Awakening Your Fearless Heart: On Facing Fear (Part 1)

[flute] Namaste and welcome. Throughout the meditation world we hear regularly about the importance of present-centered attention. And there is one story of a kind of contemporary Buddha figure, man, person, who falls out of a fifteen story window and as the story goes around the eighth floor someone sticks their head out and says, “Hey, you’re doing okay?” And this Buddha guy says, “Well, so far so good.” And what I like about that is that obviously for most of us Buddha’s-to-be, Buddha’s-in-training, we’re hooked by the anticipation of what’s to come, we don’t stay right here, rather we’re pretty chronically especially due to our negativity-bias anticipating that around the corner something is going to go wrong or when we hit bottom it’s going to be like we’re crashing. So we have a real strong tendency and conditioning to worry and to obsess. And of course Mark Twain’s famous comment – most people know this these days – “The worst things in my life never actually happened.” So a lot of that worrying and obsessing is for not. And this is our predicament that we move through a lot of life moments in the tightness of fear. A lot of life moments. I think many of us can feel in our nervous system as a society that the fear and anxiety is spiking right now. Would you agree with that? Yeah. So the common reaction when… the greater the fear the more actively and reflexively we are trying to control things and then we end up causing trouble to ourselves and others ‘cause, rather than feel the fear, we try to control. So let me just invite you to check in right from the start. Of course we’ll be doing more reflections as we go. You might check in your mind and just sense your life and some situation that feels stressful, some situation that gets you nervous, anxious, uptight. And just notice as you bring that to mind the ways you are trying to manage or control things, just how you’re handling it. And then zero in a little more sensing the situation and what you are imagining and anticipating is troublesome, kind of what you are afraid is around the corner, and just ask yourself: Well, what am I unwilling to feel right now? What am I unwilling to feel? And then when you’re ready open your eyes. Now I know this isn’t the most cheerful way to start off a talk. And it is not like fun because what happens is, if we ask that question, then we actually pay attention, we start noticing a real vulnerability, a kind of unpleasantness, a squeeze and a clench and a clutch in our body, right? How many of you have noticed that the fear clutch in your body? Okay. Here is what we know – and this is both Western psychotherapy and psychology and Buddhist psychology – is that fear when it’s not faced becomes toxic. Unfazed fear becomes toxic. Carl Jung said that our suffering, our neurosis and our suffering, come from the unfaced, unseen parts of ourselves. Unfaced fear becomes toxic. And we know through history that fear has been used by those in power to turn people against each other. People would not go to wars and they wouldn’t fight and they wouldn’t turn against each other, we wouldn’t have racism, we wouldn’t have tribalism, we wouldn’t have us against them unless we are able to stir up fear. And when it doesn’t get faced inwardly, when it goes outwardly, it becomes aggression. So that’s one thing we know that it becomes toxic. We know that when we are in a fear state in those moments we are cut off from love and we are cut off from our creativity and we are not able to be really seeing clearly the moments, it cuts off wisdom, and here is what else we know: that as long as we’re moving through the world and we are thinking of our self as a separate self, okay, the primal mood of the separate self is fear. And this is for all creatures that if we have some sense of separation, some sense that of inside this skin or this covering is “me” and the world out there is “the world out there,” there is going to be some background hum of fear. It’s universal. We all a rigged to feel fear, to feel the unpleasant squeeze of fear, every one of us. So it’s a clench that we live with. And I can say for myself if I pause and I check in sometimes it’s really obvious, I can really feel it, and other times I’m still too busy and I’m still too much in my mind to really feel in my body; but it’s there a lot and a lot of my life passes when there’s been simply learning to pay attention and lean in and befriend that fear. This is the lead into a two part talk – I’ll be doing part of it tonight and in two weeks the rest of it – it’s called “Facing Fear: Awakening Your Fearless Heart.” Because the upside of facing fear is you discover a fearless heart. And that doesn’t mean there is not fear; it means that you’re resting in a heart-space that’s bigger than the fear so it doesn’t cause suffering. The fear becomes a current in the midst of something larger. We’ll be using the acronym RAIN as a tool in learning to face and transform our relationship with fear. If you want to take a deeper dive into what I’m teaching these two weeks, it goes much deeper in my book “Radical Compassion” that just came out. But the key teaching here is that facing fear is a necessary and natural dimension of