Fear, Flow, and the End of I
Miedo, flujo y el fin del yo
A meditation exploring how identity creates fear, how meeting old pain brings freedom, and how effortless flow was always the nature of things.
Fear, Flow, and the End of I
Two kinds of fear
There's a fear that is just a natural experience of being human and alive,
and then there's a fear that is the end of I.
Let's call it death.
So it's what I imagine as the end of I,
but I, that I can only end if I think I know what I am.
So by that I mean I'm identified.
It's the same thing.
If I know what I am, that means I'm identified.
And I'm identified with something that is impermanent, which is all things,
but if I will be identified with anything, it's mind, body mind.
When identity feels threatened
So now, anything that brings the potential end of that which I'm identified with
is life-threatening,
and it'll bring about that fear that is paralyzing, or that we run away from.
And it goes deeper in the body mind, psychology, and makeup.
When we were children, very young, and the process of ego development happens, and identification happens,
pain can be so overwhelming to the egoic construct, the mental sense of self.
When pain is too much, the mental sense of self gets challenged and it cannot integrate it.
And so a process of repression begins where this is too much pain,
I cannot be with it.
But now that is always lurking as a life-threatening experience.
It was life-threatening for the egoic mind in early development.
Meeting what was repressed
And so part of this work includes what you could describe as emotional or shadow work,
where as you progress, you need to meet those fears and pains
and integrate them to a point where you start to knowingly feel:
I'm okay even with all of the biggest pains that I could imagine feeling,
or that I have felt, or that I am feeling.
No matter what fear and pain comes, what I am is prior to the fear and the pain, and it's not threatened.
And that's very liberating.
After that, it's hard for any experience in life
to bring up the fear that is life-threatening.
It all starts to feel like the roller coaster when things are intense.
A small example
If I made what I would call a mistake and some pain would come,
for example, if I'm in the kitchen and I would cut myself,
there would be a really intense reaction of self-blame and upsetness and frustration.
Or anything around missing a flight, or things like that.
But for example, with cutting myself,
it was really intense once. I cut myself quite a big cut right on the palm of my hand with a big sharp knife,
and I felt it. I didn't immediately recognize it was a bad thing.
I felt the pain and there was this super interesting, strange sensation.
And then I looked at my hand and I was bleeding,
and I was just like, wow.
And five minutes later, I washed my hand,
and it kind of clued in: what the hell, I would have been beating myself up, so upset and frustrated.
I had to be reminded to even remember. Oh yeah, that was how I would have been a hundred percent of the time.
I was very reactive like that with pretty much everything.
The weight of small choices
So many small choices would bring up this really intense, paralyzing fear
that I would have to first learn that it's fear and then face.
Like choosing a movie. Everything felt like this overwhelming choice.
I know that's also a personality type.
Not everybody would relate to that way of functioning and identification.
But now everything is absolute flow all the time,
even when there's frictions and challenges and stressors.
Flow was always here
The sense of flow used to be only when a moment is happening in a specific way
and I feel a specific way.
There's a really strong contrast between: everything is frictional,
choices are big, even small ones, they're all up to me,
and occasionally a sense of relief or flow.
And now everything is flow.
I can't not be in flow.
And just to clarify that, it was always flow.
It was as well before. I just didn't see it.
I didn't believe it. I believed there was an absence of flow.
I was believing a thing that wasn't real.
Flow was always. It's the nature of reality.
A dharma seal
In Buddhism they say there are dharma seals,
which means it's not something that is a realization you can have, a thing that comes and goes.
It's the nature of how things are. It's the nature of reality.
You discover the nature of reality and it can't go away.
It always was that way and always will be.
I could describe playfully: flow is a dharma seal.
To that which we are,
there is always effortlessness and acceptance.