Fear And Fearlessness

In this excerpt from a longer talk given in 2020, Lama Liz explores working with fear. To experience fearlessness, we must go beyond fear, which starts by getting to know it. When we learn how to befriend our fear, we can begin to step into fearlessness and respond to life with an open heart.

Elizabeth Monson, PhD, is the Spiritual Co-Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship and the Managing Teacher at Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She was authorized as a dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism after over 30 years of studying, practicing, and teaching Tibetan Buddhism in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages.

Transcript

I would like to talk a little bit tonight about fear.

And the reason I've been thinking about fear,

I just actually came out of a retreat.

I was in retreat for the past week,

And I came out to,

Again,

A different world.

It's a pretty unstable time,

And coming on the heels,

Or really in the midst still,

Of this pandemic,

There is a sense that even more ground is shaking than was just with the pandemic itself.

We really are living in a time that maybe most of us,

Or many of us,

Have not experienced before to this extent,

Or within these particular conditions.

And there's not a lot of ground,

And there's not a lot of clarity.

And certainly those people to whom we should be able to turn for leadership and wisdom are basically non-existent.

I don't know about all of you,

But I definitely find myself experiencing various forms of fear.

So I want to talk about fear,

And I want to talk about fearlessness,

And I want to just explore those experiences,

Those two experiences,

And suggest that it might be possible for us to begin to really understand this energy that arises that we tend to call fear.

What is this emotional energy?

What is fear?

What does it look like?

What does it feel like?

And then what is fearlessness?

What is fearlessness?

What does fearlessness look like?

What does it feel like?

What does it mean?

So I'm going to start with fear.

And as I was thinking about this,

I thought about really four different kinds of fear,

And there may be probably more,

And this is just one way of parsing out different kinds of fear,

Different levels of fear,

I think is a better way of saying it.

But I would first say there's something that I would call gross fear,

Or really what I would also co-name the fear of not knowing.

It's the reactivity that we experience when we encounter circumstances that we cannot control and that may pose a threat to us.

So it's probably one of the ways that many of us have felt in relation to the coronavirus,

Especially when things were very much,

Well,

I mean,

Really,

Things are still very much unfolding in that realm,

But we really don't know what's going to happen.

We don't know how long this pandemic will last.

We don't know what normal will look like.

Was there ever even any such thing?

I'm not sure where we came from was normal in any way.

Then I would say there,

Another kind of fear is something you might call a subtler fear,

Which is more like a basic anxiety or a subtle vibrational energy that is underneath everything we think or say or do,

The fear that something isn't quite right,

That we are not quite right.

And no matter how much we try to put certain conditions in place to feel all right,

Nevertheless,

There's this underlying sense of unease or fear.

And why is that?

It's because actually on some fundamental level,

We are not in harmony with things as they actually are.

We resist things as they actually are in an effort to shore up this idea of a self and to prove that that self exists to ourselves and to others.

So that all of that together creates this subtle humming energy of fear or anxiety beneath our experience.

And then we might also talk about fear of change,

Fear of impermanence,

Because pretty much everything that many of us have relied on has is totally destabilized and radically changed.

Everything is changing daily.

You know,

Every day we're in a new situation.

We're looking at new developments.

We're trying to understand where we are,

Where we're going.

There's no sense that we can just relax.

And there's a real feeling that we can't hold on to anything because things are constantly and fundamentally changing.

So any fantasy that we may have had about finding a place for rest or real security is not really there.

I think that's generally true,

Actually.

But we don't notice it as much as we do in circumstances like this.

And then there's what I would say for the fourth kind of fear is a much deeper or more primordial fear.

And this is a fear that you can find discussed quite a bit in the Buddhist tradition.

But it's a fear of non-existence,

Of nothingness.

Sometimes it's named as a fear of emptiness when people don't really understand what emptiness means in the Buddhist tradition.

There's a sense,

Sometimes we touch this fear when maybe in meditation practice,

You come close to having a glimpse that the solid sense of self is actually a totally dissolving situation.

And that fear can really rise up in relation to that.

And I would say another reason for this level of fear is that there's a general cultural problem in this Western world in relating with death.

We don't know how to relate properly with death.

We don't know how to relate properly with the experience of seeing our bodies degrade and corrode as we age.

And our culture has supported a way of being in relation to death that suggests that we should live our lives as though death wasn't happening every single second.

