Tag: Fear

At times we need to face what we are afraid of

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The tendency to pretend everything is okay, while avoiding unpleasant realities, can be seen in external social relationships and internally as well.  But to train your heart and mind you need to stop pretending. Destructive patterns thrive on being hidden. That is what allows them to maintain their power. But if you are brave enough to arouse these powerful forces, to confront them, and to examine them, you can begin to free yourself from their control. Ironically, in order to develop true peace, you need to be willing to rile things up.

Judy Lief

The energy that is in our fear

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When we come face to face with the fear and pain in our psyche, we stand at the gateway to tremendous renewal and freedom. Our deepest nature is awareness, and when we fully inhabit that, we love freely and are whole… When we stop fighting the energy that has been bound in fear, it naturally releases into the boundless sea of awareness. The more we awaken from the grip of fear, the more radiant and free becomes the heart. 

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Not getting carried away by the wind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes  Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche

An underlying reality

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It is good to examine the reasons why we find fault with others or gossip or blame them for things that have happened. Often we will see, if we look deeply enough, that these behaviours are rooted in fear. Fear and anxiety evolved to keep us from physical danger. Our brains use the same mechanisms when it comes to emotional danger also, and depending on the upbringing we have, we can find that we expend a lot of energy each day dealing with fear. This underlying fear is not easy to work with; however, acknowledging it and becoming aware of our instinct to run away  or cover it up with distractions, relationships and busyness,  is a necessary starting point. We practice looking at what scares us and opening to all that life offers. We develop a greater compassion towards ourselves and our confidence can grow.

If we are honest with ourselves,

most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.

Jon Kabat Zinn

The key to our happiness: the natural warmth of the heart

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Meditation is one of the keys
to unlocking the natural generosity of the heart.

Underneath the greedy and selfish thoughts and feelings that are part of the human condition lies a pure desire to help.

We experience this in our mindfulness practice.

When we let go there is a natural acceptance
and feeling of care.

Noah Levine

A key way of working with fears: Stay with the emotion in the body

Karl Duffy2 Comments

As the previous post noted, we try to bring awareness to the patterns which repeat in our lives. However, they can often have very deep roots in the emotional wounds which we carry with us from the past  of which we are unaware. This quote points to  a way of working with them as they actually manifest in the day-to-day of our experience. Most of our deep wounds are connected to relationships in the past and therefore we  can imagine a situation where a current relationship causes our anxiety and fears to rise.  These then give rise to a cascade of thoughts about ourselves or others, painting worse-case scenarios or stories about deficiencies in ourselves. What is the best way to work with this?  In this moment we do not know the roots in the past which the experience has touched into. However, we do have a very real feeling – of fear, or of  flight – in the body. So we stay with that. We acknowledge, if possible,   the story line that the mind is running, but leave it to one side. We try to stay with fear or anxiety as an embodied feeling and work with the energies associated with the feeling.  Stay with the emotion with kindness and non-judgment as much as you can as a feeling in the body, breathing into the feelings and widening the space around them. In this way we hold ourselves  and our fears in awareness and acceptance, just as a mother would hold a frightened child.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

Eckhart Tolle