Freedom from Fear and Anxiety

The theme I'd like to speak about this evening is freedom from fear and anxiety, if we want to look a little bit into this possibility that exists for us as human beings to live a life that is free of fear, free from the influence of fear, and a little bit investigate some of the ways of working with fear that are available to us. So one of the sort of most obvious things, in a way -- maybe not -- to say about fear is just how common it is. It can be quite easy to feel as if, "Wow, I'm the only one who experiences this kind of fear" or whatever. Just how common. As human beings, we are subject to fear. We all know what that is. The Buddha tells a very unremarkable story, a very ordinary-sounding story. Sometime after he left the palace when he was a young man, he was practising for understanding, practising for awakening. He was in different places, staying in forests and caves and things. He would be meditating, and would hear a squirrel or a bird rustle the leaves in the forest, and would be completely shaking with fear. He said he made himself continue sitting, or if he was doing walking meditation he made himself continue walking, or if he was doing standing meditation he made himself continue standing until the fear subsided. Okay. It's not a very remarkable story. But what it points to, one of the things it points to, is just how common fear is.

It also implies something there, that fear is a workable energy, that it's something we can learn to work through and work with, that we can get beyond it. I think sometimes even if that doesn't feel like a very real possibility for us, sometimes even in the middle of fear, when the fear is strong, sometimes there's just a whisper of something, a whisper of the sense of the possibility of freedom. It can be there in the fear, with the fear, through the fear. A whisper of the sense, the intuition, that maybe what fear is telling me is not the whole truth, is not the truth. Just a sense that maybe, maybe things aren't just how they seem to be. Maybe we also have a sense even in the fear that this fear, the presence of the fear, is actually closing the heart to love. It's literally constricting the heart's capacity to open in a wide and deep love. It's actually quite a popular thing now, and many of you will have heard it, the saying, "It's either fear or love." At one level, there's some truth to that. A heart full of fear, it's very hard for it to open in love. And we definitely see the opposite -- that when there's fear, how quickly the movement is towards violence. We see it certainly in individuals. You see it also in countries, in nations, and in ideological groups. There's fear and they feel they're threatened, and the movement is towards violence and war and all that, and we see that.

It's interesting. When we reflect on fear, we just consider it as an energy in our life, how many different kinds of fear there seem to be. It seems like we can be afraid of almost anything, or anything. Certainly we can be afraid of the body. We talked this morning about the body. We can be afraid of injuring ourselves, afraid of getting ill, of getting sick, afraid of the ageing process -- how will that be for me, what will I look like, what will it feel like? Afraid even of coming in the meditation hall because there might be some physical pain. We can be afraid of our emotions -- what will come up for me? Will I be able to handle it? What if an overwhelming emotion comes up, an overwhelming grief or sadness or loneliness comes up or rage? How many people are really unafraid of the whole range of their emotional life? We can be afraid of what other people think of us. How common is that? The view of others. What will they think of me? We can even be afraid of the view we have of ourselves, that we may be bad or unworthy.

We can be afraid of certain forms. It might be before the retreat you think, "God, a week of silence." And then you see the schedule: sitting, walking, sitting, walking. It's a form, and we think ...[nervous noise]. Or marriage. You know, the night before marriage, and the groom is like, "What am I doing now?" Or afraid of divorce, another form, into singlehood, if there is such a thing -- whatever it's called; non-marriage. These are all forms. We can be afraid of forms. There's a story from one of the Hindu traditions. In this particular tradition of the Hindu tradition, they believe that the guru, the teacher, could bestow, could give awakening or enlightenment to his disciples if he so chose to do that, or she so chose to do that. So could just touch them or look at them in a certain way and they would be awakened. And this particular guru was sitting one evening with his circle of disciples, and in the quiet, he said, "Whoever wants complete liberation, whoever wants complete freedom from the ego, step forward and I will give it." Silence. No one moved. Second time, "Whoever wants complete freedom, step forward." Nothing. Third time, nothing. And he said, "The offer is withdrawn." I don't know; I think he was, we have a saying in English, "calling their bluff," showing them you can even be afraid of freedom. Fear can land on anything and we can be afraid of anything.

[7:46] I think all of us, absolutely all of us, need to ask a question of ourselves: am I challenging fear enough? Am I challenging it deeply enough in my life? Now, that question is not about 'should,' and "you should this," and da-da-da-da. It's not about that. It's actually a question coming out of kindness. Am I challenging fear deeply enough in my life? Am I too tolerant of fear? So yes, I need to accept the fact that fear exists, there is fear present, fear comes and goes, whatever. But accepting it doesn't mean leaving it unchallenged. What is the real kindness there? Sometimes fear operates in our life and we're not even aware of it operating. Sometimes it's very obvious, very clear when we're feeling fear. Other times it's running through and it's not even that obvious. We're not recognizing it going on. We don't realize it's going on, but it's driving our choices and our responses to things.

