Freedom from Fear and Anxiety

This talk explores in detail the tools and approaches we can develop to work skillfully with fear in our lives, both those fears that are obvious and those that are more hidden. There is a genuine possibility of liberation from the power that fear seems to have to constrict us.

The theme I'd like to speak about tonight is freedom from fear and anxiety. I just want to explore a little bit that very real possibility for us, real possibility for our lives, to live, to move towards, to open to a freedom from fear. Perhaps the first and obvious thing to say is just that fear is something that we all know. We've all tasted fear. I doubt there's ever been a human being who has not tasted fear. It's very common. We may think or believe perhaps there are some beings who have never known that, but even the Buddha tells this short, kind of insignificant-sounding story about the time of his practice before his enlightenment, and he just describes himself practising in the forest, sitting and walking, sitting and walking. And a bird would rustle some leaves on the ground, and great fear arose -- "Trembling," he says, "trembling." And if he was sitting, he would want to get up and run away. If he was walking, he would want to leave the walking path. So he's describing that, but then he says he worked with it. If he was sitting, he stayed sitting, and if he was walking, he stayed walking.

It's interesting when we go into it, how many different kinds of fear there are. There seem to be so many different kinds of fear, so many things we can be afraid of. Certainly we can be afraid in relation to our body, of the ageing process, of illness, of pain in the body -- definitely. We can also be afraid of pleasure in the body. That's also true. We can be afraid of our emotions: what might come up? Will I be able to handle it? We can certainly be afraid of the views that others have of us, or might have of us: will they think I'm stupid? Will I say the wrong thing? Will I do the wrong thing? Do they think I look okay? Or the view that we perhaps fear we might have of ourselves: what if I discover and then see myself? Maybe I am bad. Maybe I am a failure. Can be afraid of different forms in life. We can be afraid of the form of a meditation retreat, of seven, eight days in silence. Can be afraid of the form of a certain work situation, or any form -- a relationship form, or being out of that form. Seems like we can be afraid of anything.

There's a story from one of the Hindu traditions, and in this particular tradition, they believe that the guru, the teacher, could bestow enlightenment, full liberation, could bestow that if he so chose to a disciple by touching them, by looking at them. So this particular guru was sitting with his disciples, and they were silent or talking or whatever, and he said, "Whoever wants complete liberation from the ego, step forward, and I will grant it." No one moved. Second time: "Whoever wants complete liberation from the ego, step forward." Silence. Third time -- it was just silence. Then, very quietly, he said, "The offer is withdrawn." [laughter] Now, I think he was calling their bluff. I don't know. I think he was calling their bluff a little bit, and actually pointing to something: look, we can be afraid of anything, even freedom, even this promise of freedom.

But what the Buddha's seemingly innocuous little story, what it tells us is how fear is workable. We can work with it. It's not something we have to always be a victim to. That's part of what we get out of that story. And I think we can have a sense of the workability of fear. It's almost like, even in the midst of fear, sometimes it's possible almost to sense a whisper, a whisper that freedom is possible, that we don't have to be bound by this. Maybe also the whisper that fear and what fear is telling us is not really the truth of things. It's not really the truth.

And we may have seen -- I'm sure many of you have seen -- the sort of inverse relationship of fear and love. We may sense, when there's fear, that something has happened. The heart is closing its capacity to love. Some people say it's either fear or love. There's a very direct relationship, in a way. And we see the inverse of that. We see the opposite of that: the very proportional relationship of violence and fear. We see that in animals, we see it in individuals, and we see it in countries and political groups and ideological groups and all that.

And I think that for all of us, for all of us trying to live consciously, trying to open to freedom in our lives, I think a question comes, and it's very necessary, but it's coming out of kindness. It's really coming out of kindness. There's a question we need to ask ourselves and need to reflect: am I challenging fear enough? Am I challenging it deeply enough in my life? And it's not coming out of 'should,' and it's not coming out of pressure. It's coming out of kindness. It's really coming out of kindness. But to ask this question not just once -- many [times], over and over in one's life: am I challenging it enough? Am I too tolerant in my life of fear?

Now, that doesn't mean we don't accept the existence of fear, because as I said, even the Buddha had it before he was enlightened. Everyone has it. We need to accept it as a fact. That's not the same as not challenging it, not inquiring into it. How much is my life constricted by fear? These are hard questions. How much is my life constricted by fear? Some of it may be really obvious. Some of it may not be that obvious.

