Everyday Enlightenment, page 18
Jean, a nun, was a participant in a residential training that I presented several years ago. She came to the training with the hope that it would resolve the terrible guilt that had haunted her for years. (The guilt, like any feeling, would have passed, but Jean restimulated it every time she had an unacceptable thought or feeling.) Like many of us, she had been raised in a tradition that held her responsible for every thought or feeling that passed through her awareness, especially lustful thoughts and feelings.
Accept lustful thoughts or feelings as you would accept any other thoughts or feelings. This will not open the floodgates to even more forbidden thoughts or emotions; on the contrary, it allows you to accept whatever you feel as natural. As you stop trying not to think or feel something, you free your energy and attention for higher orders of experience.
Even those of us who experience chronic depression, anxiety, or anger—possibly as a result of a biochemical imbalance that may require medical treatment—can benefit by accepting both positive and negative feelings while focusing on acting constructively and walking through the storms toward our destination.
Freeing yourself from the impossible burden of responsibility for your emotions—with all the accompanying guilt—may stimulate feelings of happiness and relief. But the happiness will pass, as will the relief, and so will the lust, or hatred, or envy, or sorrow, or joy, or any other feelings that rise and fall, like waves on the ocean.
Accepting Others' Emotions
Some of us center our lives around other people's feelings; we try to make them happy. But since you can't control your feelings, how can you possibly fix the feelings of others? The plain truth is that feeling responsible for someone else's unhappiness (or happiness) is simply not realistic
No longer feeling responsible for the feelings of others, you can come to fully accept them rather than react to them. If you are to accept your own emotions as natural, you need to accept everyone else's emotions as well. Their emotions, whether calm or stormy, are their affair.
Just as you may need to express yourself, others will feel the need, on occasion, to express themselves to you, sometimes gently, sometimes in an outburst. Few things are more healing in a relationship than to let others express their anger or hurt and to accept that as their present reality, to validate their truth (which doesn't have to be the truth). After listening, you can even ask if there's anything more they would like to say. This opens the way to a far closer and more intimate relationship with that person.
This does not mean, however, that you have to listen to someone who habitually, chronically, or endlessly criticizes you. Accepting others' emotions is not the same as becoming a psychological toxic waste dump. Remember your boundaries.
Transcendence
If your goal is to carry a child home to its mother, and you are walking through a storm, you may notice the weather around you, but you remain attentive to carrying out your purpose—getting the child home. This is how you can carry on with your life in all kinds of emotional weather. And as you mature in the seventh gateway, a time will come when you transcend emotions—not because they have gone away, but because you have made peace with your feelings, letting them pass through you like wind through a forest. You will continue to know and honor what you feel. But rather than resist or struggle against the tides of emotion, you'll persist through all kinds of weather
In a kind of meditation on emotion, you can have an angry thought or feeling without automatically acting angry. And when you do this, you experience a self-mastery so powerful and inspiring, it is like walking through a storm without getting wet. The inspiration passes, of course, just like the anger.
Emotional Enlightenment
The following might be considered enlightened, or at least unconventional, ways to respond to emotions. Let's say your spouse or partner is complaining about something you didn't do or should have done. You might tend to yell, or mope, or walk away, angry or defensive. Instead be outrageous. Say, “I love you,” and give your spouse or partner a hug and a kiss
Suppose you were passed over for a promotion you expected and feel frustrated, discouraged, unappreciated. Barge into your employer's office, express your appreciation for the feedback, state that you respect his or her judgment and intend to improve your performance in the future.
What if you ask someone out and that person declines? You may feel disappointed and disheartened. You smile, offer thanks for considering your invitation, and wish that person all the best in finding the person of his or her dreams. Then go make a list of people to ask and ask until someone accepts.
Late for an appointment, I ran into a hardware store because it was right on the way. I quickly found the item I needed, but the clerk was new on the job and very slow as he wrote out a receipt. I said, “Excuse me, but I'm late for an appointment and really in a hurry—” He looked up at me as I continued, “So I'd appreciate it if you would take all the time you need and go especially slowly. It will be good for me.” He did a double take and laughed.
Notice that in these examples, the behaviors were not consistent with the emotions. Such emotional nonattachment is a practice in emotional freedom, since your behaviors are no longer at the mercy of your feelings, which rise and fall, come and go, appear and fade, as feelings do, like thoughts, like clouds in the sky.
Consider how much your life has been pushed and pulled and driven by your changeable emotional weather. Imagine the freedom of accepting your emotions, and the emotions of others, as a natural part of life—and, instead of trying to fix what isn't broken, focusing your attention and energy on constructive activity. You have already done this so many times; the teachings of this gateway enable you to do it consciously, clearly, deliberately. This liberates your attention to ascend higher, from accepting emotions to facing your fears.
THE EIGHTH GATEWAY
Face Your Fears
Fear is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.
Like pain, it can alert and advise you, but may also cloud or limit your life.