I have a friend -- this was many years ago -- and she inherited quite a lot of money. We were friends, still are friends, good friends. A long time ago we were talking, and she was unhappy. She'd been unhappy for quite a long time. We were talking about happiness and unhappiness one evening, and talking about what gave rise to happiness. I said something about generosity being a quality that brought happiness with it, and very, very lightly suggested that maybe she donate some of this money that she had inherited. Not to me. [laughter] Just in general. It was so funny. At the time, it was a complete closed door. Just -- it was a total non-conversation. It just was a stop. And there was actually fear of, "Well, what if I won't be able to buy the kind of house that I want?" and da-da-da. She wasn't conscious of it as a fear because she just didn't go there as an option. It just was a closed door.

Sometimes fear, too, is masked as something else. It looks like something else. It can look like desire sometimes. I have another friend who works in the theatre, many years in the theatre as an actor and a director and producer and different things. A while ago, she began to realize that a lot of this kind of energy that she brought to her work that she thought was passion was actually a mask for fear. She was very afraid, at a very deep level, that if she gave up that work and that identity in that work, that she would be overcome with a feeling of emptiness and not knowing who she was and a feeling of hollowness and lack inside. That's not -- I'm not at all implying that passion is always that way, not at all. Passion is something that's, I think, totally crucial to our being. We need genuine, deep passion in our life. But there are some times that fear can actually show itself, look exactly like something else, and it's just a bit of a mask. It wasn't completely that, of course, and now she's actually gone through a whole process and it's much more genuine now.

Sometimes even on retreat when we don't have -- you may have noticed this; I don't know -- we don't have control over what we're eating. So whatever food it is gets put out three times a day here, and at 5:30 it's the last meal of the day. So sometimes on retreat there's this sense of, "Well, let me take more." And it looks like desire. It looks like greed or hunger. But it's actually coming out of fear: "What if I feel hungry later on? What if I don't have enough?" So when, as meditators, we come to approach fear, how can we work with it? There are a number of approaches, and I want to go into them a little bit tonight. They're not separate. They're complimentary. And I'll go into them in more detail. One is just mindfulness, mindfulness of how the fear feels, mindfulness of the sensations of the fear, without kind of asking why am I afraid and exactly what is this about. Just mindfulness of the sensations. The second one is looking into our relationship with fear itself, our relationship with the feeling of fear, our reaction to fear. And the third one is using more direct ways to actually challenge fear and what holds the fear together. Because, again, to reiterate something I said the other night, I think, we can't expect mindfulness to do everything. It can't do everything for us. No way.

So one question -- and it kind of seems like a very basic question, but -- what is fear? What is anxiety? So we have a sense that we're very clear what it is, but oftentimes fear comes up and we don't hang out with it long enough. Because it's so unpleasant, we flee it. We don't hang out to find out what exactly is this thing that has so much power and so much authority in my life. What exactly is it? So when we begin to actually turn around and ask this question, "What exactly is this experience of fear?", what we can notice is that there are body sensations. We're all familiar with this. Strong fear, the heart is pounding, or in English we say the tummy has butterflies. Do you say that? Yeah? Butterflies in the tummy. Sometimes the hands are sweating or whatever. That's very strong physical sensations. But even if it's not so strong, there are some physical sensations there. They're usually unpleasant, unpleasant physical sensations, and our reaction to them, which is aversion -- don't like. So there's the unpleasant body sensations and our reaction of aversion.

Second aspect of fear is what's there in the thinking life, what thoughts are going on. So not always, but often with fear there's a thinking component, the thoughts are there, and they're often about the future. Have you noticed this? Fear is often about the future. There's often a whole bag of assumptions in with all those thoughts, things that we're just assuming to be true, and we're not maybe even conscious of assuming them. And again, there's the reaction to those thoughts. Usually they're unpleasant. So unpleasant bodily sensations and reactions, thoughts and the reaction.

The third component of fear is a little bit harder to describe, but it's the sort of mental space, that the feeling of the mind itself seems to shrink. Have you ever experienced this? You may be on stage or having to do something in front of people, and it feels like your brain has shrunk to the size of a lentil or something. There doesn't seem much space inside the consciousness. That also -- mostly human beings enjoy a kind of spacious consciousness, and so that, again, is unpleasant, and there's a reaction to it. So there are bodily sensations, unpleasant, the reaction; the thoughts, unpleasant, and the reaction; and the sort of mental space constricting, getting small, and reaction.

