The New York Times notes that climate change has declined of late as a concern among people in the United States–as fears about the economy rise. Writing about a post-peak oil world and the limits imposed by climate change, Bill McKibben warns us to think otherwise: “I think those forces–a kind of ecological debt far more troubling than the economic debt with which we’re now grappling–will reshape the world in fundamental fashion.” Add to this list of pressing concerns: health care. One of the striking things about the current national political debate about health care reform is how clearly fueled by a fundamental fear of change some of the comments are: death panels? Hello?
Certain words start to take on an aura of fear: health care, H1N1 flu, climate change, the economy, money, my job, the health of my family. In a play of the senses, fear smells like fear which sounds like even more fear.
Writing about fearlessness in our time–a cultural climate sometimes glossed as “the Age of Terror”– can seem unrealistic. Yet fearlessness clearly cannot mean “being without fear.” That’s a preposterous and silly notion of bravery: “what, me worry? Bring it on.” Here fearlessness means being brave enough to face our fear, to experience it directly, to taste it.
There are essentially two kinds of contemplative instructions regarding fear in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition I practice within: one set of practices concerning ”that” and another set concerning ”this.” In the first case, “that” refers to the fear itself (and it could be anger or jealousy or any other strong, conflicting emotion). This approach–we can read about it in the many books of Pema Chodron or her teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche–involves letting go of our busy thoughts about the emotion we’re feeling. This means allowing our attention to drop down from the usual roof brain chatter–”Is it right that I feel this way? Will this feeling change by tomorrow? Who else feels this way? (nervously looking around) Do YOU feel this way?” — letting our awareness fall instead into the part of our body where we feel the emotion: tension in the solar plexus, a tightening in the chest, a flutter of groundless insecurity in the stomach. When the attention begins to oscillate–rapidly jumping back and forth between the ideas and concepts we have about fear and the dynamic energetic experiences in the body–it’s our previous training in the stability of mindfulness that will allow us to come back to experience in the body, again and again. Pema Chodron once called this the process of ”learning to stay.”
A question I’ve often heard on group meditation retreats: “What if the fear doesn’t go away?” This is a revealing question: it bespeaks a fear of fear itself, something like, “How can I make this uncomforable emotion go away?” (and, glancing at my watch, how long will that process take?) But when we remember that “fearlessness” here doesn’t mean the absence of fear, this question becomes less important: we can hear it as a voicing of the fear itself (just as anger often leads to being angry that we’re feeling angry at all). The key here is remembering that our basic fearlessness is expressed and strengthened in the act of being willing to feel the fear as directly as possible (without conceptual or narrative additives) and for as long as it lasts.
The set of meditative instructions regarding “this,” on the other hand, involves strengthening our own well-being. It’s as though the fear initially looms large over us: the giant King Kong of fear towering above us. We feel small, almost tiny, in comparison. What could we do against such a large adversary?
The journey of meditation involves discovering and cultivating an inner wisdom that is not dependent on any external support. It’s not the same as the usual conditional well-being in which we feel happy or content because something good happened: we were praised (and given a raise) at work, the test results reveal that we’re healthy after all, we enjoy a meal of celebration with family and friends. These are wonderful events, of course, but the unconditional well-being of the spiritual path is not based on things always working out the way we’d like. (This expectation is somewhat unrealistic.) Meditation leads to the discovery of a confidence “without beginning or end.” We discover an inner capacity to face the myriad events of life–sunny and rainy, hailstorms and rainbows–and this capacity feels stronger than the fear arising. It’s as though the giant shrinks some as our own inner confidence grows.
All of these streams can flow together: the conditional support of friends and family, the unconditional strength roused in meditation, and the wordless experience of the energetic upsurge we call “fear.” As my teacher often said: “Unless we experience fear, we cannot experience fearlessness.”
