Recognizing Fear's Messages and Sitting with What's There
Reconocer los mensajes del miedo y permanecer con lo que hay
A student describes how recognizing the repetitive belief systems that accompany fear has helped them return to direct experience, leading to a discussion about the physiological roots of emotional patterning and what happens when we learn to feel safe with fear and pain.
Recognizing Fear's Messages and Sitting with What's There
A student describes how recognizing the repetitive belief systems that accompany fear has helped them return to direct experience, leading to a discussion about the physiological roots of emotional patterning and what happens when we learn to feel safe with fear and pain.
One thing that has been helpful for me is getting familiar with the little belief systems, the little messages that the mind sends out along with fear. When I hear those, I say, "Ah, yes, that's familiar. I know that one." It becomes so obvious when it repeats itself, so obvious that it's not true, that it's frozen in time. That helps me move away from the little monologue and go back inside, just checking: "I know this pattern, and I'm afraid of fear. Oh, it's just fear. Okay, go inside, check it out, you'll see." It's such a simple process, but the conditioning is strong. I recently got a book that talks about the whole physiological process set in at a very young age, so it's not just psychological. In other words, it's all about being gentle, forgiving myself, and just asking: right here, right now, what's up? That's it.
That's exactly what I was telling a friend two days ago. Exactly. You invite this gentleness and patience because your actual brain physically needs to change. The habitual patternings of thought are hardwired in the brain. They are malleable, but literally, physically, the synapses and neurons need to start making different connections. That's what you're describing. From a very young age, we learn how to not feel certain things, and the way the energy of an emotion is dealt with is through patterns of thinking that push the energy in a different direction. By energy, I'm talking about something electrochemical. Physics can see it. It's a real thing.
Noticing the habit, contacting the fear
Over time, we can bring attention to that process of thinking, which is what you're describing: noticing, "Oh, there's the habit of this kind of thinking, but what's actually there is fear." You start getting in touch with the fear. There's a direct contact with that energy. And what's going to happen, one hundred percent of the time, is that the pattern of thinking will slow down, because its purpose was to keep you from feeling the fear. That was the coping mechanism for a young child, because the fear was too much for that psyche to relate to directly. The same goes for pain, shame, all kinds of forms of fear and pain, emotional and deeper.
The hot tub: staying with intensity
This is what I was pointing to in one meditation about the hot tub. The mind is saying, "I want to get out of here, it's just too hot, I want to get out of here." The more you can sink into that and realize it's fine, that the flavor is actually quite interesting (the flavor of the fear, of the pain), the whole mechanism of protective thinking that pulls you away starts to realign. It begins to align to a pattern of safety. The mechanisms of the reptilian brain, which are saying "fight, flight," start shifting to: "Is this safe?" And that is well-being. That is peace.
Safety within terror
If you can be in terror and in pain and feel safe, then there is peace. The mind cannot imagine this. But when you are able to be in terror and in pain and feel at peace, feel safe (let's call it that way, because it's more like the pattern of the brain), you feel safe because you've sat with it again and again. Nothing happens, and it's totally okay. You start developing a sense of safety.
And then the mind would freak out.
It will freak out, but then it will just stop. Because the whole purpose of the mind is to protect you. The thing is, you come to the mind and say: "Please, master, protect me from fear and pain. Help me. Create the veil of illusion so that I can manage and deal with fear and pain. But don't protect me from seeing reality."
When there's nothing left to protect against
Once you open up and see reality, which is to sit with fear and pain, the most intense fear and pain you can conceive of, and then sit through it and find that you are safe, the mind goes: "There's no reason for that anymore."
There's a story from an animated movie where a character approaches a dragon, ready to fight it, ready to take it down. Then something shifts in the relationship. Instead of fighting, the character says, "You're very angry. What's going on? Poor dragon, you seem very hurt and angry." And the dragon responds, "Oh, thank you for seeing me."