Now, I'm not saying all that to be overly anal and precise. It's actually because each of these provides a way in to how we can work with fear. So it's not to make things complicated. It's actually to make things simpler. Before we even get to that, when there's fear around, it can be really, really skilful -- fear is around and we may feel the sensations in the body -- to find a place in the body where we don't feel fear. So, okay, fear's around, feeling it here and here and it's unpleasant. Are my toes afraid? Are my earlobes afraid? Is the tip of my nose afraid? Generally, these areas, we don't feel too much fear in them. It's helpful to realize that, because one of the things that happens with fear is that it seems to take up everything. It seems to take up all the space, as if everything has become fear. So to put the awareness somewhere where there isn't fear can be really, really helpful.

But much of the work with fear is this mindfulness of the sensations of fear. So what does it actually feel like? Can we really be intimate and open with those sensations, unpleasant sensations of fear? Usually -- not usually, always when there's fear, we may or may not realize this, but there's fear of fear. There's fear of fear. We're actually afraid of the experience of fear. If we can begin, gradually, to learn to work with the sensations of fear, the physical sensations, and learn to open to them and be with them, slowly, gradually, we develop this sense of it's okay, it's just some fear, some unpleasant sensations. I can be with it. It's almost as if the mindfulness, the awareness, can get around it, accommodate it. It can be handleable. That's huge. That's really, really significant. Just this mindfulness of the sensations of fear.

If you want, not necessarily on this retreat, but at different times in one's life, one can even, in the meditation posture, when there's a certain amount of calmness -- you're with the breath, and you just feel relatively peaceful -- then reflect, think about, bring to mind what it is that makes you afraid. So you're just literally dropping a little bit of fear into this pool of calmness deliberately, so that you can see it ricochet and have its effect in the body. One of the advantages of that, in the sitting posture or the walking or whatever, is you don't have to do anything. Maybe you have something, a performance to do or a speech to give or something coming up that there's fear. In the sitting posture, when there's calm, drop in the thought of that. Why? So that we can practice being with the sensations of fear and developing this confidence with the sensations of fear, developing a sense, gradually, that hey, I can be with these sensations. They're unpleasant, sure, but mindfulness can be with them. Confidence with fear is one thing that's almost always lacking. When fear comes up, it has so much power, it's like "whoa," and we just do whatever it says. We don't have a sense of confidence with it, don't have a sense that we can handle it. But the meditation period or posture is a safe time. We don't have to look great. We don't have to say anything. We don't have to do anything. We don't have to be intelligent. We just have to sit there and pay attention. It's a totally safe space.

[20:25] So there's the mindfulness and developing that capacity. Then there's this second piece, looking into the relationship that we have with fear, our reaction to fear, and our relationship to the sensations. As I've already said, usually that relationship is one of aversion: get rid of it, I don't like it, I want it to go away. Or being afraid of it and actually fleeing it, running away. But this is very, very interesting, this piece, because the aversion to the feeling of fear or the fear of fear is not a neutral factor. It's not something that just kind of happens to be there on the side. When we are aversive to the fear, when we run away, it actually makes the experience of fear grow. It also makes it feel more difficult. The aversion, the reaction to it, is actually part of the fear itself. It's part of the fear itself. What happens when we run away from the unpleasant sensations? Where do we run to? Where do we go to? Most of us can't help it; we go straight up into the head. All the energy goes from here in the body where it's difficult and unpleasant, goes up into the head where there's already a lot of thoughts swirling around. All the energy's gone up there, adding energy to that. It zips around even faster, even more thoughts, and that adds to the fear, and the whole thing spirals and gets worse. Usually those kind of thoughts that are going around with fear are not helpful, and it's just adding to that.

So this reaction that we have is actually part of the anxiety. It's not something separate. It's not like the fear is one thing and my reaction to the fear is a separate thing. Is this making sense? No? Yes? No? Okay. Please say if something doesn't make sense. So we have an experience of fear, and then we have the reaction to that experience. Usually our reaction to fear is that we don't like it, we want to get rid of it, we want to push it away. We're even afraid of the feeling of fear. But that reaction is part of the whole pattern of fear, and it's actually something that keeps it going. It keeps it going. Yeah? Not to take my word for it, just because I'm saying it and I'm a teacher. You can actually check this out. It's amazing. One can actually check this out. If I can find some way of taking away that reaction to the fear, relaxing that reaction, the fear cannot support itself. It cannot support itself. It cannot carry on without my aversion to it, without my wanting to run from it or be afraid of it. So this is something we can really check out for ourselves and know is true for ourselves.