Oftentimes, fear is around, sometimes fear is around, and we don't even realize it's around. We're not even aware of it. We don't recognize its presence. Sometimes we don't even realize that we don't have a choice or we don't have choices in situations because of the presence of the fear, and we're not even aware of the absence of choice for ourselves.

I had a person I knew, a friend, and years ago, she inherited a lot of money. Then, quite some time later, we were talking about happiness. She was not feeling very happy in her life. We were sort of talking about, "Well, what brings happiness?" And we talked about different things. At one point, generosity came up as a factor that actually brought happiness, brought a sense of well-being to the heart. And I sort of lightly made the suggestion that, you know, maybe she'd want to donate some of her ... [laughter] Not to me! [laughter] Just in general! And it was funny. It was just like it was a complete no-go area. Since then, it's quite different, but it was just interesting how it wasn't a choice, it wasn't an option. It was just 'no entry.'

Sometimes fear in our life is actually masked as desire. It looks like desire. It's fear, but it's cloaked in desire. We can see this in many different ways. You may even see it here a little bit on the retreat. Sometimes people around food -- there's not a lot put out at tea, and we're not in control of what we eat here. Sometimes either at lunch or at tea, there's a sense of wanting more, taking more. And it looks like desire, if it happens. It looks like desire, but actually it's just fear underneath.

I have another friend who does a lot of work in the theatre. That's her profession. She acts and directs and things. She's been doing that since she was quite young. And for many years, it looked like there was great passion, great passion for the whole theatre world. But what she slowly began to realize was that there was actually a fear of what would happen if she wasn't so involved and so much in the spotlight -- would there be a kind of emptiness there? And all this momentum -- not all of it; certainly not all of it -- a lot of the momentum was kind of running away from this fear of emptiness, fear of feeling impoverished, of feeling barren and dry inside. And it looked like passion. Again, it was quite a while ago, and she's moved through that, and come to a genuine passion. Passion is something extremely important in our lives, to connect with a sense of genuine passion.

[11:27] I want to look tonight at a little bit of the possible approaches to fear. They're complementary. It's not mutually exclusive; they're just complementary. (1) So the first one is mindfulness, and mindfulness particularly of the experience of fear itself, the physical experience of fear itself. I'll go into this more. What can often happen when fear is around, we wonder: "Why am I afraid? Why is this here? Why, why why?" The mind kicks in. So this level is just about connecting with the basic experience. (2) The second one is mindfulness of our reactions to fear. I'll go into this, I'll go into all of them in more detail. Often when fear is around, it's unpleasant, and we're actually afraid of fear. We fear fear. It comes up, and it's something that it's very difficult to deal with, and we just are pushing it away. (3) And the third one is more about challenging fear in more direct ways. So it's less about mindfulness, because we cannot expect mindfulness to cure everything. It's extremely powerful, but it's not going to take care of everything, and that's also not what the Buddha taught.

So first question, and it's a kind of basic question: what actually is fear and anxiety? We use these words, and we know, we think we know what it is, but oftentimes, we don't hang out long enough with it to really know exactly what's going on when fear is around. So what do we notice? If we can turn towards it, and actually just have a very open view, a very careful, thorough look at what's going on when fear is there, what do we notice? Usually there are sensations in the body. We all know -- the tummy has butterflies, the heart may be thumping, maybe the hands are sweaty or whatever, other symptoms. There are sensations in the body. Usually they're unpleasant, okay? They're unpleasant sensations. And then, because of their unpleasantness, as we were talking about -- Christina was talking about vedanā this morning -- because they're unpleasant, we have a reaction to that unpleasantness: we want to get rid of it.

So there are the body sensations, the unpleasantness of them, and our reaction to them. Body. Second aspect that's almost always there with fear, but not always, is what's happening with thought, in the realm of thought. There's often a lot of thought around when fear is around, and again, often a lot of it has to do with the future, a lot of future thinking, even if it's just a few moments from now, or sometimes it's years from now. Thought, and it's often future related. But within this perhaps is a whole bag of assumptions and beliefs that, often, they're not seen, they're not fully conscious. That's all in the realm of thought. And this is kind of operating and buzzing around in the thick of fear. And again, generally, the thoughts are unpleasant. They have an unpleasant vedanā. And we have a reaction to them. We have a reaction: we want to get rid of them. So there's the body, the sensations, and the reaction; the thoughts and the reaction.

