we can send to ourselves

that are reassuring. And what you do is you pre-establish them. So when fear comes up you know, oh, first let's resource and get a little bit stabilized. And to resource well, let's say there's a phrase you're saying to yourself, like, you know, you can be held in the heart of the Buddha, you're held in the heart of the Buddha, you repeat it, you might have an image with it, and as you begin to feel a little sense of more calm, just let that feeling fill you for 15 to 30 seconds because that's what allows a more positive state to get installed. Give you an example of anchoring.

One woman I worked with a number of years ago, her daughter was in and out of rehab. And when she wasn't in rehab, she was on the streets addicted to heroin and cocaine and whatever she could get hold of. And she was also prostituting herself. And her mother was terrified she would die on the streets. And I was close with this woman, so it was very painful. because, as many of you know, the fear for a child is unlike anything in the world. So this is her child who's maybe 19 or something. So she was enabling like crazy.

She kept paying for the next rehab. And when her daughter would finally hit a certain kind of bottom and plead with her to live with her or plead for money, she was, give her the space and give her the money. until it finally became clear that she was traumatized and that she was enabling her daughter and not helping. And so her path had to be to create boundaries and to work with her own terror that she was going to get that phone call that her daughter was dead. And so I want to tell you how she worked with her terror because it's powerful.

And what she would do was she would feel it. it and breathe with it and do a lot of the things we mentioned, the breathing and the grounding. But she would imagine to her was the Bodhisattva of compassion, this field of love and light, and she would take all the fear and all the terror she felt and she would basically say, goddess, hold this, please hold this. And it was like the love in the world, please hold this. It's not like I want to get rid of it and I don't want to feel it. like include this in this greater heart of compassion. And that was kind of the gesture,

kind of offering it. Handing it over, not having the small self think it can manage the fear that's that great, but handing it to something larger is this pathway of realizing connectedness. She did it over and over again and there was enough of a sense of being held that she could make it through. And meanwhile, her daughter hit a number of bottoms and her daughter climbed out. I feel emotional telling you it because she's now helping other young people. And not every story ends like that, and I'm aware of that. But for her, for the mother, the critical piece was discovering some larger belonging that could help her hold that anguish. We are not survival of the fittest, we're survival of the nurtured.

We need to feel that belonging. I'm sure most of us have touched a really great fear. And my experience is the only thing that works with really great fear is love, is finding something larger that feels like it's helping to hold the fear. If you trust you're the ocean, If you feel that belonging, you're not afraid of the waves. The fear's still there, but they don't overwhelm you. Of course, the other part of that saying is if you don't trust you the ocean, you'll be seasick every day. You know, that one goes.

So how to find our pathway to connectedness? For one woman who came to a retreat here, she came and she had come on a... a Friday and was waiting for a report on a biopsy and she was terrified. And she joined one of the groups like you've been in in the circle. And people in the circle shared and one person had a son who was struggling with addiction and another's husband had Alzheimer's and the horror of that one. Somebody else had lost a job. So they went around and she found that through that weekend, they were the night travelers with her. She could sense it's not my fear,

it's the fear and we're in it together. We have to remember that, that larger belonging. Sometimes we can't do it only in our mind and that's okay too. Sometimes we can't handle the fear. We need help. We need someone else to hug us, to hold us, to remind us. It's like one, I remember one story of a father, his son during a storm would cry out from the nursery, he was afraid of the lightning and the thunder. And every time the father would go in and calm the boy, you'd say, don't be scared, God is with you. And so it happened a bunch of times and finally the boy said to him, I know God's with

me, but right now I need someone with skin on. It sometimes needs to be, we need the connectedness of another being. I was thinking, as I was reflecting on that, of Franco Sestesky, who has worked with people dealing with the whole range of fear, people who are dying, people who are loved people who are dying. And he shares a story that taught me a lot that I want to share with you. Some of you might remember it. It's a beautiful one to listen to.