So we have this fear and aversion. We might also be, in our relationship to fear, putting a pressure on for it to be different: "It shouldn't be here. I shouldn't have fear." Or judging ourselves, that because there's fear around we think, "I'm hopeless. I'm such a scaredy-cat," we say in English. "I'm full of fear." And we judge ourselves. These, again, they're not neutral. Putting pressure on or judging is like putting the whole fear in a pressure cooker. It's adding to, it's building the whole thing. It's adding to the fear. If fear is around, what do we assume it means? Just because fear is around, that it means, "Oh, how many years I've been in therapy and meditation and saunas and bubble baths and whatever it is, and I still have fear." What do we assume it means about ourselves or about our practice? That's the other thing about that story about the Buddha -- seems very unremarkable, but then you reflect a little bit: this guy -- it doesn't say exactly when it happened, but he left his palace, and six years later he was completely, totally liberated. Complete, unexcelled liberation. So somewhere between, you know, a little while and six years, he had that level of fear, but he was that near to liberation. So what does it mean if we have it? Maybe we're that near.

Can we have kindness with fear? Oftentimes kindness goes out the window. We need to recognize the humanity of having fear. It's human to feel fear. So when we do the mettā practice and we say, "May I be safe and protected, may I be happy, may I be peaceful," if there's fear around, that "I" means "me with fear." It means the I with fear. It doesn't mean "me when that fear has gone away." Can we include it in what we give kindness to? Can we see the humanity of it? This is really crucial. Can we also have kindness and acceptance for the fear itself? If we're saying the primary reaction to fear is aversion, pushing it away, fear of it, what if we experimented -- and again, this is something you can really check out for yourselves -- what if we experimented with a way of working with fear that, instead of trying to be just mindful of it, we actually completely tried to welcome it? Completely, completely opened the doors of consciousness to the physical sensations and said, "Come, come. It's okay. You can be here. There's plenty of space for you. You can be here." Completely welcoming the physical sensations of fear, going really overboard on welcoming. Now, I know that probably sounds a little bit cuckoo, but try it. Try it. To me, it's one of the most powerful ways of working with fear. Very, very interesting. What's happening then? I'm pulling the rug out of this typical reaction that's the fear of the fear and the pushing away and the aversion. I'm doing the opposite.

A few years ago, I was doing a personal retreat at Gaia House. It was a retreat in solitude at Gaia House for a couple of weeks. I wasn't very well physically. I was quite ill. And at the end of the retreat, I already had tickets to go to India. A group of friends were going to work at a leprosy community to offer some service there and meditate and live together and offer some service. I really wanted to go. I wasn't very well. And I was doing my meditation, my practice, these couple of weeks, and just very, very slight in the background, these thoughts kept coming in about my health, and will I be okay when I go to India, will I get -- because I had been to India twenty years before and got very ill, and actually never really been the same since, digestive and things. The little tiny thoughts in the background, nothing really big, but just this apprehension, very subtle fear just coming in.

I would meditate, and notice this, and try and sort of just let it go. Having meditated for, by that time, twenty years or whatever -- I don't know, I can't remember -- different techniques and a lot of sophistication, a lot of sort of meditative kung fu, basically, and I was trying all this stuff to basically get rid of it, in essence, until I finally realized, "Oh. I'm basically trying to get rid of it." The most obvious thing dawned on me. And when I realized that, I began to completely welcome the fear, completely welcome it. And how quickly it changed, how quickly it changed. At first it felt as if the fear was like a little, young part of me that was afraid about his health. It felt like, okay, now me and this very young part are going to go to India together, and we would be together through India, kind of checking out India. [laughs] And then what happened, all the excitement could come up. I hadn't been to India for twenty years. Oh, the culture again, and I'll see this, and I'll see that. It actually allowed the heart to open. The excitement could flow again. And a little while later actually just the whole thing faded and was really not an issue. It was all tied up in that resisting the fear and trying to get rid of it.

[30:14] So when I said "What does fear involve?", I said the third aspect was this mental space and the way the feeling of the space of the mind seems to shrink, seems to have shrunk. There's something quite interesting about that. I think there's something quite interesting about that aspect of the fear. I've noticed for myself in the past, years ago, and in different people that I work with, there can be periods of one's life when anxiety can become kind of a habit. We find ourselves just -- it's almost like we keep falling into anxiety almost as a default. The mind, the system, keeps finding itself in an anxious state. Sometimes we say, "I'm anxious about this or this," and sometimes we don't even know what it is; we just feel anxious. Now, not all the time, absolutely not all the time -- it's quite complicated -- but I have noticed that oftentimes those periods of time in some people's lives when it becomes a habit, the system finds its way into anxiety, it can be that it becomes a habit in a climate, that there's already a climate of a lack of self-love. There's a climate of a lot of inner harshness and criticism. And that climate is kind of perfect soil for anxiety to take root and become a habit. I think there's something really, really interesting here. Just to explore it a little bit.