evolving consciousness. It’s just part of waking up our consciousness. We face fear. And when we get hooked by fear – in other words when, rather than face it, we go into our control strategies and we bury it, we go into a kind of developmental arrest where we can’t keep waking up to our fullness. So we’re going to be looking at how we make the movement from the fearful, separate self to that heart-space that has room for fear. And as you listen, if you decide you want to do these weeks and really practice with fear, and if you have anybody else that is wanting to team up with you, it’s actually more powerful to do it with a friend and compare notes. First of all it becomes a little less personal. I do workshops on fear now and then and one of my favorite of the exercises is that I’ll have people get into these kind of small groups and write on a piece of paper different things that they are afraid of – maybe three things – you know, “I’m afraid of failing at work,” “I’m afraid of being rejected,” “I’m afraid of other’s judgment” or whatever it is – and then they fold the pieces of paper and they all get put in the middle and kind of tossed around in a bowl or something and then everybody picks out three and then going around in a circle people read the fears and they are reading other peoples’ fears but they’re actually reflecting on “Oh what would it be like to have this one” and of course they’re very overlapping. But what comes out of that - it’s so profound and obvious, it’s so simple in a way - is the sense that it is not “my fear” it’s “the fear,” it doesn’t feel so personal. And yet, when we get a wash of fear, it feels like “it’s who we are” and “something is wrong” and “something is wrong with me” and “this shouldn’t be happening”… and, you know, we get all very personal. So to share the process of exploring and facing and waking up through fear is actually best done in a relational field. Often the spiritual path – the metaphor – is that we’re kind of climbing this mountain and we’re transcending all the stuff of our humanness and experiencing some transcendent state. And I actually think a much better metaphor is that we’re going inward and inward, it’s kind of inverted and inward, and I like the way Rumi puts it, Rumi speaks of “night travellers who turn towards the darkness and are willing to know their own fear.” He says, “Life’s water flows from darkness. Search the darkness, don’t run from it. Night travellers are full of light and you are too. Don’t leave this companionship.” So there is this message that in our togetherness we can bring the light of awareness, the light of presence, and go in and in and in the hurts and the fears and discover within our very essence the shared essence of timeless, boundless love. We go in and in and in and discover that presence, that love, it’s the love that will not die. So the message here is that if we want to be on this path of facing and transforming our way of relating to fear the attitude is key. And our reflex is to think that when fear comes it’s bad, right? Isn’t that what happens? We think it’s bad, we think something is wrong that we are feeling it, it shouldn’t be happening. And what I’m inviting, if you want to really take this as part of your path, is a kind of a willingness and an interest and above all a care, really gentle, in turning towards. One friend many years ago – he was at the time really serving as a teacher for me – said that fear is a sign that we’re at the edge of our comfort zone, it’s like a little light going saying “About to grow,” you know, and I thought… at first I was a little bit cynical and I said, “Yeah, well, fear could mean I’m about to die,” you know, and actually that’s true and yet, if we really think in a very large way that the dying of some of our old beliefs and the dying of some relationships and the dying of seasons and the dying of our old jobs and the loss of our body and our mind… it all can be part of waking up. And I suspect that there are many of you that have been with people who are dying and watched them wake up as part of dying their hearts, right? Because we start being… it’s almost like this body-mind becomes more transparent and spirit starts shining through and dying we start realizing, “Well this identity is not what the solid, temporary body, there is something much vaster and more profound that’s who I am.” Realizing that, the shift in identity from the fearful self to that mystery and vastness, is what gives us freedom from fear. So, yeah, about to grow. Now I want to make clear that as I speak and as we talk about the particular tools that help us to face fear I’m not talking about traumatic fear or panic because we still have to face all the ways that fear lives in our body. We use that phrase “Our issues are in our tissues.” But when there is trauma, we need to do it in a way that’s more gradual and with more resources and support than we might for the fears that many people experience day by day. So we are not focusing on traumatic fear. And there will be next week a conversation with my friend and author Jim Gordon about his book on healing trauma that will round this out some. Another piece to say is that, when we get into fear and we really get locked in, we’re in a trance, okay, and