And I think it's one of the reasons why the coronavirus experience can be so powerful is that death is emerging as a very stark reality in a culture that has systematically ignored and denied it.

We have put our dying people away where we can't see them,

Where we can't relate to them.

And it's a separate,

Private,

You know,

Don't go there.

So fear,

You know,

Those are just some kinds of fear.

There are lots of kinds of fear.

And I'll say a few more of them a little bit later.

But it's not just one emotional experience.

It's a very,

It's a spectrum of experiences that we might call fear.

Manifestations of energy in our experience that we might call fear.

And part of the problem of where fear,

Where you could say fear fundamentally arises from is the problem of attachment and grasping.

Trying to hold on to,

Trying to grasp,

Trying to solidify some sense of our basic existence in some way so that we find ourselves continuously engaged in a project of trying to protect ourselves,

To make ourselves feel safe.

And we have to engage in an ongoing energetic output,

A kind of scrambling to keep that sense of self secure.

And there's a contraction and a turning inward and a constant evaluating of our situation that can lead to a kind of even hypervigilance.

You know,

Another level of fear is,

You might call it something like hypervigilance,

Where we're always on the watch,

On the lookout for the threats.

So other ways we might name fear or fear might manifest in our experience.

We could,

It might manifest as anger.

It might manifest as blindness.

Willful ignorance,

Boredom,

Restlessness,

Speed,

Arrogance,

Jealousy,

Competitiveness,

And some of the more obvious manifestations,

Anxiety,

Depression,

Tension,

Or even pain,

You know,

Physical pain.

And fear can lead also to a strong sense,

And this is where the hypervigilance kind of thing comes in,

A sense of paranoia,

You know,

That we're trying to armor ourselves and be prepared for any possible threat.

And we start to see threats everywhere.

And we close ourselves off from the world,

From any kind of vulnerability or openness or sadness.

So how do we work with fear?

You know,

That's more of just a kind of an elaborate description of fear.

But how do we work with fear?

And I want to talk about two different strategies,

Shall we say.

And one of them I think we'll all recognize,

Which I'm calling neurotic strategies.

And these are things that we basically turn to when we feel very uncomfortable and we want to take our minds off how we feel.

We want to find a way not to feel what we're feeling.

So you could say everything from drugs,

Alcohol,

Substance abuse,

Even to things that are supposedly,

Actually supposedly meant to really help us turn towards and face our fear,

But we might use them more as a panacea.

So you could put meditation into that category,

Depending on how we're using meditation or even yoga.

You know,

Some way that it's being used as a way to bypass what we're actually feeling.

Entertainment.

You know,

The culture is built on entertainment.

And that was,

You know,

If you don't like what you're feeling,

Go watch a movie,

You know,

Go gamble,

Go whatever,

Right.

There's so many forms of entertainment.

Internet obsession.

You know,

I was just talking with a fellow teacher the other day who he described how when he finds himself feeling caught up in fearful and difficult emotions,

He'll find himself just surfing the internet,

Going here and there,

You know,

Just like looking and nothing really serious in any way,

But just finding himself lost in the internet world,

In the virtual world.

So all of these are basically strategies of distraction or avoidance and ways that we try to pretend to ourselves that we don't feel the way that we do.

You know,

The entertainment industry does feed off our fear and entertainment should be promoted and any thought of death should be avoided,

Right.

But thankfully,

We also have what I'm calling wisdom strategies,

Neurotic strategies,

And then wisdom strategies.

And wisdom strategies,

You know,

There are lots of wisdom strategies,

But since this is a talk in a Buddhist community,

I'm going to talk about Buddhist strategies.

So wisdom strategies begin all the way back at the time of the Buddha.

And what I want to read you is a very short paragraph from the life of the Buddha,

From a text called The Awakened One,

A Life of the Buddha,

That was written by Sherub Chudzin Kohn.

And I was very struck by this when I read it.

Because it's not something that it was pulled out in the life story of the Buddha and made so clear and obvious,

Really surprised me.

And I wondered about it,

You know,

I thought,

Why this particular topic,

Which is fear?

So this paragraph happens in the life story of the Buddha,

Right after the Buddha has,

He leaves the palace,

He leaves behind his life,

He renounces everything,

He goes out into the wilderness,

And he begins to look for teachers.