He was accompanying a young man, Matt. Matthew, who was dying of age. And Matthew's gay. He was a long-time Buddhist practitioner. And he was suffering these high fevers and pneumonia. And what came up in the midst of that was this really deep fear. Now, he had been brought up in this very fundamentalist Christian family. And the message that had been beaten into him by a kind of fire and brimstone father

was that there was a punishing God. and now as he was close to death, he really believed that he was going to go to hell for eternity due to his sexual orientation. That's the pain he was living with, that he was going to be punished by God. And so he was terrified.

And this happens sometimes that we have these vulnerability from very early on and then this deep fears put in us And then when we get vulnerable at different times in our life, something cracks open and it can really flood out and that's what was happening to Matthew. Frank tried to support, he tried to support him with mindfulness and with the compassion practice that Matthew had studied for a lot of years, created an altar with a Buddha by it and held his hand and chanted, but there was no, he was in the trance of fear, didn't crack, didn't

wake up from it. I'm going to read you what Frank described. She said, by two in the morning, I was exhausted and feeling ineffective and powerless. So I chose to go home and get some sleep. On a drive there, for some unknown reason, I thought of my first Holy Communion, the Catholic ritual that ushers young innocence into the loving lap of God. When I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box,

a small collection of mementos I hold dear. I located a five-inch plastic figurine of Jesus, surrounded by lambs and little children. Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. As Matthew continued to moan and shout and toss around, turn in agony, I took down the thunkah, replaced the Buddha statue with the small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth,

a cleaning woman named Dina came into the room and spotted the figurine, put the mop to one side, and she said, with great enthusiasm, merciful Jesus, when his kindness is with us, everything is all right. At once, Matthew's eyes locked into Dina. An angelic smile spread across his face as he pivoted toward the altar to gaze at the plastic Jesus statue and back in Dina's direction. His entire body relaxed in that moment, the punishing God of Matthew's childhood, the one whose wrath he had been taught to fear and whose judgment made him feel like a terrible person was transformed into the merciful

God that he also knew and loved, the one who adored all his children, no matter their so-called faults and flaws, a kind forgiving, all-accepting, benevolent God. Dina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed to wake up from that true. trance of fear to relate to it, not from that fear. I left them together there, they didn't need me. So I share this because on this path of awakening we have many different ways to turn towards love and we don't necessarily do it just when we're afraid.

Every time you turn towards love, every time you remember that larger belonging, there's more and more familiarity with who you really are, that loving presence. There's more space for the fear that's here. So we started with fear's greater yet is the truth of our connectedness. And fear is this portal that we have to experience and go through, but in that process of going through we can discover that space, that tenderness. that's more the truth of who we are than any story we have of a scared self. So I'd like to close tonight with another brief reflection on awakening from warrior pose,

get it right, and in the stillness to let your attention turn inward, you might ask that question, and what am I unwilling to feel? If there's anything going on in your life that in some way you've been sidestepping, there's any place of fear of sensing a problem, sensing something's wrong, that might want attention just for these few minutes right now, to not choose something that feels overwhelming and if you already find that something feels overwhelming, let this be a time of resourcing, of sense of sensing how you can turn towards love. But if it feels like it's in that window of tolerance, to let yourself contact where fear lives again, to invite it, to lean into it, to feel your throat,

your chest, your belly, it may be helpful to remind yourself what you're believing is going to go wrong. What's the worst part of this for you? Wherever you've been, Wherever you experience fear the most in your body, your heart or your belly, you might put your hand there, where you intuit fear might be just to contact your own being, friendly now, friendly with the fear. It helps to imagine that it's there but you're having it right beside you, you're not fully going to immerse yourself into it, that's fine too. establishing contact, feeling where it lives and what the felt sense of it is, gentling in

towards it, let the breath, the attention be with it and it might help to sense that you're with others doing the same, that we're all feeling into that vulnerability, breathing into it, the night travelers. And you might sense what this fear place most needs right in these moments. Is it acceptance, that it's just okay to be here? Is it love or tenderness, forgiveness, sensing from your most awake heart offering the light and warmth of care relating to the fear, to the waves? And you might sense who are you?

are you when you're relating to fear with care, with presence? Sensing that tender wakefulness that's right here, we listen to the words of the poet have faced. He says, how did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all its beauty? felt the encouragement of light against its being. Otherwise, we all remain too frightened. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.