The quality of loving-kindness, the quality of mettā or love or friendliness, as it deepens it's felt to be quite calm and spacious, lovely quality. In a way, it's the opposite of the feeling of anxiety, which is not at all spacious -- it's this mental constriction; it's not at all calm. If I have a lack of self-love, if I have a lot of self-judgment and those kind of thoughts, they are also felt in the mind to be very cramping. They're very oppressive. They feel like a weight. The mind kind of cowers underneath them. They squeeze the mind. That squeezing coming out of the self-criticism is an element that it shares with anxiety. It's just a small jump, because they share that constriction, it's just a small jump from the self-criticism to the anxiety. Certain kinds of fear are also very common when there's a lack of self-love. Again, knowing this in the past with myself, and knowing this with a lot of people I work with. When there's lack of self-love, or that's not really consistent enough or strong enough, there's tremendous fear of failure, often fear of what other people will think of us. And sometimes even a deeper fear, a fear that we may be, at some very deep level inside ourselves, bad, the core of us is bad. This might sound odd to some people here, how could someone think that, but it's actually quite common for a person to fear that the truth about themselves is that they're bad, they're even evil in some way. That kind of thought and the fear, it's a really, really painful fear for a human being to have, to walk around with, to live with. But that kind of fear is often around most when there's this lack of self-love, when there's a lot of self-judgment and criticism, harshness.

So all that, part of what it points to is the absolute necessity when we're working with fear, and especially if fear is kind of a common thread in our life -- and it is for many -- the absolute necessity of working with love, of bringing kindness in. Absolutely crucial. There's another piece about this constriction of space. So I said one part of fear is the mind feeling like it's shrunk. Sometimes, many times, it can be really helpful when there's fear to actually deliberately open the mind to a sense of space. So take in a big room. Take in the physical space, the sense of physical space in a room. Be outside. Take in the sense of space outdoors. What that does is it opens up the mind and the sense of the space of consciousness. Within that, the fear is just one thing. It's just one thing in consciousness and doesn't feel like it's overwhelming. So really, really skilful to work with a sense of space in many ways in practice, and that's one of them.

Okay. So right at the beginning, I said there were three ways of working with fear. There's the mindfulness, there's the looking into the reaction and the relationship we have with fear, and there's also challenging in a bit more deliberate way, a bit more active way. So oftentimes when fear is around, it has a lot of power, and it says, "Do this," and we do that. And it says, "Don't do this," and we don't do that. Whatever it says, do or don't do, that's what we do. It has this authority in our lives. Sometimes we need to challenge fear, not so much by mindfulness and awareness and all this -- sometimes by actually just doing exactly what it says not to do, and not doing ... you know what I'm trying to say: doing the opposite of what fear says. We challenge it by doing. I'll put something out here as an option, with all kindness and a lot of spaciousness, but a retreat is a very good environment where that's a possibility. And it doesn't have to be limited to retreat, and it's just a possibility. Again, there's absolutely no 'shoulds' here. But what are some of the ways that we get a little bit afraid? I'm not even talking about big deal fears. What about an undercurrent of fear that we hardly even realize? Say, around food. What would it be to decide one day, "I'm going to skip a couple of meals. I'm going to skip one meal. Or I'll fast one day," or whatever?

Challenging our fear around food, which is actually quite a primal thing. Just challenging it. Or around sleep. We can get quite tight around how much -- "Oh, I need X hours of sleep." What if I said, "Okay, I think I need X. Let me take X minus two. Let me take two hours less sleep just for the hell of it, just to see, just to turn around and stand up to fear and question its authority"? No 'shoulds' in here at all. It's not about pressure or 'should' or anything like that. It's certainly not about being macho. We're not giving any medals for meditation machismo or anything like that. It's coming out of kindness and a willingness to explore and expand our boundaries.

I mentioned generosity before and my friend's kind of fear to go there. We have this tradition of generosity. Generosity is something that opens the heart. How often do we really test that out? Does generosity really open my heart? And give enough to find out. I'm not just talking about money; I'm talking about all kinds of things. Do we really stretch ourselves in giving, or is there fear about giving? Most of us, the fear is I don't want to give too much because then I won't have enough, or what if something happens and I need da-da-da-da.

