On Fear

Adapted from Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield , and others

Fear is hard-wired in our nervous system. Fear is a given. It is an evolutionary message for survival. It is not a mistake! If you go back and strip the layers from any fear, at the core you will reach the fear of non-existence—the impermanence of one's life—it is about the fragility of being and loss of our existence.

But this:
that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one's heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

Elegy IV
Rilke

When we get fixated and reactive in the face of our fears we get locked in to the biochemistry of fight, flight, and freeze, which is incompatible with life and joy. Fears come and go, but fear becomes suffering when our identify and sense of self gets caught in it—when our mind is tangled in fear and our bodies tight with it, our world becomes small and contracted--—we forget the vastness of being. We forget love and kindness and beauty and relatedness.

Freedom from fear is not the absence of fear--it is when fear arises but does not take over the sense of who we are—that there is some remembering of something bigger—the recognition that fears are waves in an ocean—the awareness of the vastness of consciousness—a shift from the existence that is fear-driven to the awareness that fear comes and goes.

Be empty of worrying
Think of who created thought
Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open
Move outside the tangle of fear thinking
Live in silence
Flow down and down
Into always widening
Rings of being.

-Rumi