you know what it’s like. I mean, there is nobody here probably that hasn’t felt fear and sensed that shrinking and how we get small and how our view of the world gets small. It’s not like we’re remembering how other people are doing and concerned about them and it’s not like we are enjoying the stars in the night’s sky, it’s like we are small and self-focused and cut off in our way from our resources. So it’s a trance. But not all fear creates a harmful trance. Fear is sometimes described as nature’s protector; so it’s universal because it’s built into our nervous systems to be a signal to let us know we need to do something to avoid threats to our body and mind. And we are supposed to narrow our attention and get focused for a time period, we are supposed to narrow our attention and scan for where the source of the trouble is, and we are supposed to armor ourself and we’re supposed to have blood rush to the extremities so that we can, you know, run, run run; all that’s supposed to happen. If you are in a car and the driver has been drinking, you’re supposed to feel fear. And if you have medical needs and insurance won’t cover or if you see a child playing on dangerous slippery rocks or whatever, you are supposed to have fear and do something. Fear turns to suffering, it turns into a trance that binds our life when it oversteps its bounds – and by that I mean when our fear-response, the on-button gets jammed and so we are not just responding to something that’s really danger but everything is triggering, we are triggered all the time. And that happens for many of us when we have a regularly repeated experience of threat early on in our individual lives or if we are in the non-dominant population and we are in a culture that is regularly threatening our survival and well being our bodies will learn fear. And it can lock in over time so that on-button is just… the accelerator gets jammed, we are always on. And it takes over at least partially in an unconscious way so that we are busy trying to control things but we’re not aware it’s going on. So here I want to pause and re-introduce something I speak about once every couple of classes which came from Joseph Campbell. And he describes this big circle with a line going through it. And it’s a circle of awareness. And the line going through it means that whatever is below the line is unconscious and whatever is above the line is conscious. And much of our fear – the thoughts and the feelings around fear – is often below consciousness; it’s driving us, totally affecting us, shaping us, affecting our body and our mind, but we are not aware of it. And in order to face fear we have to bring it above the line, we have to shine the light of attention on it. So that means we have to begin to see where it is. And I want to give you a bit of a kind of a walk through of the expressions of trance so you can begin to identify fear, where it’s living in your body-mind. Some people call this the body of fear. When you are habitually caught in fear but you are not aware of it and it’s controlling your experience. You can see it through your body, your mind and your behaviors these patterns. Now what happens to the body when there is fear, especially fear from an early age, is the body gets really tense or it gets really numb, either lose contact with it or it’s really, really tight or both; shoulders can get knotted up and raised, the head forward, back hunched, chest sunk in, the heart and belly, you know, heart armored the belly tight; and in a way it’s like we put on a permanent suit of armor. You might be listening and you might say “check, check, check, check”; we all have it to some degree, I mean, we all have… the on-button is pushed on for a lot of us a lot of the time. One Tibetan teacher said, “We are like a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.” So that’s the way the body reacts when we are in that trance of fear, it armors itself. Well what is the emotional body do? It’s interesting: If you have any really difficult emotion and you scratch below the surface you’re going to find fear. It’s like all roads lead to fear. Fear is the existential experience that is impacting everything. So when fear is unprocessed, when we haven’t faced it, it’s kind of a… it’s there in our body, it’s like imagine a flow, it’s torqued, it’s like a hose has gotten torqued so that energy isn’t able to… it’s not in our full consciousness, it’s kind of being resisted, but the water is still running so it takes different expressions. Unfazed fear turns into physical illness; we know that, I mean, there is tones of research on the effect of stress and what happens when we are in a stress-reaction for two long. So there is physical illness, it takes shape as chronic anxiety and worry, anger is a big one – look at anger and then look underneath and you’ll usually find your way to fear – and then of course when we really push it under turns into depression. So there are a lot of expressions in the trance of fear that don’t initially look like fear. And then of course we lose our sensitivity when we are armoring our hearts so we lose our empathy and our capacity for joy. So we’ve talked about how the physical body goes and the emotional body. Then there is the fear-based