Fear appears in many disguises, such as “I'm not really interested in doing that” or “Why bother?” or “I can't.”
You face fear every day— fear of failure, of rejection, even the fear of being yourself.
Your fears are not walls, but hurdles.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it.
Living as Peaceful Warriors
Many of our fears are tissue-paper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.
—Brendan Francis
Road Map: Exploring the Forest of Fear
You now begin your final ascent toward the summit, through a forest of fears and the shadow-land beyond, up toward the prize of an awakened heart and the call to service that is the perfect expression of everyday enlightenment
How often are you aware of being afraid? Most of us would report feeling afraid only in dramatic moments—the sudden growl of a dog, a screech of brakes on the highway, the moments before we make an important presentation. But fear is with us every day in little ways. Our souls may be immortal, but we are also physical beings who can suffer pain, injury, or death, suffer embarrassment, failure, shame, or rejection. Thus primal fear gnaws at the foundation of nearly every endeavor. This gateway could have come first, but fear can be so intimidating an adversary, you need the power of the previous gateways to prepare for this confrontation.
In the previous gateway you learned to accept emotions, including fear, as natural. But because fear can have such an inhibiting (or even devastating) impact on our lives, and because that impact is often hidden to our conscious awareness, we need to independently address how to face and overcome our fears in this gateway.
Fear is not only your adversary; it is also your guide and adviser. It is natural and even appropriate—even a sign of sanity—to let fear guide you in physically dangerous situations where a lack of attention or care could mean injury or death.
Such moments of physical risk are rare. Your major battles with fear are not outside you; they lurk inside, in the caverns of the psyche, in the arena of psychological survival and dark imaginings, where fear shape-shifts into subtle guises such as self-doubt, insecurity, lack of confidence, shyness, inhibition, timidity—a reluctance to assert, express, or even be yourself. Whatever form fear takes, your willingness to face it squarely will determine your fate in the high country of human potential. Whether fear is your friend or foe depends upon whether you become its master or its servant. Here, in this gateway, you can take a stand and step forward resolutely into the life you were born to live.
The content of some previous gateways centered around awareness, understanding, and perspective. But the primary way to face your fears is by taking action. Therefore this gateway centers around specific exercises—things to do.
A single courageous act calls forth others. Such moments, little decisions, shape your life and inspire other people to do the same. Welcome to the eighth gateway, your initiation into the realm of the peaceful warrior.
In this gateway you will explore the location of fear, have a chance to face your personal moment of truth in the pin test, confront and overcome self-doubt, and learn a direct method to free the body of fears stored as specific zones of tension.
Understanding the Adversary
My friend Walter called to tell me he had failed a test of courage. It involved a challenge course in which he was to climb to the top of a telephone pole, stand on the top, and leap off to a trapeze about five feet away. Even though he was on a safety tether, this task was imposing
“You say you failed. Didn't you make it all the way up?” I asked.
“I climbed all the way,” he replied.
“But you weren't able to stand up on top—you fell?” I guessed.
“No, I didn't fall.”
“So you missed the trapeze?”
“Oh, I grabbed the trapeze all right,” Walter replied.
“I'm missing something here, Walt. You told me you'd failed.” “Yes, I did,” he assured me. “You see, I was trying to beat fear, but I was scared the whole time.”
Walt was suffering from a basic misunderstanding of how we face our fears. You cannot control your fear by willing it away. You conquer this adversary only by making it your servant and adviser and never allowing it to become your master. Fear cannot take your power; the danger is that you may surrender your power without a fight.
A Stuntman's Secret
Dar and I were childhood friends who met at a trampoline school. One day we climbed a ladder up to a billboard, high above the roof of the school, and dove off, landing on a soft pad below. I climbed to the fifth rung; Dar just kept climbing. Ten years later he was one of the most daring and successful stuntmen of modern times
For one of his stunts, Dar had to run full-tilt forward, spin around backward, crash through a glass window, fall sixteen stories, and then do a somersault with a half twist, before dropping into an airbag. Any miscalculation or mistake would have cost him his life. Dar's stunts included diving off the top of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, leaping from a helicopter hovering at three hundred feet to land on an airbag (that looked the size of a postage stamp below), and driving a car off the rim of the Grand Canyon, whereupon he climbed out in midair and pulled his parachute. Dar once jokingly reminded me, “When skydiving, if you pull your chute when the people below look like ants, that's good; if the ants look like people, that's bad.”
Every time Dar prepared himself for a new aerial stunt, he would recite a prejump mantra, louder and faster, getting ready: “Owah tajer kayam . . . ohwha tajerkayam…OHWHATAJERKIAM…OH WHAT A JERK I AM!”
