Afflictive Emotions: Fear

So we are exploring our emotional life, the inner life of feelings and emotions and how they feed our mind states. In the Buddhist psychology, they are known as afflictive emotions. Emotions that bring great harm and suffering upon ourselves and others. And we spent a couple of our practice periods with anger and today I would like to call in the emotion that anger most often covers over and that is the emotion of fear.

Transcript

So we're exploring our emotional life and to start I'd like to quote from Carl Jung.

He wrote,

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.

The latter procedure however is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

Yeah,

But necessary.

The inner life feeds you know the feelings,

The emotions,

They feed our mind states.

In the Buddhist psychology some of these emotions that we're exploring together are known as afflictive emotions.

Emotions that bring about great harm and suffering upon ourselves and upon other people.

And we spend a couple of our practice periods with anger.

Like we really looked at anger together and I encourage you to still get to know this story.

The story of the historical story of your anger.

That's an important inquiry.

And today,

Today we're looking at the emotion that anger most often covers over.

So if their first response is anger,

Then the emotion it often covers over is fear.

And fear is an extremely potent emotion.

And when we're not aware of its potency,

We make many of our life's decisions from it.

When people aren't aware of fear operating,

They spend their life not really engaging or setting up all kinds of intricate sort of walls and ways of protecting ourselves.

At some point all of us are influenced by fear.

How we see the world,

How we see ourselves and the choices that we make.

It's always interesting to put together a talk on some of these afflictive emotions because they arise in me in an interesting way.

To get to see them again and how the flavor of the emotion changes with my practice.

In the ancient Buddhist psychology,

A lot of the emotional life,

Our motivations in life are broken down into two categories.

Those which are skillful and those that are unskillful.

Those that are helpful and those that are unhelpful.

Those that are wholesome and those that are unwholesome.

And the unskillful side,

The unwholesome side,

It's sometimes seen as the bad side.

Things like hostility and hatred,

Lost and greed.

They're considered unhealthy and unskillful.

But what's interesting is that fear is never considered unhealthy or unwholesome.

It's never considered somehow bad.

And it's not on the wholesome side either.

It's not been put into a class of emotions that our practice is supposed to uproot and overcome.

There are healthy fears and then there are the ones that limit our life.

So the idea is to not put fear in a negative category,

But to understand it and respect it.

It doesn't make us a bad person to be afraid.

It doesn't make us a wrong person to have fear.

It just comes with the territory of being a human being.

Sometimes it's quite intense fear and sometimes it's mild.

The problem with fear is not fear itself,

But how we behave because of the fear.

So some people,

When they get afraid,

They get angry or they attack.

That was a strategy of mine for many years.

I can relate to that one.

Some people,

When they're afraid,

They collapse.

They collapse.

Some people run away.

That's a new strategy that I notice in my mind.

It wants to run away when I'm afraid.

I just want to leave.

I want to leave now.

So that's a new one that's come in that I'm quite aware of.

So it changes.

It's not like you have a static way of being and that's it.

Some people,

When they're afraid,

They put their head in the sand.

So it's not like you have a when they're afraid,

They put their head in the sand.

So what do we do with fear?

How do we behave because of it?

Like this is an important inquiry and to understand that it changes.

How you may have responded to fear in the past may be very different than how you respond to fear today.

Fear is not a problem in and of itself,

But the impact,

How we live with it,

It might be.

Anticipation is kind of a main ingredient for fear.

You know,

We're on our way to what's going to go wrong.

Have you noticed that?

And some of the things that we anticipate will happen and like,

And they will actually happen.

And some of them that we anticipate will happen will not happen.

You know,

What's interesting is that we suffer so many things in life that don't happen.

It was Mark Twain who said,

I've had a lot of worries in my life,

Most of which never happened.

And that can be said for all of us.

And the way that fear lives in the body from the neck down,

We've been talking a little bit about practice from the neck down,

You know,

The current,

The undercurrent of fear,

Oh,

It's really uncomfortable.

And in a way,

Fear is designed so we dislike it.

And then we act,

You know,

We act because we don't like the feeling.

So we have to do something about it.

Or sometimes when there's a lot of fear as a way of being,

We numb it with drugs and alcohol,

Social media,

Shopping.

The problem with avoiding fear is that it's still there.

It's in the body.

It just knocks on the on the body in a different from a different door.

You know,

If you're avoiding fear,

It could come out as depression,

Which we will explore next week.

It can come out as anger,

Which we just covered.

But it comes out and it comes out sideways.

It could come out as physical ailment in the body.

So one of the ways to understand fear that I found is helpful is to shift our orientation to it from thinking in terms of I'm afraid to I have fear.

It's the same with anger.

Like I am angry is different than I have anger right now.

The differences in that like I am I am is kind of like this is who I am.

I'm identifying with it.

I'm defining myself by it.

Whereas if I'm afraid to I have fear,

I'm defining myself by it.

Whereas if we frame it as I have fear,

Or there is fear here,

It's not the whole picture of who we are.

So there's not this over identification with it.

It's a way of like just changing that framing can create a larger awareness is to kind of bring bring that attention,

A kindness of attention.

You know,

So if we know that we're afraid,

We can help the fear feel safe.

We can help the fear feel safe.

So often what we do is we react to the fear and become more afraid.

And then we get rolling with the fear and we make decisions based on it.

We talk ourselves into hiding it or denying it or getting pissed off.

And we're not,

You know,

We're just triggering it more and more and the fear then gets intensified.

And then we get more afraid and then we take on more action.

So mindfulness practice is learning how to be learning to how to help the fear feel safe,

Going towards the fear with kindness,

Towards the fear as a safe person.

It's not an easy thing to do.

Some people I know,

They actually when they're feeling really afraid,

They hold themselves,

They sort of hold their whole body,

Or they hold their hand.

But so doing this kind of creating this safety in meditation is useful.

Because hopefully,

When we're sitting with fear in meditation,

We're safe enough.

We're not causing harm when we're still and we can be with it.

We don't have to push it away.

It's just an uncomfortable sensation in the body.

And maybe and maybe you have to hold your body,

Maybe you have to hold yourself or hold your hand.

Because the awareness of fear,

It is like cupping your hands together.

It's like holding the fear.

And practicing with fear is really powerful.

Because there's a there's a decision,

You know,

You're not collapsing into it.

Or you're not just jumping into the habit of reacting to it.

When we can see that there's fear,

But we're not afraid,

Like that is mindfulness right there.

It doesn't have to take over.

Like the,

That seeing of it is our is our ground is our nature.

And there's nothing inherently being like there's nothing inherently wrong with being afraid.

It can be really for many of us a growing edge.

It certainly has been for me.

And so one of the ways we can begin to work with fear in the same way that we did with anger is we begin talking about it,

Begin to normalize the fear that we have,

Maybe getting to know the story,

Like what is the historical roots of fear?

Was there a manifestation of fear in your upbringing?

And maybe you don't start with the deepest,

Darkest fears you have.

But asking yourself in a general way,

How you experience fear?

How does it feel in your body?

Like,

Where do you feel it?

And what is the attitude towards it?

Do you get angry?

Do you get afraid?

Do you run away?

What's fear like for you?

So this is our exploration for the time that we have left.

And for those that join on insight timer in the mornings,

I invite you to write about this.

Get it out of your body and onto some form of either art or through just the written word.

So thank you for your kind attention.

Reviews

Illuminating, tools for responding to fear rather than reacting. Recognising fear is a start. Thank you 🙏❤️

Absolutely spot on analysis of what can be hiding behind fear and how it can sneak out sideways. Thank you 🌟