behavior. So when we’re afraid we start busily trying to control things. And there is a whole body of work called terror-management theory which is all the ways we try to control things so we don’t have to feel fear. I think one of the biggest is we just work harder and faster and just constantly trying to do things. The other big one is that we over-consume. We numb. You know, the fear doesn’t feel good so we try to numb it with drugs and alcohol. Then we act out trying to either defend ourselves or try to prove ourselves and we pretend that we know things we don’t because there is a lot of fear being shown to be stupid. I read this… Children were asked, “Name six animals which live specifically in the Arctic.” And the response of one child was, “Two Polar Bears” and then “three” and that’s crossed off “four seals,” you know. “What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for?” “He is a noted figure in history because he invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles.” “What is a vibration?” “Well there are good vibrations and bad vibrations. Good vibrations were discovered in the nineteen-sixties.” “What happens during puberty to a boy?” “He says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery.” So there is the whole thing of presenting ourselves which we know. We know part of our control-mechanisms to present ourselves. And I just think it’s interesting how often it’s to seem knowledgeable in certain areas. A big one is aggression; that, when we are feeling afraid we get aggressive. And I’m primarily talking about on the individual level but we can see it of course societally how fear leads to aggressing. And of course then there is a feedback loop because we get afraid, then we act aggressively to somebody and then they get defensive or aggress back and then around and around it goes. And there are different ways that it plays out when we are afraid. There is a story some of you might remember from long ago where there were eleven people hanging onto a rope suspended from a helicopter. Ten were men and one was a woman. They all decided that one person should get off because if they didn’t the rope would break and everyone would die. And so the negotiation began. But no one could decide who should go. So finally the woman gave a very touching speech saying how she would give up her life to save the others because women were used to giving up their life for others – for their partners and their children – giving in and not receiving anything in return. And when she finished speaking all the men started clapping. So there is aggressive and there is passive-aggressive. So I’m being playful because, you know, we all have these management strategies where we are just doing the best we can to try to get away from feeling fear, we all do it. Then we have fear-thoughts. The fear in our body could not be sustained if we didn’t keep on cycling through our worry-thoughts, our fear-thoughts that keep going and going of what’s going to go wrong and the judging and the obsessing about what we are afraid of. And the Buddha wrote – or didn’t write it but taught – that whatever you regularly think about, that becomes the inclination of your mind - which is common sense. If you sense neuropathways and you just deepen the grooves. So then you start thinking “What was I thinking about today?” And we know how much the undercurrent of worry… “There is not going to be enough time or will I get it done and am I going to miss this thing from happening and am I going to fall short on that… we know how much is in there on these areas. So what do we fixate on? It’s said there are five types of fear: terror, panic, “Username or password is incorrect,” “we need to talk” and fourteen missed calls from mom. So the deepest root of fears is that primal mood of the separate self and the fear is losing life, the fear is a threat to existence. And that’s at the reptilian level - this fear that we are not going to make it. I saw many years ago… this is Victor Yalom - he does these little cartoons – and he did one that says… he has got a psychiatrist sitting in a chair and then lying on the couch is the grim reaper. And the grim reaper is saying, “No doc, I’m afraid it’s your time that’s up.” And that’s the fear, you know, is that we’re going to lose our life and of course it extends into fears about sickness, things go wrong and we immediately perseverate and it goes right into a deadly disease but it also goes into loss of our home and our dog and our physical security to our finances and so on. So anything to do with security and safety can go right down to that deep survival fear. I remember reading a while back – and I don’t remember from where – Joseph Campbell saying that the very beginning of all religions is the cry “Help!” that we all sense it’s out of control, that we’re all impermanent and there is some deep place in us that’s looking for some way to make it and not be terrified by it. “This life is a test. It is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do.” So you get the idea. That’s the core level of what we’re afraid of. Then when it’s not a life or death issue – that is very interesting what primates do, our default when it’s not life or death – is then we start comparing to