When we begin to practice mindfulness of letting go, we often stumble on fear. Fear arises because of an insecure, emotional, or greedy attachment to ideas, concepts, feelings, or physical objects. It can also be caused by coming into contact with something that we do not understand or whose outcome is uncertain.
Your practice of mindfulness has taught you that it is not the mental states themselves that make you uncomfortable, but your attitude towards them. You may have the attitude that mental states are part of your own personality, part of your existence. Then you try to reject the unpleasant ones as if they were foreign bodies. But you cannot really reject any of them, because they were not yours in the first place. Your best response is to maintain a steady practice of observing your mind, without reacting with clinging or aversion to anything that comes up, but skillfully working to free the mind from all unwholesome states. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Fear visits the mind but is not the mind. Mind is clear, open and luminous.
Try this simple exercise:
Sit quietly and notice whatever sense experience seems most prominent. It could be sound, a sight, smell, taste, the physical sense of sitting or some body part, or a thought. Don’t think about this. Whatever comes up first is the right answer. Now wait a minute and then see if the same sense experience is still most prominent. The chances are it will be a different sense experience (maybe the thought about what sense experience is prominent). Can you see that during these moments the awareness of sense experiences and thoughts arose and visited the mind. But the mind remained the same. It remained clear and open and able to contain whatever mind and body experience was presented to it. This is the clear, open, and “empty” nature of mind. Just as sense experiences visit the mind but the mind is unchanged, so too does fear and aversion visit the mind but the mind remains unchanged.
PREPARATION ASSIGNMENT #27
FEAR #4
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is not being stopped by the fear that we experience because we realize that the basis of all fear is not seeing things as they really are.
The following are important forms of courage for us to cultivate.
- Courage is recognizing that we do not know anything with certainty. It is only the conditioned mind that needs the false sense of security that comes from thinking that we know.
- Courage is letting go of all books, scriptures, and the authority of those who say they know. It means living from the truth that arises in each new moment.
- Courage is giving up the desire to be appreciated by others, knowing that when you serve others, you are really serving yourself.
- Courage is to resolving our issues from the past and to releasing our mind from carrying this unpleasant burden.
- Courage is living an ethical life and dealing with our moral dilemmas.
- Courage is to facing aging, illness, and death with equanimity as opposed to dread or grief.
- Courage is being authentic in all of our relationships.
- Courage is practicing consistently and not giving into discouragement and doubt.
- Courage is opening to the truth of impermanency, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness.
- Courage is surrendering to life, to trust life’s natural unfoldment.
- Courage is to accepting our shadow side; reclaiming and accepting those aspects of ourselves that we have denied, pushed away, kept hidden and suppressed.
- Courage is seeing all points of view as being relative. It is recognizing that there is no “right” point of view. We realize that by holding to beliefs the mind feels vulnerable with a corresponding need to self-protect.
- Courage is staying mindfully present with all mental states without holding to the pleasant ones or resisting the unpleasant ones.
- Courage is remaining open-hearted without having to be defended or protected by the mind.
How do we realize the true nature of fear?
Our emotions, including fear, are not random. They arise due to our genetics, our conditioning, our exposure to others who modeled various emotions, and to our past experiences.
Our patterns of emotional reactivity persist because we continue to feed
them. We charge them with power by grasping the pleasant emotions, resisting the unpleasant emotions, and by generally allowing the emotions to occur without becoming aware of their true nature. If we stop feeding the body the body will eventually die. Similarly, if we stop feeding the recurring reactive emotional patterns, they will eventually extinguish and no longer arise in the mind.
All emotions, including fear, are conditioned processes that rise and fall based upon various causes and conditions. They are made up of thoughts, feelings (i.e., they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), and sensations in the body. All of these mental and physical phenomena are impermanent and are nothing more than compressed emptiness. They have neither a core nor an inherent substantiality to them. They arise, manifest, and if not interfered with, will quickly fade away.
When these emotions arise they do so impersonally. In other words, they are merely reflexive actions of the mind and body that arise with consciousness as their support, and are truly selfless. There is actually no self or “person” to whom they occur.
How do we see the truth of fear?
- Look directly at the fear as it arises to consciousness without turning away. We want to fully open to the fear; to allow the fear; to become intimate with the fear; to encounter the fear; and to surrender to the fear. (The fear can be experienced by opening to the contractions in the body, the quality of feelings that are present, or by observing the related thought processes in the mind.)
- Avoid the traps that support the mind looking away from the experience – labeling the emotion, judging the emotion, rationalizing the emotion, attempting to discover why the emotion arose, or promising oneself that we will not allow that emotion to arise in the future.
- By fully opening to the fear in this way, without the interference or screening that comes from the cognitive processes, the fear will reach a critical point which may feel quite threatening to the mind. However, if we refuse to be deflected at this crucial moment, the fear will eventually pop – it will dissolve into the emptiness from which it came. It was actually nothing but compressed emptiness from the very beginning.
- If only one time we are able to stay present in this way, not only will we realize the impermanent and selfless nature of fear, our future practice will dramatically change. We will have the confidence that comes from directly realizing the true nature of experience.
- While going through this process it is important to be patient and compassionate with ourselves. Our conditioning runs deep and it takes a while for these reflexive patterns of mind to be seen through.
Please know that this is a process. Conditioned patterns are often deep ruts on the path. Be patient and befriend impatience. Be fearless while befriending fear.