He wants to learn how to meditate.

He wants to learn how to practice.

He wants to learn how to overcome suffering.

And he practices with two different sanghas,

Two different communities,

Where he's trained very deeply in meditation practices,

Yogic practices,

And he very quickly has such an affinity,

After lifetimes and lifetimes of being a bodhisattva,

He has such an affinity for meditation,

And he quickly surpasses even those teachers.

And they want him to stay,

They want him to take over their communities,

They want him to become the main teacher.

And he says,

No,

I haven't found what I'm looking for.

So he leaves,

And he begins to wander.

So this is as he's wandering,

He began traveling southeast,

And again crossed the Ganges.

Then he moved by short stages through the country of the Magadans.

In the wild,

Uninhabited lands,

He was sometimes plagued by fear,

The kind of fear one feels when alone in a remote place.

Walking through the forest and suddenly hearing the loud snapping of a branch behind him,

He experienced dread.

When such things happened,

He deliberately worked to defeat his fear.

He refused to move a hair's breadth from the spot where the fear struck,

Or even to change his posture until he had overcome it.

Gradually,

He became better at this,

And began to seek out frightening places.

He visited forest shrines in the middle of the night where terror made his hair stand on end and his skin crawl.

He would not move from the spot until he had confronted the fear and subdued it.

Now,

A lot of the language there is about overcoming and subduing and conquering,

And that's just coming very much out of the time of the Buddha,

A very martial sort of realm,

Time period.

But really what that says to me,

That paragraph,

Is that one of the very first things that Buddha did on his path to awakening was to turn into the experience of fear.

That whenever fear came up,

Rather than trying to get away from it or distract himself from it,

He simply went right into it.

He paused.

He stopped.

He allowed himself to be present with what he was experiencing,

And he waited.

You could say that within the context of a lot of how we teach working with difficult emotions,

That in essence what he did is he began to familiarize himself with his own experience of fear.

To the point where he even then just felt that he wanted to stimulate fear in his experience.

There's a history in Buddhist culture of practitioners going into places like charnel grounds to face their fear,

To bring it up,

To face it,

And to befriend it,

To walk into the mouth of the demon,

Instead of trying to avoid it,

To see what it was all really about.

You hear stories about yogis and yoginis in charnel grounds facing their fear,

Surrounded by dead and decaying bodies,

Diseased bodies,

People going into long retreats and establishing protection circles,

Ways that they are,

Which are symbolic,

Which are meant to actually preserve the open spaciousness of one's own basic nature in order to be able to be present with fear.

Through their love,

They transform those demonic energies into protective energies that then work to actually help the practitioner not succumb to being overwhelmed by the difficult emotion.

In other words,

In some sense,

You could say that these harmful spirits and energies,

These demons,

They represent our fears.

When we tame these fears,

They turn into protectors for us.

But basically,

What the story of the Buddha here is asking us to do is asking us to begin to realize that protection from fear has to come from within us.

It isn't going to come from something outside of us.

It has to come from within us.

And that acknowledging fear,

Stopping,

Being present within the midst of our fear is one of the keys that we have to freedom.

So getting to know our fear.

And what I might suggest for that is watch yourself.

How do you move when you're afraid?

How do you talk?

How do you conduct yourself?

What does the world feel like when you're afraid?

When you're within your fear,

What does your world look like to you?

Do you chew your nails?

Do you avoid meeting someone's eyes?

Do you seek out different forms of avoidance or distraction?

Do you head to the refrigerator?

Do you open a bottle of wine?

Our little habits can tell us a lot about our relationship to fear.

And Buddhism really encourages us to investigate what is your relationship to fear.

And of course,

Then meditation.

Meditation is a tremendous tool for being able to begin to see more and more what our fears are and what relationship we have to those fears.

So I'm moving myself now towards what I want to talk about next.

And finally,

Which is fearlessness.

And fearlessness can only arise from the experience of making friends with fear.

And some part of this,

And this is something I want you to remember,

Because it's very interesting,

I think it's very interesting,

Is that whenever we feel a sense of threat or a sense of fear,

It simultaneously heightens our sense of being alive.

Because especially if the,

You know,

Fear is coming in a way that feels threatening or even life-threatening,

At the same time comes up this tremendous energy,

This sense of being alive.

So it's said that whenever fear of death arises,

At the same time,

A love of life comes along with it.

