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How can we become totally fearless, or at least begin to move in that direction? The first is to understand that death is but a doorway into a new part of our ongoing life (2). It is this body that dies while we continue our journey in another plane. The second requirement for fearlessness is a quiet mind - a restless mind fans the flames of fear into an inferno. And the third is to have an open loving heart. There is an old story of a man walking along a road towards a town in India and he meets Death coming out from the town. Death tells him that a cholera epidemic had just come upon the populous and thousands died but, Death remarked, only one in ten of the victims were killed by the disease itself - the majority died of fear. Those who did survive were the ones who went about tending to the sick in a loving way, secure in the conviction that destiny decides a person’s fate and not a disease, and fearless in the knowledge that their real Self was immortal. When someone comes to us for therapy because they are being swamped by fear, each one of the above principles is valuable by itself and out of these we develop self-help techniques suitable for that person’s challenge. To give you a few ideas to go on with, I’ll tell you about a man that I saw not too long ago. We’ll call him Tim. In his early thirties, Tim was a get-up-and-go entrepreneur who’d left school early but ended up owning several houses before he’d turned twenty-five. The demands of his lifestyle resulted in triple by-pass heart surgery. This was one year before our first session. He recovered well with a diet and exercise program, which led to him running on the beach every morning at 6.00am. Then on the anniversary of his heart attack - to the exact time and day - he experienced his first panic attack while walking on the beach prior to beginning his run. Faced with a galloping heartbeat, rapid onset of dizziness and nausea, Tim used his mobile to call for help. Having assumed that his heart was in trouble again, Tim was relieved - although somewhat embarrassed - to be told that he was physically healthy but would need help for his mental-emotional state. When Tim came to see me two weeks after the first onset, he was having several panic attacks a day. These were so debilitating that he found difficulty in breathing and was too exhausted to even check in on his office staff at work. After brief history taking I suggested to Tim that we develop a simple meditation technique to calm the mind and nervous system so he could relax and breathe easily. He settled back in the easy chair with eyes closed, and my words went something like this: We did this for a while, with the attention being fixed only on the left nostril for a while, then the right nostril, then both nostrils together again. The next step was to breathe with the abdomen: Each time you breathe in, push the stomach out… As you breathe out, pull the stomach back towards the spine… Keep returning the attention to the breath at the nostrils… After doing that for a few minutes, I asked Tim to open his eyes again so I could explain something to him. First of all I compared thoughts to electricity - if we get too close to a ‘live’ wire, we might touch it and not be able to let go. In the same way, if we get too close to our thoughts, we’ll not be able to let go of them. This is what happens when a panic attack starts: we can’t stop thinking about the fear. Fear of fear leads to even more fear, until we collapse or run away from the situation. So it is important to have practice in letting go of thoughts. I told him that letting go of thoughts is the first stage in meditation, that we’d be learning to do just that. At this point I added:
I asked Tim: if he was touched by a magic wand, what emotion would he like to experience for the rest of his life, every moment, every day? What would it be? Confidence, love, compassion, enthusiasm, happiness? Which one would it be? After a few moments of reflection, he said, “Love. I’d really like to feel love all of the time. Pure love, good love, sweet love.” Then I asked him, if the same magic wand touched him again, what emotion would he like to banish from his life forever, so that he never had that feeling ever again. Without hesitation he replied, “Fear, I’d banish fear.” “Good,” I said, “now we have your meditation mantra. These are the words given to you by your inner wisdom for your mind to hold onto. Let us begin our meditation again.” This next phase in our session would have gone like this:
We continued this for about five minutes and the settling effect was quite marked. I told him that to give the words even more power, it was important to understand their deeper meaning:
I then turned to his choice of ‘fear’ as the emotion to be banished from his life forever. Fear, I told him, is not real, in the same way that a shadow is not real. A shadow is but an absence of light. Likewise, fear is but an absence of Love; it is not part of who he really is. To explain further, I gave the following analogy:
Asking Tim to keep this deeper understanding of his mantra in the back of his mind, we began to meditate again, this time for fifteen minutes or so: “I breathe in Love… I let go fear,” again and again with every cycle of breathing. There were occasional reminders to keep observing the breath at the nostrils, and to “push the stomach out as you breathe in.” The effect was profound. For the first time since his collapse, Tim felt safe and relaxed. He left the session with the commitment to practise his meditation diligently. When I saw him one week later, Tim had been free of panic attacks and had been doing his breathing mantra for five hours every day. Within six weeks, Tim pronounced himself fully recovered. His way of living in the world had changed markedly. Compassion for others less fortunate than himself was growing daily. And he was happier, more at ease, than at any time in his life. Notes:
With love,
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Practice Letting Go of Fear Fear is the emotion that comes when we are faced with the ‘unknown’, when we are on the brink of having our certainty (about ourselves and the world) removed. This ‘unknown’ which beckons us is an expanded heart, a higher level of loving. The false certainty which is about to disintegrate is that we are this body, separate from the rest of the world. Pure love is present when we love everyone and everything the same. Such love is accompanied by the ever-present certainty that we are not separate individuals. The two antidotes for fear are Love and Truth. The arrival of fear can begin the awakening into our true nature: Love which knows no fear. The presence of fear tells us that we are ready for the Truth: we are the conscience; we are immortal spirit resident in this temporary body-house and there is no ‘other’ of which to be afraid, for there is only the One. |
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