others and sensing where we’re going to fall short. And each of you knows in your own heart of hearts and mind of minds how much comparing goes on and whether it’s to do with our appearance or intelligence or our success in the world or our personalities we are constantly comparing. And as mammals and primates we have a fear of failure within the relational field, we’re pro-social creatures so it’s another form of death, it really is, to not belong, to feel rejected. So that’s another domain of fear is that “I’m not going to succeed,” “I’m going to fail,” “I’m going to be rejected.” So I’ve been talking about the fear-thoughts and those are the thoughts that can predominate when we’re in the trance of fear: worry-thoughts, fear-of-failure thoughts – and unless they get brought above the line, unless we start becoming aware of them, they control our biology and they keep us as a scared, small self. So a story - this is a story you’ll find in “True Refuge” – was of a man who was industrial trade group. And he was a workaholic and that was one fear-management strategy. But he was always scanning for what would undermine his reputation as a very powerful connected person. So he was always competing with people - another management-strategy. And finally he used alcohol and cocaine to kind of rev himself for different meetings and so on. Anyway, all came down to fear of failure, that was what was going on behind it. But it caused trouble. Like he basically became addicted and he was on the verge of losing his marriage and his job. So he had to go into recovery, kind of got forced there, but then it turned out to be grace because he was basically having to bring above the line the whole tangle of the trance of fear, the whole tangle of his body’s armoring, the tangle of all the thoughts he had about failure and all the strategies to control had to come above the line. And he described a gift from his sponsor who taught him the phrase “Not my will but my heart’s will.” And I’m sharing that with you because when we get into these control-strategies, “my will” is the ego saying, “You’re going to fail if you don’t do this” and “You have to do that” and “It’s okay to have this drink” – that’s my will - and for him every time he saw himself, you know, about to say something or about to enter into his old control strategies he’d say, “Not my will but my heart’s will.” And that started to bring the whole thing above the line. He started to see how many of his thoughts were keeping him completely in that trance of fear. One of my favorite of all spiritual teachers – his name is Sri Nisargadatta, he wrote a book “I Am That” – and he has a line that just comes back to me over and over again and it’s that “the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.” Our minds keep us in the trance of fear. Our minds tell us “You’re not good enough,” our minds tell us what’s wrong around the corner, our minds tell us what we’ve got to do to control things. That’s “My will,” “my ego’s will.” It’s the heart that begins to sense that if we want to be free we have to come into presence, we have to face what’s here. And we need to do it with the help and support of each other. “The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.” We’re going to now shift and look at how can you over these next few weeks start practicing once you sense that you’re in that trance of fear. And sometimes your indicator will be that you just physically tight, sometimes you’ll be sensing the fear-thoughts, sometimes you’ll see the control-behaviors. Any of them is the entryway: Okay, this is the trance of fear. If you are not familiar with the acronym RAIN, it’s a weave of mindfulness and compassion and the letters stand for R is Recognize – Ah, recognize, fear is here. A is Allow – that means don’t go into the control-strategy, just pause, give it space. The I of RAIN is to investigate and it’s not mental, it’s not like saying, “Oh I’m afraid because my father treated me this way and now somebody else has this tone of voice…” that’s not the I, the I is investigate, “Okay, where am I feeling this in my body? What am I unwilling to feel?” It’s like really getting into the body. The N is to Nurture, is to bring kindness and care to that process. Then there is in RAIN what’s called “After The RAIN.” It’s notice the shift that’s happened in presence, how by bringing above the line attending and investigating and nurturing, notice who you are in the end, notice the shift from the scared self to the fearless heart-space. So that’s the RAIN process in a nutshell. And what’ll do for the remainder of our time right now is just to look at the Recognize and Allow because that alone is incredibly powerful to how bringing things above the line. But just before we start I want to name that with RAIN - even though it seems sequential - the N of Nurture you need all the time. You need the N before you start. You need to even engage at the very beginning with kindness, and at any point during the process, if you’re feeling caught; again it’s the quality of kindness. And there are many different pathways to kindness and many ways that you can offer some calming and soothing to the body and the heart in the process. So nothing is formulated. You each have to customize