Actually,

We see how much we love life,

How much we love being alive.

And when we meditate,

When we rest with the energy of fear,

We discover that our,

This kind of basic survival instinct can be experienced as a basic energy of being alive.

I'm here,

I'm alive,

I'm present.

The energetic power of just being,

It's so vivid,

It's so powerful.

And that we can rest in that sense of being,

That sense of aliveness,

Which isn't fixed,

It's not solid,

It's changing all the time.

But it's reminding us that we are alive,

That we are actually here,

That we are actually present.

And that because we experience fear,

We can then experience fearlessness.

So fearlessness is a particular kind of term.

And actually,

Though,

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition,

What's really meant by fearlessness is beyond fear,

To go beyond fear.

It's not that fear goes away,

But we are able to move beyond it.

And in Tibetan,

The term for beyond fear,

Going beyond fear,

Is this term jigme.

So we go beyond fear when we start to examine fear,

Our fear,

Our anxiety,

Our nervousness,

Our concern,

Our restlessness.

When we look into the fear and we start to see perhaps what's underneath it.

What's underneath fear for you?

I think very often what we might find are many other emotions are underneath fear.

We may find grief,

We may find anger,

We may find anxiety.

We may also find deep down that beneath fear is sadness,

A kind of sorrow.

Because we know,

We know so deeply that we can't hang on to anything,

Right?

We're going to lose it all,

No matter how much we cling,

No matter how much we try to avoid circumstances that feel threatening.

Ultimately,

We are going to have to lose everything.

So there's a kind of sorrow to this life that is always present,

At least in my experience.

I feel this quite strongly sometimes,

The sense that,

And it isn't necessarily,

It's not a bad feeling.

It's more like a kind of tenderness or a sorrow that,

You know,

Where the side where you,

When you feel the most vividly alive is when you also feel the most sense of like sort of tenderness.

And vulnerability and sorrow.

You know,

And as we feel our fear more and more,

This kind of fearlessness starts to take place.

This moving beyond fear.

But the act of allowing fear to be present is an act of kindness to ourselves.

And beneath fear,

This fearlessness comes from letting the world break your heart.

Break your heart into a million pieces.

And every day we can have our hearts broken now.

Every day is not hard.

Right?

Every day.

Trempe Rimbushe calls this the tender heart of sadness.

He says that fearlessness is the tender heart of sadness.

That's what it is.

So it doesn't mean,

Fearlessness doesn't mean that you become reckless and you become careless and you're willing to jump off a cliff.

Or fearlessness means that your heart is completely open and it's broken.

It's broken.

And because it's broken,

Then you are able to see the vividness and the beauty and the tragedy of this human life.

And the humor.

Let's not forget the humor,

Right?

We also get to see the humor.

So when we can rest with that broken heart,

That tender heart of sadness,

We have far more capacity to respond accurately to situations that are arising.

Because we're not responding out of aggression.

We're not responding out of fear.

We're responding out of a kind of love.

We're responding out of a kind of joy,

Even.

And wanting to share that,

Wanting to find a way to make that a reality for everybody.

Part of that involves also having to let go of any attachment we have to how we want things to be and being present with things as they are.

As they are.

Accepting reality as it is right now.

And that's changing constantly.

It's changing constantly,

That reality,

Right?

It's not fixed.

But that means we have to stay very awake and very aware as to how things are changing.

You know,

We can't stop paying attention.

But when we do that,

When we do accept reality as it is,

As it's changing,

And we discover that we have the resources to respond,

Not from aggression and not from hatred and not from despair and not from fear,

But from some kind of open tenderness and vividness and sense of the power of what it means to be genuinely alive,

A kind of weight is removed from our shoulders and there's automatically a better,

A greater sense of inner peace and relaxation.

Which may even lead to more willingness to live in the now.

You know,

To really live in the now with the present moment vividness of all of our sensory experience.

Reviews

So helpful, clear and direct.
I was ready to hear this. 🙏

I am so impressed with your broken heart fearlessness example. Inspires me to move on from old wounds without judgement. Thank you 🙏🏻

How utterly to the point 👌🙏.
As fear is a basic experience as the Buddha showed it relevant from the beginning to quite advanced states.

Beautiful, thank you Lama-la thank you so much for sharing 🙏🙏🙏