Some people believed that Dar was as crazy as he was fearless, but he was neither. He just had a secret that he had learned long ago on that ladder above the trampoline center: Dar Robinson, one of the greatest modern-day daredevils, was terrified—practically scared to death—with each and every stunt. His heart leaped from his chest; he had to consciously control his rapid breathing; he sweated, he trembled, just like the rest of us—then he did what he had set out to do. This is what you and I can do in everyday life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” Wise words. But dead wrong. Fear does not die; it may not even go away. Or if it does vanish, it may resurrect itself, moving to greet you farther down the road. Your task, then, is not waiting for fear to die, but to face it while you live.
Anatomy of Fear
Understanding the symptoms of fear—how you physically feel when you are afraid—helps to manage it, much like knowledge of the physical process of childbirth helps many women to weather its powerful waves and rhythms. Knowledge doesn't calm the seas, but it does help us take steps to trim the sails and batten down the hatches and ride out the storm
When you feel low-level fear—a vague anxiety, concern, or nervousness—your symptoms are likely to be subtle: a slight change in breathing, imperceptible or unnoticed increase in muscle tension in all or part of your body, a knitted brow, nervous mannerisms like biting your lip or clenching your jaw. But when you perceive something as acutely dangerous or threatening, chemical messengers like adrenaline and glucose flood into your bloodstream to energize your muscles and ready you to face, fight, or flee from danger. Your mouth may become dry. Your heart beats faster. Your breathing may become rapid and shallow or stop momentarily. Fear is psychologically uncomfortable. It's supposed to be, just as pain is physically uncomfortable—designed to get your attention. But sometimes you need to bear what is painful, and sometimes you need to do what is fearful.
The Layers of Fear
You are not actually afraid of the act of public speaking, or singing, or taking tests, or letting a tarantula crawl across your arm, or even leaping out of airplanes. Rather, you fear your own imaginings of what might go wrong—that you may forget your speech, sing off-key, fail the exam, get bitten by the spider, or forget to pull your ripcord. And the truth is, you are not even afraid of these things in themselves, but rather of the emotional or physical consequences—embarrassment, shame, mediocrity, pain, or death—all worst-case scenarios
Mention an ocean cruise and some of us envision formal meals, deckside shuffleboard, or beautiful sunsets, while the more fearful of us visualize the Titanic. The same is true of camping in the woods—some of us picture panoramic vistas, cozy campfires, and starry skies, while others imagine snakes, insects, and bears. As you have learned, expectations tend to shape your experience of life, and fearful expectations create a fearful life. One key to facing your fears, then, is to consciously begin to visualize positive outcomes—to form the pictures you want rather than focus on images you fear.
When to Listen and When to Overcome
People have asked me how they can determine when to listen to fear's counsel and when to push through the fear. As a general rule, when the danger is physical, let fear guide you to take care and prepare well or even choose not to take foolish risks. But when the fear is psychological, as in the fear of embarrassment, shame, rejection, and so forth, that is the time to push through it
Physical fears are direct, objective, and realistic. In the unlikely event that something goes wrong when you are skydiving, you may receive an injury or may even die. Fear advises you to take precautions.
Psychological fears are indirect, subjective, and symbolic. The sky doesn't fall if you forget a speech or sing off-key or fail an exam—there is no risk of physical injury or death. If you go deeper into your psyche, you'll find that you are afraid not of failure, but of what it represents: issues of psychological survival, primal fears of losing face, of rejection, abandonment, ostracism, worthlessness, and mediocrity, of being a charlatan and a fool.
Assessing Your Relationship to Fear
The ancient warriors knew that we must understand the enemy in order to vanquish it. Take the following inventory of the fears in your life and how they might relate to your needs and goals
• Are you a risk taker?
• Might you ever describe yourself as timid, shy, insecure, or suffering from self-doubt?
• Have you noticed how you deal with subtle fears every day?
• Recall an incident when you let fear stop you from doing something you wanted to do.
• Recall an incident when you accomplished something you feared.
• Do you have any phobias?
• What are your five worst fears? Failure? Losing face (shame, embarrassment, ridicule)? Rejection? Inadequacy or mediocrity? Public speaking? Pain? Heights? Insects? Animal(s)? Enclosed spaces? People?
• If you could save the life of a child by doing what you most fear, would you?
• As you overcome your fears, in what specific ways might your life change?
The deeper your understanding, the greater your power. As awareness penetrates a fear, it starts to dissolve fear at its core. Many of us misunderstand the nature of fear and of courage.
How You May Let Fear Limit Your Life
Whatever the sources of fear, if you run from it (the way many of us avoid emotional confrontations rather than staying present and resolving them), you limit your life in the following ways
• You may become your own jailer, imprisoning your experience in a cage that's meant to keep the dangers out, but ends up locking you in.
• You may avoid trying anything new because you don't want to feel incompetent or appear foolish or silly.
• You may not ever fully commit to an effort so that you can console yourself with thoughts such as “If I had really tried, I could have done it.”
• You may avoid, whenever possible, any situation in which you don't have control, because of the fear of being out of control.
• You may hold yourself back from achieving success out of the fear that success will leave you unfulfilled or with nothing left to do.
