A Day in the Life of Love - Pt 3
By: Stephen Levine
Posted: September 10, 2010
A DAY UNOBSTRUCTED BY FEAR
What would it be like in a day in the life of love to wake up without fear?
Without the fear that most wake up with? Without the great obstacle to love?
Without fear and the aversion it breeds. Without the hiding.
A day of opening our heart to our fear.
A day in which the fear and the anger of unattended sorrow does not obscure the heart?
A day without compulsive reaction or negative attachment (aversion, an almost violent pushing away) to fear and anger. Without turning our back on aversion and that sometimes not too subtle satisfaction of “ speaking our mind” without quite knowing what we are saying?
Working with fear is the key to opening the heart. To keep us accessible to our birthright. To stay open to fear , not to numb out or close off or lash out. Watch our body patterns, staying soft we see how fear keeps our life small.
If all you want to do is feel “safe” you will forever feel unsafe. To build confidence in your capacity not to close around fear and thus not become afraid comes slowly. It’s not like we will have gone completely beyond fear. It is only fear that wishes that to be so. There will still be times when fears as deep as your survival genes will arise. But we will no longer be living what is refered to as a “fearful life”.
The deeper our negative attachment to fear the less depth there is to our love. And fear like all afflictive emotions is contagious. When we duck every one around us ducks. When we look up a crowd gathers that searches too the upper reaches for what seems so engaging to us.
The innate connection between one person‘s state of mind and another’s becomes a central recognition in our lives. As does the investigation of what keeps everyone from spreading that contagion. When the investigation of the fearful urges which gives rise to so much unloving behavior becomes a keen intensification of the life force we become Einsteins of ourselves. We don’t even take Newton’s word for it.
Indeed, to extend the metaphore, Einstein though regaled as a great thinker said it was not from thought but inspiration, intuition, the whispers from the outer reaches of the life force, that gave rise to his most remarkable insights arose. He didn’t even take gravity for granted. He explored for himself, in himself, how we know in our body and mind more intimately than falling that gravity effected us. Was gravity only down? Was fear all there was? Indeed it is said by some that the only inborn fear measurable in a newborn is the fear of falling. But our Einstein won’t settle for other’s observations. And sitting behind the wheel of his own vehicle he discovered when he stepped on the accelerator that he was pushed backward into his seat. That gravity too was forward motion. And a quick stop gave us a pain in the neck.
E equals M C squared was an attempt to keep the world spinning on its axis so there could be more to gravity than fear. So we might look forward, and even recognize within that we are a constellation of pure energy and every molecule in every cell is endowed with the potential to release it. That when the liberating awareness which releases love initiates us into our most profound workings we discover that everything is composed of the forward gravity of consciousness. That the world is created in its wake and when we catch up to ourselves there comes the great insights from which a peaceful future may be born.
Meeting fear with a kindness we may have long lost confidence in there arises a forgotten satisfaction. As the energy of holding is released joy becomes a distinct possibility.
The investigation begins in the marrow and evolves into the ethereal. Evolves from the most noticeable to the most habitual..
What does fear feel like in the body? As with all heavy states its often easier to relate to them first as their body pattern. The tightness in the jaw or gut we can soften to before we open the door to the sales-pitch already trying to sell us their wares that this fear or anger, etc, is our only alternative.
Indeed when we live wholeheartedly in our body sometimes a coolness in the back of the neck or a tightness in the belly will foretell the state of mind that is just about to poke its head into yours
Explore its body pattern. Where is your tongue in your mouth? Is it pressed against the roof of your mouth? Flat against the bottom? Pushed against your teeth? Curled behind the lips?
How does it effect the legs? Do they seem slightly less able? Do they want to escape? Can you still feel the floor beneath you? What’s happening behind your left knee? What is happening in your anal sphincter?
Relating to the fear instead of from it we start to re-inhabit our body. Noting the tension in the belly, in the jaw. Noticing how fear amplifies the ache in the center of the chest.
Each state of mind has its own personality. Listen mercifully to the content even the tone of thought. How is it effecting the rhythm of the breath? What is its choice of language? What happens to thought when instead of sticking to it we allow it to come and go without comment? What does it feel like to not let fear drown us in the river of consciousness, but settling back a bit watch with a liberating awareness that fear too float by? Nothing is too good to be true.
We have experienced the state of fear, big and small, innumerable times but we always turn away from it in fear or compulsively express it. We think that acting on it but it only encourages a stronger reaction next time. We never respond to turn toward it to investigate “what is fear?” We never get inside it to explore its constituent parts, the impersonal, even automatic flow of the process we take so personally.
Fear like all heavy states, all afflictive emotions, say , “Don’t look me in the eye. You can’t take it”. Because all these states have a certain hallucinatory quality about them. They appear to be more solid and less susceptible to impermanence and mindful dispersal than they really are. They say better look the other way because I am only going to get worse, and I’m never going to go away. But that has never happened. States of mind arise and dissolve in the flash of an eye unless acting on them, turning a thought into a train of thinking, bids them stay. There are so many states making up such as anger that we have rarely discerned their multiple risings and replacings: the disappointing of desire giving rise to frustration, to bewilderment, to pride, to judgment, to aggression, and the recycling of frustration and confusion and a compulsion to react, to “do something about it”. We see one emotion dissolve into the next in what is obviously a pre-set pattern.
We mistake an intricate process for a single state of mind and knowing very little of ourselves think it is simply anger or jealousy or envy not recognizing the fear and frustration of desire behind it all.
Turning away from fear is acting on fear, turning toward it to investigate its inner nature is an act of fearlessness which cultivates courage.
True fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to stay present to the process without flight or fight.
Reaction is mechanical compulsion. Response has a half a breath longer to consider its options. Response plays the edge.
Wherever we are playing our edge there is going to be fear because just beyond our edge is the unknown, in which all growth occurs.
What is this anger, this foul and peevish mood? Noting how anger arises from fear we recognize perhaps the two most seductive states needed to be understood to undertake a “spiritual career” or even hobby. Fear not only gives rise to anger but a host of unskillful activities. It even goes so far as to cause us to react to such as boredom which makes it difficult to stay with meditation or keep our knees from unbending in prayer.
Watch how to investigate with an open heart the closed mind brings forth peace. And then quite to our delight we notice that though our old nemesis of fear and anger are in the mind we are not angry or fearful but clear hearted, encouraged, and capable even of love.
Nothing is worth the heart being closed even a moment longer.
When M. Gandhi was asked by a New York Times reporter, to speak more about his passive resistance. Gandhi said there was nothing passive about our resistance, it’s just non violent.
That’s when anger turns into something really remarkable. It’s non violent. It is that same dissatisfaction with how things are same energy, but a very different out come. Oddly enough anger has a certain selfless energy. At a certain point in outrage, anger would drag the person it is angry at over cliff with them.. Well now imagine if that selflessness was rerouted toward love for the person to whom you feel the outrage was directed and help relieve their suffering.
When we start to convert this anger into service, when our frustration with the state of the world starts not to separate us in anger but connect us with compassion how different it becomes, if not at least a little, the world we live in, certainly the world that lives within us.