When Fear Surfaces
Cuando Emerge el Miedo
A student asks whether the anxiety and fear that have arisen through practice will become a permanent state, and the teacher explains how uncovering buried emotions is a necessary part of the process.
When Fear Surfaces
A student asks whether the anxiety and fear that have arisen through practice will become a permanent state, and the teacher explains how uncovering buried emotions is a necessary part of the process.
I'm wondering if I could be in this state of being disturbed, scared, and jumpy for quite a while now. Is it going to be my new normal, or is it something I need to... See, that's just my mind trying to fix everything again.
Yes, but I would say you've been like this for decades. You've just been hiding it from yourself well enough. Now there's an opportunity for that to shift, so give yourself some time.
The addiction to emotional cover
It's like somebody who spent thirty or forty years being an alcoholic without realizing it, and then one day they see: "I think I have an alcohol problem." That's a really hard truth to take in, but it's a good thing to realize, because now you can do something about it. It's a metaphor, but the dynamic is similar. We are addicted to emotions, specifically the emotions that help us cover up what we really feel. When you start to feel fear, when you start to feel pain, the emotions you're addicted to stop being useful, because you don't need them anymore. You don't need the hits. You don't need the substance.
I don't even know what I was addicted to before.
It doesn't matter. I'm just giving you a bit of a map for understanding that you're now getting more in touch with what you really feel. You're on the surface of it.
So it's a new normal.
Not a new normal, but a passage
It's not a new normal. If you call it that, you're categorizing it as something stable, and it's not. It's normal in the sense that most people live like this, but don't think of it as something permanent. You're working through it. You're learning to relate to being anxious and afraid.
It's very simple. I can see a perfectly clear image of you, because I can see it of myself and of anyone else, and I have memories of it. Being three years old, being hurt, being afraid, and my parents not being able to contain that in me or help me contain it. I would come to them and feel less safe much of the time. So I learned to pretend I was okay. But then my mind started going and going and going, because I had to start telling myself stories, dreaming up whatever the thoughts made me feel emotionally, so that I could manage what I really felt. And I started having nightmares.
This is the human condition. It's not some weird thing that happened to you and me and a few others. It's very much how humans develop. Ideally, over time, we can create a society where parents are more aware, more healthy, so that their children have to go through less of this. But the process right now is this work. You realizing that you're anxious and afraid all the time, or a lot of the time, is striking gold. It's a really big discovery. I know it's very uncomfortable.
The mind creates emotional states
When you see your mind racing, when you go into that thinking, it's creating a state. It's creating a certain kind of emotion. That's what we're addicted to. And that's why this work, in certain parts of the process, is really good to combine with therapy, because therapy will go more deeply into what's arising and start to address it directly.
Therapy is someone there to reflect what you're experiencing.
Yes, and also to help you learn how to create space to feel all of that.
When the nervous system goes on high alert
Sometimes there are states of fear where you get that hypervigilance, where every little thing is really startling you. Your nervous system is affected and goes into high alert. Sometimes that can be a trauma response, and many people have had some kind of trauma, smaller or larger. The meditation process can definitely lift repression barriers, and then that material starts coming up.
If it's really bothering you, if it's unpleasant and you're finding it hard to get through on your own, that's where a therapist can help. It's more than just reflecting back what you feel. A therapist can also help you understand how you encoded beliefs and thinking from a childhood perspective, and then update that to an adult perspective. They can help your nervous system settle down so it doesn't keep reifying this terror state or fear state.
It's a matter of how much it's bothering you, and whether you want someone to help you with it. But these states can get stuck. They can go on repeat, and I don't think it's a good idea to interpret that as a new normal.
Fear is always fear about something
The fear is there as fear about something. From there, you want to keep looking, and therapy is really good for this: first relate to the fear, then ask what it is fear about, and then you can uncover that. Then you relate to what you've uncovered. I always simplify it as fear and pain, just to keep it simple. And because of this sense that "this is the new normal," I want to say: because you're opening this door, there is an end to parts of this process, where you move on to something else. That is possible.
The texture beneath the label
The sensation of physical pain, experienced directly, doesn't get labeled as pain. It's really hard to describe. If you experience physical pain directly, there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, it has a quality of love, because it's a love of something we are so attached to. But fear comes in and taints it. What I'm describing is extremely subtle.
It would probably be easier to understand intellectually. Think of the physical body: it's always a physical body, and you don't know that. Also, why call it that? What's the use? It has a texture, like a color. Pain is a similar thing. Physical pain has a kind of texture. Emotional pain has a kind of texture. Fear has a kind of texture. It's important to experience the texture directly, more and more, rather than the naming of what it is.
And eventually, ultimately, it's a fear of death. But what is a fear of death? It's what we imagine when we imagine what we love most ending.