Facing Fear in the Present Moment
Enfrentar el miedo en el momento presente
A student describes the difficulty of staying present with unpleasant experience, and the teacher explores how fear operates beneath the surface of avoidance and striving.
Facing Fear in the Present Moment
A student describes the difficulty of staying present with unpleasant experience, and the teacher explores how fear operates beneath the surface of avoidance and striving.
That was a very difficult meditation for me.
That seems to be what's happening for you, same as last week.
Yeah. And this relates to my question. Historically, most of what I'm doing on and off the cushion is just avoiding. The present moment is difficult for me, and I turn away with all kinds of distraction: food, movies, books, anything to bury myself in thought.
Lately, both on and off the cushion, I've been turning toward the present moment a lot more. Part of that is I found some pieces that were really nice, easy to pay attention to. But especially since last week, what's new to me is being present for difficult stuff.
When I am present for difficult things, I'm starting to see something. There's a lot I read over the years in dharma books about struggle with present experience, and I tended to roll my eyes at it. It seemed very abstract. But now I'm starting to taste it across a bunch of different situations: I'm present, there's something I really don't like, and I'm just fighting with it. There's restlessness. There's a need to turn away or get out of it.
A couple of things come up. One is striving, a lot of striving to try to get to one of the nicer present moments. The other very common experience is this feeling of: "I can't take this. If I stick with this stuff I can't stand for longer and longer, I'm going to exhaust myself and collapse, and then everything will be miserable again, and I'll go back to bad times." I try to pay attention to those two experiences, but I don't really know what to do with them other than to just notice them as part of the present. I'm curious if you can comment on that.
Naming what is actually happening
For sure. The last thing you talked about is fear. I'm not sure if that's obvious to you.
Fear? I guess the experience has this particular narrative attached to it, but yeah, it feels really bad. You're right, it's fear. It's anxiety.
With fear, we need to first see that it's fear. Otherwise we get trapped in the narrative.
We can get caught up in the narrative because to us it seems like we're doing the right thing. But if we are not aware that we are acting on fear, then fear will act through us. We basically hand our will over to the commandment of fear.
Fear says: "If you do what I say, you won't have to feel me." That is how it functions psychically through us. If you follow the narrative of what fear is saying, you'll get away from fear and everything is going to be okay.
You can see this in Christianity, which had a much bigger story about it: the temptation of Satan. But you could really minimize it to a functioning of the psyche, and you could also understand it in evolutionary and biological terms. A fear gets triggered, and if you do what the fear says, things will be better, because fear is telling you where danger is and you want to be away from danger.
The problem is we have evolved to a point where that response can get triggered for reasons that are not appropriate. We can be afraid, and it's ghosts under the bed. There isn't an actual threat. Fear can get triggered because of conditioning. Our bodies have become conditioned to react in a fear-like form based on threats that aren't actually real in the present moment.
I wanted to lay out that map so we can talk about how to relate to fear with discernment.
The voice of fear
First: know that it's fear. Otherwise you're going down the path of just giving in to it. Anxiety is a form of fear, more in the background. Though someone else here might correct me on that.
I would say it's not always mild or in the background. Anxiety can be a fear of fear.
That is bang on for me. It is fear of fear a lot of the time. Sorry to interrupt, but you nailed it.
So the relationship to this is: first, recognize what it is. You just said "fear of fear," and that connects to what I was describing. The voice of fear says, "If you do what I say, you won't feel me." The fear itself is uncomfortable, so we want to avoid it. We want to feel at peace. We want to feel that there is nothing wrong. And that powers the striving.
Discerning real danger from conditioned avoidance
One thing is to see what the danger actually is. You were saying, "If I don't do these things, maybe I fall back into the situation that was terrible, like in the past." Recognize that as anxiety, as fear, but don't immediately throw it out as unreal or as something to ignore. It's something to look at. Ask yourself: am I wanting to do something right now that I'm not doing? It's always about what you most deeply want to be doing.
Fear could be informative. There may be something we are not doing that we want to do, and so there's an action required. At other times, there isn't an action required. I'm just avoiding something that is present right now. In that case, the work is to sit, to feel, and to make room for what's happening.
That's very helpful. When you said it's fear, I thought, "Yeah, I guess I know that." But honestly, I think I don't really know it most of the time. I was feeling a little sheepish because it's sort of obvious when you say it. And the point about fear of fear was right on the money. I have high anxiety, so it's fear of fear of fear. A lot of the avoidance comes from that.
That distinction you're drawing is helpful: fear that tells me to put out the fire, stop the barking dog, or not get hit by a car, versus fear that just says, "I don't want to deal with what's right here." Most of my fear feels like it's directing me away from the present. Having avoided for so long, being present is unfamiliar to me.
It becomes a habit, the unconscious way of functioning.
Facing fear in increments
I'm not sure what specifically is sparking the anxiety. If it's actually the act of meditating, then perhaps this advice applies: the way to do it is to face it in little bits. Because if you try to take off too big a chunk and face it all at once, you can get flooded. But if you face it in increments, in increasing increments, it's usually manageable.
It very much applies. You might be sitting with something you want to sit with, and then you distract yourself. You could do exactly what was just suggested: it doesn't have to be sitting with it for an hour. It could be, "I'm going to take one minute on the clock and just totally go into this, and then free myself from that effort after a minute." Experiment. What is that like? Then maybe later that day, try it again for two minutes, three minutes.
In some meditations I point more toward the sensations: what is the discomfort? Really feel into it. One metaphor I like is to think of it as an acquired taste. We all know how something we didn't like when we were young, we later learned to like, and we realized there was actually a lot more value in it than we thought. An acquired taste is where you discover value in something that at first was distasteful.
In increments, you can learn to discover that there's a lot of value in feeling what you don't want to feel, in facing fear and letting it move through you. Fear is usually about not feeling a certain pain. Once we are able to stay with fear, we will probably discover pain underneath it. It's a deepening, more and more, into allowing sensations that at first our whole conditioning tells us are the wrong direction.
At some point we come to this work, or for other reasons we find ourselves addicted or dysfunctional, and we start to realize: I need to figure out how to be with this. Then we discover the value, because things start to unravel and improve as we are able to sit and let our awareness touch and hold sensations like fear and pain that we don't want to hold.
Fear as a signal of something unfulfilled
It really depends on what the fear is a fear of. If what's happening when you sit down to meditate is that the self is dissolving and you're afraid of that dissolution, that's one thing, and it's also in a sense what you're wanting. But it can also be more specific. As was alluded to before, you can be afraid of something because you're not doing something you should do. Perhaps you have a gift that's unfulfilled, or something really essential in you is upset that you're not following through, and you're not doing it because you're afraid to sit down and do it.