Actually, I was working with a retreatant on and off for quite a while a few years ago, and she used to give -- you know, the particular form of dāna to the teacher -- she used to give what I thought was really a lot, you know. It was very nice, but at some point I sensed there was something a little bit -- something about it. So we talked about it, and it turned out that she was actually giving out of a compulsion to give, out of fear -- and she had a pattern of doing this -- out of fear of what people would think if she didn't give a lot, fear of being perceived as stingy or ungenerous. So it can work the other way. We may have with the sitting -- we have these forty-five minute or half an hour sittings, and we might be like, "I couldn't possibly sit more than that." Maybe there's fear. What would it be just to sit an hour one day? Sit an hour and fifteen minutes.

And again, sometimes the pattern is the opposite. Some years ago, I was sitting around with a group of friends, and somehow the subject came up about whether we meditate every day at home and that kind of thing. Someone was asking everyone. We were sitting in a circle. One of my friends, Dave, was asking everyone in the circle, "Do you" da-da-da. He got around to me and said, "Do you practise every day, Rob?" And I said, "Yeah, I practise every day." And then he said, "When was the last day you didn't meditate?" I realized it was when I was under general anaesthetic, you know, in the hospital, when you're totally unconscious because they're operating on you. I thought, well, maybe I'm afraid of not sitting. Maybe I've become attached to this sort of super bright, clear mind, you know, pristine awareness. [laughs] Is there fear there? It's like, it can be hidden. What would it be to shake the whole thing up? What would it be to shake it up, coming out of kindness, not coming out of 'should'?

[40:52] Sometimes we need to challenge it by the way of thinking, by the way we think about fear. When there's fear, what are we believing? What beliefs are going unquestioned? What thoughts are there that we are reacting to about the situation that we're afraid of, about oneself, about another? What's there in terms of the thought life that we're believing, completely believing, and reacting to? If we believe every thought that goes through our head, I mean, pff, forget about it. It's really going to be a problem. But can we question some of the assumptions that are underneath the fear and supporting it? For example, one of the things that I am challenged by is I have Crohn's disease. Some of you may have heard of that, and others not. It's not a very nice disease at all, but they don't have a cure for it yet. They don't have a cure, and they don't really understand how it comes to be. In my particular case, I have periods when I'm healthy, and periods when I'm ill, and periods when I'm really fine and then ill again. When I get ill, it lasts really quite a long time. When I was describing that story about meditating before I went to India, the fear that was coming up was, "If I get ill, I'll be ill for years again," and da-da-da-da.

I noticed sometimes I get these sort of in-between symptoms. I've been well, and then it begins to feel a little ugh, and it's sort of like it's on the edge, and it could go one way and it could go the other. That's a very interesting time to notice fear. I began some years ago to look at what happens at that point, and I realized there are actually quite a lot of assumptions involved. There are quite a lot of assumptions that I had. I was assuming that if I got ill I wouldn't be able to work. I assumed that if I got ill I wouldn't be able to socialize in the same way. I wouldn't be able to travel. And that was there. It's, "Oh, no, if I get ill, it will stop me doing all this stuff." But then I thought, hold on a minute. Is that even true? And I remembered the last times I got ill. I still worked. It was slower, but I still got quite a lot done. It was slower, okay. I still travelled. It was more complicated, but I still travelled. And I still had all kinds of social relationships, including intimate relationships and all of that. But the assumptions somehow kicked in immediately that it would stop me doing this stuff, and it wasn't even true, until I actually said, hold on a minute, is that true? To question these assumptions. This is really a huge piece of the Dharma, questioning our assumptions.

Can we got to the end of a thought chain? The fear says "what if da-da-da-da?" What's it actually saying? Can we finish the thought and see it, see what does it say? Sometimes it's, "What if they think I'm stupid? I have to do this thing. Maybe they'll think I'm really stupid." Well, what if they think I'm stupid? It's okay. [laughs] It's okay. So you think I'm stupid. It's really okay. So what if you think I'm stupid? So what if I fail? So what if I'm tired, if I don't get enough sleep? So what if I'm tired? So what if I get ill and lose some weight? So what? We can really go to the end of the thought chain, keep questioning.

For some people it's even, "So what if I die? I'd rather not live with fear." For fifteen years I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, in America. I lived there when the September 11^th^ terrorist attacks happened. I remember very clearly it was -- I don't know how it was over here, but it was huge there. It was so major. The two or three days after the attacks, when the World Trade Center towers collapsed and all that, especially in towns like New York and Boston, which were -- many of the terrorists had flown out of Boston -- massive panic in the society. It was absolutely insane, the level of fear that had just sort of taken hold of everybody. No one knew what was going on. All the army and navy surplus stores sold out of their gas masks in about twenty-four hours. People were just imagining the worst, and everything they could buy -- cans of food. It was complete madness of fear.

