Most of us experience a life full of wonderful moments and difficult moments. But for many of us, even when we are most joyful, there is fear behind our joy. We fear that this moment will end, that we won’t get what we need, that we will lose what we love, or that we will not be safe. We may think that if we ignore our fears, they’ll go away. But if we bury worries and anxieties in our consciousness, they continue to affect us and bring us more sorrow. We are very afraid of being powerless. But we have the power to look deeply at our fears, and then fear cannot control us. We can transform our fear. Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. The first part of looking at our fear is just inviting it into our awareness without judgment. We just acknowledge gently that it is there. This brings a lot of relief already. Then, once our fear has calmed down, we can embrace it tenderly and look deeply into its roots, its sources. Understanding the origins of our anxieties and fears will help us let go of them. Is our fear coming from something that is happening right now or is it an old fear, a fear from when we were small that we’ve kept inside? If you can look deep into your fear and have a clear vision of it, then you really can live a life that is worthwhile.
Thich Nhat Hahn
When we’re feeling aggressive — and in some sense this would apply to any strong feeling — there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. So what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. [However] Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. We discover that joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid. So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy.
In each situation, it seems to us that the disturbing emotion or suffering that arises in our mind is very solid and powerful. Since it is so intense, it appears to be more powerful than we feel we are. However, if we actually look and meditate on the mind’s nature, we discover that all the things arising in our mind — thoughts, disturbing emotions, sadness, and misery — are [less solid]. If we scrutinize them, looking to see what they really are and where they really are, we will discover they are empty of substance and location. When we look directly at the thoughts, disturbing emotions, and misery that arise in our mind, we cannot find where they are located, or where they came from, or whether they have a shape or color. We never find any of these qualities that all the objects seem to have.
We can see the mind as like a room. The things and people in the room are like the thoughts, the mental objects. We can think, ‘I like this one, and I don’t like this one, and this one’s okay.’ We can be very busy sorting out which thoughts we like and which thoughts we don’t like, but have you noticed something else about the room? What else is in it? Space… So instead of focusing on the objects, we can focus on the space around them. Sometimes when there is a lot of thinking, all we can see is the thinking; it is as though it occupies the whole mind. But there is a way of recognising that the mind is much bigger than the thinking. Instead of focusing on the thought, we can focus on the space around the thought. If we have a very strong emotion like anger or grief, we can start thinking about it and wondering what to do about
Mindfulbalance 