Third aspect, perhaps, of fear that goes on is there's a kind of shrinking of the felt mental space. I'm sure many of you know this experience: you have to present something or perform something, and you're up there on the stage, and suddenly the brain has shrunk to the size of a chickpea. [laughter] And you have to deliver whatever it is you're supposed to deliver. Generally, human beings like more sense of space in the mind, more sense of expansiveness. And so there's this shrinking of the mental space. Again, it's unpleasant, and there's a reaction to it.

All that, that whole constellation, we call 'fear.' Now, I'm not going through all that just to be overly complex. It turns out that these are different ways in, different ways to working with fear and moving towards freedom. When there's fear around -- and just to say, a small point -- it can seem like, because of this shrinking of the mental space, that it takes up everything. It takes up the whole space. It can seem when fear is strong that everything is fear. It's just covered everything. It's important to puncture that view a little bit. So there will be body sensations if the fear is strong enough. There will be body sensations. There will be somewhere in the body generally that there are no fear sensations. So, for example, the earlobes, or the end of the nose, or the toes. Toes rarely feel afraid. [laughter] At least no one has yet told me that they ... And it's important to put the consciousness there, even just for a moment or two, to puncture, as I said, the view that fear is taking up everything. Just to remind ourselves: there is something else. There is something else. There's a place of some relief.

But then we also need to turn around and really look at the fear, really be with the fear, really bring mindfulness to it. Now, as I said, usually when there's fear, there's fear of fear. So we're not going to want to do that. But this is a very important aspect. Can we practise -- and it really is a practice -- being mindful of the sensations of fear, of the unpleasant sensations? So that the mind will be doing what it's doing, and we don't have to fight that, but just keep coming back to the sensations, their unpleasantness, and just slowly, over time, what can really happen is that we can develop a capacity. We're developing a capacity to accommodate the unpleasant sensations of fear. Gradually, our capacity is literally enlarging, and we feel we can contain this in awareness, in mindfulness. It's really a practice.

Sometimes, even, in meditation, it may be really skilful, when there's some calmness, if there's some calmness, to actually sacrifice, or feel like one's sacrificing the calmness a little bit. Here's the calmness, the stillness. Everything is going fine. Bring to mind whatever it is that brings up fear, and just drop it in. Drop it into the calmness. And then watch it ricocheting around, particularly the body. Watch it ricocheting. Why? To develop, because we're interesting in developing this skill, this capacity of accommodating the unpleasant sensations of fear.

And the good thing, one of the good things about meditation practice, about sitting and walking, is they are very limited forms. So in terms of fear and what we might be afraid of, in a lot of cases, it's a very safe environment. When we're sitting in meditation on the cushion, I don't have to say anything clever. I don't have to appear a certain way. I don't have to perform. I don't have to look good. It's safe. Knowing it's safe, or the walking is safe, we can drop in the fear, and we know it's a safe container. We can just watch it ricocheting and develop that capacity, knowing there's no need to act -- I don't need to act on this thing that I'm afraid of. So that, over time, we really develop a sense of confidence with fear, confidence with the sensations of fear, because that's often what's missing with fear. We do not feel confident. It's around, and it has tremendous authority because we feel next to zero confidence with it. So the more we can do that -- and it's really a practice -- the more we develop that confidence. When we're doing that, we're also going against the grain, as I said, of this fear of fear. We're pushing against that.

I want to explore a little bit more this relationship that we have to the fear. In the Dharma, what's happening is always important, but our relationship to what's happening is as important, perhaps more important. What is the relationship to the fear and to the sensations of the fear? Usually, as I said, it's aversion or fleeing. We want to flee the unpleasantness. Now, that's totally understandable. The only problem is that it's actually not neutral to have an aversive relationship with fear. It's not a neutral factor. Our relationship with things is not a neutral factor. So fleeing the fear makes the experience of the fear increase, unfortunately. It actually increases the felt difficulty of the experience. Our aversion to fear is part of the constellation of fear. It's not something separate. It's part of the constellation.

So we flee these sensations in the body. Where do we go? Right up into the head and the thoughts. All of the energy, or a lot of the energy, goes up into the thoughts. The thoughts start gathering momentum, swirling around because we're fleeing the anxious sensations in the body, and start spiralling. The thoughts start gathering momentum. Usually, in that context, the kind of thoughts that are around are not very helpful. There's an increase. The whole thing builds.

