In Tara Brach’s excellent talk, The Courage to Awaken, she quotes Stephen Levine, who asked, if you found out you had only 3 days to live, who would you call? What would you say? And why aren’t you doing that now?
Recently a very old friend of mine, maybe the earliest friend I remember, got back in touch with me over Facebook. It was strange: I hardly recognized him, I asked a mutual friend if he was who I thought. We’d fallen out of touch at age 6 when his family moved to another state, so it was jarring and evocative to remember my last memory of him as a child and then read about his life, 23 years later, on his blog.
He’s had an exciting life so far, and has spent a lot of time confronting fear in a variety of ways – he was a professional gambler, then a renowned pickup artist, and these days is vegan and lives in a tiny RV with few possessions, traveling as a nomad.
His life has been so different from mine and still so active that it’s given me a lot to reflect on – like the question above, I think, which of the things he’s done do I feel a longing to do? And why have I not done them?
The single most recurrent theme in my practice is fear, the basis of the separate self, the very physical contraction inside that distances. Tara Brach describes it evocatively as the “space-suit trance”, that state of feeling like we’re an astronaut, hanging onto the mothership by a thin tether, and the panic we feel at the possibility of being entirely disconnected, when the reality is the opposite: the vastness of space is only isolating and cold if we fight it. Surrendering, we can find it’s enveloping and complete, love itself.
All of my attempts to control are based in fear: I contract, inside, resisting one outcome, I try to cause another. Realizing I can’t control outer circumstances only builds that contraction up. Soon it’s the only state I know. Surrender, the release of that internal contraction, is alien, takes practice, even though it’s my natural state. Surrender is difficult, because it means viscerally experiencing the fear.
One of my significant fears is that others see me as unlikable or incompetent. It’s pervasive – in social situations I tend to be either quiet and introverted so as not to expose that soft spot inside, the tenderness of vulnerability, or else I act gregarious and extroverted, but it’s just an affectation, something I learned to do, another suit of armor.
I’ve been paying attention to ways I behave differently around others than I would in private (beyond basics, like, “I wouldn’t have any clothes on right now if these people weren’t here.”) There’s a litany of differences. If I didn’t have this fear, I noted today, I’d listen to music indiscriminately in my car, with my windows rolled down, and sing along. Even stuff that currently I find embarrassing.
Another: I noticed the other night at the climbing gym that when I fall off a bouldering problem, I have this habit of acting frustrated or angry. I’d never really thought about it before, but I remember it from childhood. I worry that people around me will see me climbing a V3, say, and think, “Oh, he can’t even climb a V3? He must be a loser.” If I act frustrated or shake my head with exasperation, I think, they’ll see that and instead think, “Oh, he must just be having a bad day. Look how incredulous he is that he fell. Obviously he’s a very good climber normally.”
In the same moment I realized how much that behavior effects my own mental state. I’m so used to acting so exasperated and frustrated with myself that I’ve internalized it. It’s not just on the outside – I really do feel dejected and uninspired a lot when I’m doing that. For the rest of the night I tried smiling every time I fell off a problem and saying, “That was great” to myself. It’s amazing the difference it made in my own mood.
For me, my whole practice can be distilled to this process:
- With mindfulness, often spontaneous insight, I notice a behavior or habit of mine that has a negative effect, bothers me, or thwarts some longing I have.
- I observe, in meditation: What fear is behind the behavior? What am I afraid of?
- I invite myself to experience the fear, to feel that vulnerability, to sit with that tender spot underneath the armor of my behavior.
- Slowly, over time, the fear loses its grip and the behavior loses its compulsion.
That makes it sound very workmanlike and easy, and while actually practice is workmanlike, the very definition of ”mundane”, it’s not easy at all – that process is often excruciating.
Social-based fear is one of the hardest, for me, because I find it much easier to work with fear in private. The fear of looking like a fool or being rejected or unloved is much harder for me to stay with than, say, the fear of falling while rock climbing.
That said, I think for a full and complete practice it’s important that I be working with everything I see. I try to strike a balance between self-aggression and complacency – I want to push myself out of my comfort zone, but fear doesn’t vanish overnight, so I have to do so with compassion and patience, too.
It’s interesting to me the way these things are related: Fear is the foundation of the (separate) self, we experience it as a very visceral contraction, it inspires us to try to control things and this resistance thwarts our own deepest longings. Fear, control, contraction, and longing.
I don’t have a pithy conclusion to this post, but I do recommend Tara Brach’s talks like the one I linked to at the top. For that matter I recommend all of Dharmaseed - it’s a great resource of excellent lectures and guided meditations by a huge variety of teachers.