for yourself. But this gives you a structure that’s useful. To keep in mind that fear - I think of it like a wild shy creature that’s in the woods and it’s like we are standing in the meadow and we are saying, “Come on out, I’m here to be with you.” It takes inviting with real gentleness and kindness and interest and then you will see what happens, but the beginning of RAIN is when you sense fear to name it and to allow it to be there. The shamans say that when you can name a fear it loses its power over you. To just say, “Okay fear, fear, unpleasant,” it loses its power - not all the way clearly but some. And there is a lot of science that correlates - especially from UCLA - that by mental notation, naming what’s going on, you activate the prefrontal cortex and that quiets the limbic system and there is more coming back online with executive function, with compassion, with mindfulness. So naming helps. Now the example that I share with you on Recognize and Allow is my very favorite example - it’s something that I’ve remembered now for decades and I wrote about it in “Radical Acceptance” - a man who was at a retreat and he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. And he needed help getting around the retreat. His wife was there to get him to the meditation hall and the dining room and so on. And when he came in for an interview I was surprised at how upbeat he was. And I asked him… He was a psychologist, he had been meditating for a number of years, but he knew it was going on. And he told me that it was like the fall time, when the leafs are falling, it’s not “bad,” it’s just what’s happening – which I thought, wow, that’s pretty wise. Then he shared something that had happened in the onset of the disease. He said he was teaching, he went to a place to give a workshop, about hundred people there, and he was about to start and he went totally blank, like completely blank, like he had no idea what he was going to say – in fact, he didn’t even know what he was doing there, he didn’t know why people were looking at him expectantly. So that was the situation. And of course his heart starts pounding. So here is what he did. First of all he didn’t do anything, he just paused, and then he started naming what he was aware of: “pounding heart” and then he kind of bowed; “scared” bowed; “feeling a clutch right here” bow; “embarrassed” bow. This went on for a while just naming his experience and allowing it. And finally he said you know he looked around and he said, “Well I am sorry.” And you might imagine… A number of people actually had tears in their eyes ‘cause one person said it, they said, “Nobody has ever given us the teachings this way.” And what had he done? Well, he sensed the trance of fear about to take over, and he paused, instead of the control-strategies, he paused and he named and just kind of allowed what was there to be there. The bowing is another way I think of saying yes and it doesn’t mean yes I like this but yes this is the reality at the moment let it be here. Or I use the phrase “This belongs, it’s just part of what’s happening right now.” No resistance. So that’s what Recognize and Allow is. And when we sometimes we don’t even need to go beyond that. If you can just recognize and allow the play of fear, it shifts you from that resisting, scared person to the space of presence that has room. And this is the gift of a mindful attention. Recognize and Allowing is the ground of mindfulness. When you are mindful of something it’s no longer under the line, no longer inside it, you are bigger, you’ve enlarged to the presence that can include it. And I mentioned at the beginning that this is really the practice that everybody on a spiritual path, if we want to wake up, needs to do. Otherwise we are living in resistance. There is a poem I like called “Fearing Paris”: “Suppose that 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 leads to Paris. Still you wouldn’t dare to put your toe smacked up on the city limit line, you’re not really willing to stand on a mountain site miles away and just watch the Paris lights come up at night. Just to be on the safe side you decide to stay completely out of France. But then the danger seems to close to 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 you a secret and says, ‘See Paris first’.” Don’t you like the way the siren is saying “Yeah, that’s right! See Paris first!” So of course we need to regularly visit Paris because the more we do – or whatever you want to call your fears – what happens is that we start developing a kind of space for them, that can tolerate that, that we are not tightening against them and we are not closing our heart against ourselves or others because there is kind of openness and a flow. And if we start developing that tolerance, our behavior starts changing because we don’t have to run away from the present moment because most of the time we’re running away from the present moment because it feels uneasy and out of control and has some fear in it. So it’s a regular practice and it’s an on-purpose practice. I can say for myself I often I’ll either sit down on my cushion at home or I often meditate as I’ve shared with you all by the river and I’ll come into stillness and I’ll ask, you know, “What really