So the reaction, our reaction of aversion, of fleeing, of fear of fear, is actually part of the anxiety itself. They're not two separate things. We can see, we can really explore this in meditation. This is one of the amazing gifts of practice. What we see is, when I take away the reaction, when I lessen the reaction of aversion, if I really take away the reaction, the fear cannot support itself. It's supported by my fear of fear. And not to believe anyone who says that -- we can check this out in our own practice.

There's fear of fear. Am I also, perhaps, putting a pressure for it to be different, for whatever reason? Putting pressure on the situation. Am I judging myself because there's fear around? "I shouldn't be afraid. I should be over this. No one else is afraid of this kind of thing" -- whatever the story is. There's the pressure of judgment. Pressure acts like a pressure cooker, basically. It just adds to the fuel, adds to what's feeding the fear. What, perhaps, am I assuming? What am I assuming that the presence of fear means about me, about my practice, my spiritual success or failure or whatever? What am I assuming it means about me, because there's fear, and maybe it's an irrational fear or whatever?

If you remember that seemingly innocuous, seemingly insignificant story of the Buddha, you just have to reflect: this guy, he doesn't say exactly when it happened, but this guy was somewhere in the time between leaving the palace and complete, unexcelled liberation, which is six years later. So somewhere between one day and six years away from complete, unexcelled liberation, and he still had that kind of fear when a squirrel moved in the leaves or whatever. We tend to think, "What does it mean about me?" Well, look at the Buddha. I find that very reassuring. [laughs]

[24:21] So working with the reactions that we have, is there the possibility of kindness? Is there the possibility of bringing kindness in, kindness into the whole situation? So we've been introducing the mettā practice in the days here, and we say, "May I be well. May I be happy. May I be peaceful." The "I" that we're speaking about, when there's fear, that's who I am right then, in that moment. It's the "I" including the fear. It's not "I, when the fear is away, or excluding the fear." Can we realize the humanity of it? As I said, it's so common. Can we realize the humanity of fear, and include all of ourselves in the kindness? The factor of kindness, when there's something like fear around, is extremely powerful.

Can there also be a kind of kindness and acceptance, kindness to the fear itself? So not so much to this person feeling the fear, but to the fear itself. What does that mean? What would it look like? What would happen if I totally emphasized, totally went overboard emphasizing acceptance towards the fear, kindness towards the fear, complete and utter welcoming? This sounds bonkers, I know! Complete welcoming of the fear, opening the doors of consciousness to the sensations of the fear. I'm talking about the physical sensations now. Letting the mind just be, and coming back to the sensations. Completely opening, opening to that, emphasizing totally the welcoming. Then there's kindness towards the fear. What's happening then? We're deliberately going against, undermining the fear of the fear, deliberately.

So again, this is, I find and a lot of people find, a very, very powerful way into working with fear -- not so much about the precise noting of where it is and where it ends and exactly what it feels like, but emphasizing the other aspect of mindfulness: really the acceptance part, really, really strongly. Again, like a lot of this, like most of this, it's a practice. You can really develop it.

It's very easy to forget all this. I mean, even after years of meditation, a few years ago I was doing a two-week personal solitary retreat at Gaia House, and I was not very well physically, not very well at all. And after the retreat, I was going to go to India. I had tickets and plans and everything. I really wanted to go, because there was a work retreat I wanted to do at a leprosy community, and I didn't want to miss it. I had been to India about twenty years before or so, just once, and got very ill, and took me ages to get better -- and actually, never was really the same since then. And I noticed on this retreat, there was just a sort of ongoing undercurrent of apprehension: "How will my health be?" And it wouldn't seem to go away. Being an experienced meditator or whatever, I tried all my meditative kung fu [laughter], acquired over years. And nothing was working. It was still [there] -- nothing particularly strong, but it was just in the background, this kind of apprehension.

And then, you know, I realized: basically I was trying to get rid of it -- in sophisticated ways or whatever, but basically I was trying to get rid of it. When I realized that, it was like, okay, completely embrace this apprehension. Completely embrace it. And it really began to shift, and it didn't take very long. The first part, the sort of image that came to me was as if the fear was a very young part of me that didn't want to get ill. And then it was just really embracing this, and the sense of, so to speak, me and my little boy who was very afraid were going to go to India together! [laughter] We would be in India together, checking it out. And all the excitement came up, and the passion for wanting to go, and the openness to it. It really came back. The fear was still there. Actually, after a while, that faded too. But it was just in that piece of, "Oh, yeah. Need to embrace it."

