In this blog, I want to revisit and expand working with fear and anxiety, and any other variety of pain. This may be especially relevant given the present difficult circumstances many of you are experiencing now. Let’s begin with some definitions. Fear is usually triggered by a specific situation while anxiety often does not appear to have a discernable cause. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard made a distinction between anxiety and dread – anxiety has a cause while dread is free floating and is therefore considerably more painful.
The ultimate sources of fear and anxiety, or anxiety and dread, are insecurity and lack of control – not knowing and/or not being able to influence outcomes. Everything changes. There is nothing to hold on. We are falling through space with no place to land. This can be experienced in meditation as a blissful samadhi state but can also be quite terrifying for the ego.
Inevitably, we will lose all are possessions, relationships, as well as our mind and body. They are just on loan for a finite period of time. In the end, our identity, our little self, will be erased. Expectations that we can somehow adjust our personalities to live an untroubled and easy life, a life without loss are unreal. It is the basic premise of psychoanalysis that we can change our storyline to make the reality of the human condition easier by examining the causes of our pain. Of course, this examination can help individuals who suffer especially from fear and anxiety, but it works only to a point because the human condition cannot be solved.
Here, I think the Buddha’s parable about what to do when someone shoots an arrow in your back is relevant. If you have an arrow in your back you want to have the arrow removed as the first step; the determinations of causes, which may or may not diminish the pain, can wait.
What I have presented in our last group meditation and am discussing in this blog is a way of pulling the arrow out of your back through the Dzogchen technique of luminous, loving, spacious awareness. The first stage of this Dzogchen technique is facing the pain of fear and anxiety directly. This is going against our hard-wired conditioning that tells us to run away from it. In Paleolithic times, running away was a preferred and successful mode of survival when the individual was faced with human and animal predators. This is not very relevant in the 21st century. To be sure, sometimes fears are real and must be attended to. It makes sense to wear a mask during the epidemic, for example. Otherwise, fear and anxiety are frequently a fabrication that causes us to suffer or escape through the quick fix of distractions, the usual automatic band aids of the moment. It is not possible to outrun fear through distraction and there is a heavy price to pay for trying to do so – a slow leak of energy that compromises physical, mental, and emotional health.
Pick a pain that is bothering you. Ask yourself whether you are feeling something that you do not want to feel right now. Fully embody the pain. Feel it in every cell of your body, this takes courage because the feeling can be very intense. Stay with it. Embrace the fear with the luminosity of complete attention and now move into warm infinite space. The Tibetan Bardo texts say to embrace the little self that is crying out in pain like a mother soothing a child. When a child in pain goes to the mother, the mother applies emergency first aid in this way. Only later will the mother ask the child how the pain began. Of course, the mother in the Bardo texts, is not your actual mother, but the archetypal Great Mother from which the display of phenomena appears and disappears. In Taoism too, the origin is things is the Tao, the generative womb matrix. The Great Mother takes the contraction of pain and dilutes it through expansion into limitless space of her Void body. It is like dropping a vial of poison into the ocean – its toxicity dissolves. Hold the Void body of the Great Mother with warm 360-degree awareness coming from the center of the heart mind. It may take some time and much repetition to allow the pain to “self- liberate” (as the Dzogchen texts say) into the loving spaciousness of the womb matrix. The pain may not completely dissolve, but at least its intensity will be diminished. The more you practice this Dzogchen technique, the more confidence you have that you will be able to restore your equilibrium from whatever disturbance, however unpleasant, arises in the field of awareness. All you have to lose is your suffering.