wants attention right now?” and I feel inwardly or I ask the question, “What am I unwilling to feel?” And quite often there is a kind of clench in there. And I’ve learned to not think there is something wrong. I just figured, “Oh that’s the fear of heart”; “the fear” not “my fear.” So imagine us all, all of us here and those that are listening online, if we’re all just practicing with fear and when you are practicing think that there is hundreds and maybe thousands of other people that are practicing going “Oh there is that fear clench!” And what about if we just breathe with it and what about just feeling the feeling and being kind. And you can even put your hand where it is. There is a lot of evidence that if you just touch yourself the warmth of the hand right here at the heart helps to bring some comfort. You can breathe; you can breathe long and deep a bit - anything that calms you down that can be helpful - but stay and feel where that clench is, visit Paris. So the starting place for us as we explore this on the spiritual path - this evolving consciousness by opening to our fears – is wherever there is some expression of that fear trance shows up. And we named a bunch of them whether it’s the armored body or the worried thoughts or the controlling behaviors. And take some time to pause and ask yourself, “What am I unwilling to feel?” and bring kindness and curiosity. And we’ll just practice a little bit of that right now as we’re together sitting and then I invite you to take it home and explore it for the freedom of your own heart and it also a freedom that ripples out to others. So please sit comfortably. And close your eyes. And take a moment to let go of any unnecessary tension or tightness in your body. And as we did at the beginning of the talk I invited you to scan for where you might have some stress in your life that brings up anxiety or fear. And again I invite you to look for that and not something that is on a scale from one to ten a ten, something that’s more maybe a five or a six ‘cause it won’t serve you right now as we do this light RAIN with fear. So it might be something that’s coming around the corner where you’re afraid, some gathering socially or something to do with work, or maybe it’s in an individual relationship some confrontation coming up, maybe it’s your fear for another person what they are going through. Let yourself get close in with what’s going on so you kind of sense the worst part, like what is it you are really afraid is around the corner. Maybe there is a belief you’re going to lose something, you’re going to fail. So you are beginning to notice the fear beliefs in the mind. Maybe you are noticing that you can begin to come into the body and ask yourself, “What am I unwilling to feel?” Recognize, just name, name what you are aware of. Maybe what you first come to is anger, it might be fear, it might be hurt, vulnerability. Whatever you notice. And keep paying attention just recognizing, naming, allowing it to be there. Maybe there is that clench. And to allow means just really let it be there for now. And if it helps you though putting your hand on your heart or wherever you feel strong feelings – you could put your hand on your throat or your belly – you are beginning to accompany yourself in the process. This is the beginning of nurturing as it’s going on which can only be helpful. So you might experiment. What am I unwilling to feel, to feel in the body, to recognize it, to allow and to deepen with investigating, just to really sense: Where is it? And where is the most vulnerable place? Let whatever you discover belong here, let it be here, as if you are bowing and saying, “Okay, this too.” Investigating it, feeling it. And I described those wild creatures in the forest. Just sense what this part of you might most need to feel embraced and held by you, to feel welcome, to feel cared about, accepted. So you are asking: What does this fear part need? How does it want me to be with it? And that’ll guide you in nurturing. And just offering a really kind presence. You might sense as part of After The RAIN even just for these few moments the difference between the scared self and this growing heart-space, this kind presence that’s attending. This is the beginning of freedom - that shift. And you might sense that you are with others – hundreds of thousands of others – that are the night travellers facing fear. Maybe you can think of one person in your life right now and the fears they are feeling. Let your heart include them so it’s not “my fear” but it’s “the fear,” the clench that we are all feeling, all of us, all of us. Facing and awakening through fear. All of us evolving from that fearful, separate self to this heart-space, this shared heart-space. The poet Hafez writes, “How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all of its beauty? It felt the encouragement of light against its being. Otherwise we all remain to frightened.” As we close you might sense your own intention to bring that light and that care to the fear that is universal and living through your body-mind and others, your intention to discover the heart-space, the fearless heart-space, that can include fear but not be controlled by it. Namaste and thank you for your attention. [bell]