Myself and a group that was the Buddhist Peace Fellowship decided to have a peace vigil, I think it was the second day after the attacks. You probably didn't have this here, but in America after the attacks -- and they still have them -- the federal government would issue terrorist warning levels. So yellow level is, "Well, maybe we think something might happen," orange level, and red level means, "Whoa, you better be careful because something is really going to happen." That day for Boston they had issued a red level terrorist alert. We wanted to have our peace vigil. And we just thought, "To hell with it." We went and stood on a patch of grass about twice the size of this room underneath the two tallest buildings in Boston, and we had our peace vigil there. The two tallest buildings, incidentally, are insurance buildings, which says something about what big business fear is. Anyway, so we stood there, and it was like, I'd actually rather have this building fall on me than live in this madness of fear.

[47:20] Oftentimes, these assumptions -- still talking about the assumptions -- oftentimes we assume a lot without realizing it about what we need to be happy or about what we need in general. A little while ago I was reading this article. I think it was in the New York Times. It was an article about a certain kind of very academic high school in New York City. I can't remember the name of the school. But they were interviewing the kids in that school who had special exams when they were 13. A lot of pressure to do really well on these exams. This is something I can relate to, having been sent to those kind of schools. They interviewed a number of boys. It was a boys' school. And the level of fear and anxiety was unreal for 12, 13-year-olds. And again, I remember, at that age. One of the boys said, "I have to do really well on these exams. If I don't do well, I won't get into the A stream." Do you have this here, A stream and B stream for the really bright students? No? Okay.

So in some schools they put the really academic guys in the A stream, and they do their thing, and then the sort of middle, and the not-so-bright. [laughs] It's a real big deal to try and be in the A stream. This boy said, 12 years old, "If I don't do well, I won't get into the A stream. If I don't get into the A stream, I won't get into Harvard," which is a big, very famous university in America. "If I don't get into Harvard, I won't get into Yale Law School," which is a very famous law school. "And if I don't get into Yale Law School, I'll be on the street." [laughter]

I read this, and he just went from A, B, C, D, E, and for him it totally made sense. Totally. It was crystal clear logic. He got that from the school and his family and who knows, and I understand it because it's also a little bit my background. But for him that made sense. We laugh, but we have our own similar ones. We have our own little steps of thought process that we don't question: does this link really go to this link? This is what I'm saying. What if this happens? Will it really be the worst? What if? So to unpack the thinking process and really question it, really turn around, stand up to fear. Do you know what cojones means? [laughs] You got to have a little -- a little -- you've got to have a little oomph sometimes in practice. There's a side of practice that's very much about being soft and receptive, and there's a side about being, "I'm not going to take any more of this now."

Another very common fear, the fear of "Will others approve of me?", as I said. "Will they think I'm okay?" Why does that have so much power in our life? That's a really interesting question. Why does that have so much power? Why are we so anxious about what people think of us? One of the reasons, I think, is that we actually don't have yet enough of a reservoir of happiness inside. We don't have that. When that's there, and this is part of all this cultivation business that I keep going on about, when that's there, the more that's there, the more inner happiness we have, the less it matters what people think, whether they approve of us or not. It just matters less. We literally begin to have a confidence in life, and it's not a cold kind of arrogant thing -- there's just a confidence there.

Earlier I said that fear often has a thinking component, and oftentimes the thinking is about the future -- either one second or minute into the future, or far into the future. This is important. Do we really know how to take care of the future? Do we really, really know how to take care of the future for ourselves? What is it that leads to happiness? This is what we want in the future. We're afraid that we won't be okay, that we won't be happy in the future, that we won't know peace. What is it that really leads to happiness? Do we really know that and understand that? And are we doing that? So again, this is why this cultivation business is so important, because those qualities -- the loving-kindness, the generosity, the equanimity, the mindfulness, the calmness, the concentration -- this is what leads to happiness. Cultivation is how we take care of the future. It's our investment portfolio. Can you translate that into Finnish, Sampo? Do you know what that means? Do you know what I'm talking about? It's a word from finance, from the way people invest money. I went to my bank, and they're always calling me about "you need to invest in da-da-da-da." [laughs] I should tell ... whatever. [laughter] I think it takes a really mature, really mature practice to really know, really clear in the heart, what it's worth investing in. I'm not saying there isn't a place, of course, for investing and putting the money in a safe place and all of that; I'm not saying that. But what's really, really, really the best investment? Are we really clear about that? I think to be really clear about it and to live from that clarity is a very, very mature practice, and it's actually very rare. It's very rare. Most will go to what seems like it takes care of the future, but do we really, really, really know how to take care of the future?

Cultivation. Cultivate the beautiful qualities of heart. If, also, I take care of my relationship to the present. If I take care of my relationship to the present moment, if that relationship to the present moment is one of openness, of curiosity, of awareness, of brightness, of care, of kindness, if that's the relationship I develop to the present moment, the future takes care of itself, moment by moment. I'm feeding that energy into the future. This cultivation and taking care of the relationship to the present, that's how we take care of the future. And then, as we do that, as we develop in that way, there really is genuinely -- and I really do mean this -- less and less worry about the future. Less and less worry, "Will I have enough? Will I be okay? Will I be secure? Will I have enough money? Will I be alone?" All that stuff, very human, begins to just be less and less of a worry, genuinely, because we really know we're taking care of the future in the best possible way.

All fear involves the sense of self, involves a sense of ego. Without the ego, there can't be fear. Investigating the ego is a huge part of practice. It's a lot of the thrust of practice. I'm not going to go into it in this talk. We'll see whether we get to that particular area of the Dharma on this retreat. But it's one of the most important and deepest and most central aspects of the Dharma, seeing through this ego, this sense of self, so the fear has nowhere to kind of hold on to.

Just finally, I want to talk about just one other possible approach to fear. We tend to feel, we tend to think, and it seems obvious to us, that we have a thing or an event, some situation, and the fear. And that is our reaction to the thing -- we're afraid of that thing, we're afraid of that event, we're afraid of that situation, afraid of that person, whatever it is. There's the thing, and here's my fear. It just happens that I could have -- this is my relationship to it; my reaction to it is one of fear. But I could have a reaction of curiosity, of calmness, of equanimity, of all kinds of things, openness. We tend to assume there's the thing, the event, the situation, and here's my reaction, and it just happens to be fear, as if they were two separate things, as if they were separate, as if the thing and the event/situation was one thing and fear was another. But that's not the case. This is a really important point in the Dharma. It's not the case that there is the object and there is the reaction to the object. At one level, it's true. At one level, it's really not true. The reaction I have is always colouring and shaping and kind of building my perception of this thing, of this event, always, always, always, no matter if my reaction, my response to it is one of kindness, equanimity, mindfulness, fear, excitement, hatred. All of that, any mind state I have, is colouring this thing. It's making this thing.

So fear colours our perception and our thoughts of something. Now, at one level, that's kind of obvious. When we're afraid of something, it seems much worse than it is. It seems, "Oh, this person is really scary," and we look again, or this situation, or this place or whatever. The fear is actually colouring how we see it. At one level, that's obvious. But we can go a little deeper with this. If I believe that the present moment, the thing in the present moment, is something real that exists by itself, independent of my mind, if I believe that -- which is the common sense that we have of things, that they just exist over there by themselves -- if I believe the present is something real and independent, then fear of the future will follow that, inevitably, as sure -- to borrow the Buddha's analogy -- as the wheels of the cart follow the ox that pulls it. It's inevitable to be afraid of the future if I believe in the independent reality of the present. But if I begin to see that the present is always being coloured by the mind, whatever my mind state is it's always colouring, always shaping and creating the present moment, whatever it is, I can see that, I can see that in the present moment. I can see it with the past -- I think about my childhood, I think about a relationship I had, whatever, and in a certain mood in the present moment it seems, "Ah, that was fantastic. What an idyllic, lovely ..." And in another mood, it's like, terrible, it's awful. I see the past depends on the mind state in the present. The present, what seems to be out there, depends on the mind state in the present. The future which I'm afraid of is exactly the same. The future is only going to become the present and then become the past.

So we say the past and the present, they're empty of existing independently. The future is also empty. It doesn't exist in a real, independent way. The more I can begin to see that, the more we can begin to see that, the more it's like we can't really take the future seriously. So we can't really take fear all that seriously, either. Fear has nothing to stand on. There's nothing to kind of put it together. So all of these approaches -- I know I've covered a lot of territory, but all of those approaches are actually available to us. There's nothing unreachable in any of what I've said at all, at all. It's all available to us as approaches and ways to work with fear. We can do this. We can discover this. This is a real possibility for us. Does it take practice? Sure, it takes practice. But is it possible? Yeah, definitely, absolutely, for everyone.

Shall we sit quietly together for a minute or two?