Okay. So I talked about this mental constriction that happens with fear: the mind shrinks. The space of the mind seems to shrink, and it feels very uncomfortable and very paralysing. I've noticed, both for myself in the past and in others, there can be -- and this isn't always the case; there are many more factors at play -- but there can be periods of time in our life when anxiety becomes a habit. Somehow the whole system has got into a kind of groove, like -- those of you who are old enough to remember -- gramophone records. [laughter] The needle can get stuck in a groove, and it just kind of repeats. It can sometimes be the same thing with the sort of physical/mental system: it just keeps falling into these grooves of anxiety. Sometimes we don't even know what it is we're anxious about. It finds itself in a groove, and then we go out looking for something to be anxious about: "I must be. I feel anxious. What is it?"

Not all the time, but sometimes, that anxiety, as a habit, can be there -- it has the potential to arise when there's a climate, a kind of ongoing climate, of self-judgmentalism, etc., of harshness to oneself, lack of acceptance. There seems to be a real connection. It's almost like that inner atmosphere of judgmentalism of oneself, harshness, is the breeding ground -- like a swamp, actually -- and the fear comes out of that.

I find this quite interesting: love -- in the sense of mettā, of loving-kindness -- when that's there as a quality in the heart, it's, almost inherently, we could say, it's calming. It has a soothing quality. Now, by definition, anxiety is the opposite. It's anything but calming. It's anything but soothing. Self-judgmental thoughts, inner harshness, inner critic, that kind of being very hard on oneself, tends to feel very cramping and oppressive. It shares that quality of constricting the mental space. It shares that with fear. And that's one of the reasons why it's just a small skip from that kind of inner environment into fear. It just needs a couple of shifts and it's there, because they share that quality.

In addition, I think certain kinds of fear come, are bred, really, in an atmosphere of lack of self-love. And again, I've certainly known this in the past for myself, and I see it in others. I have seen it in others. How exaggerated and painful is the fear of failure when there's the inner self-judge, when that's very strong? Fear that we might discover the truth about ourselves -- that we are actually, deep down, bad, worthless. Those kind of fears, very deep, existential fears about the self-view, really can run riot, can grow, can fester in that atmosphere of a lack of self-love.

So the huge importance, for all kinds of reasons, huge necessity, really, for love, for kindness, when working with fear, especially when fear and anxiety feel like an ongoing pattern in our lives, something that's quite recurrent -- huge place for love, for kindness to oneself, the mettā practice, etc.

[33:18] There's this constricting of the mental space. It can be, when there's fear around, extremely skilful to give attention -- literally give attention -- to physical space. So if we're sitting in here, that might mean opening the eyes and just looking at the space of the room, taking in the sense of the space of the room. Or going to listening. And again, we mentioned listening is often quite good at establishing a sense of spaciousness or opening a sense of spaciousness in the consciousness. Or going outside, and just looking at the sky, and getting a real sense of space there. Why? When the awareness goes to space, the mind kind of follows it, and it begins to, literally begins to open up -- can do -- in spaciousness. And again, that will counter this constriction, this mental constriction. So we're working against that particular aspect of fear.

Sometimes, too, if a fear is ongoing, if a fear is very persistent, we feel under its thumb, it can be really skilful to just not dwell on it, take ourselves out of that environment, and get space that way, get some psychic space, so to speak. Go play squash or whatever. It's hard to really be in your fear when you're ... [panting sounds] [laughter] Panting around the squash court. Or play with someone much better than you, and you have to ... [laughter] If you have some creative, artistic thing, just get involved in that, or something you like to really get the mind involved in. Just take it away, get some space, and then maybe come back to it.

So there's the mindfulness of the sensations, exploring what fear is, and developing our capacity to be with it, and the whole gradual process of that. There is the investigation of the relationship that we have with it, and countering the fear of the fear. There's the working with the constriction, and seeing ways that that can open, loosen. I think we also need to challenge fear in a more direct way, with more bravado, sometimes. Oftentimes, fear is saying to us, "Do this," or "Don't do that." And sometimes there is the place for, if fear says "Don't do that," we do it. And if fear says, "Do this," we don't do it.

Again, we might think of the most extreme thing, but we can practise this in very small ways. Just practise small gestures of just turning around to fear and saying, "Oh, yeah?" Standing up to it, going against, questioning its authority, questioning its power. It may be that this kind of environment, one wants to -- I put this out there very lightly; it's certainly an option -- one may want to start exploring that kind of thing here, if one wants to. Again, how much fear can there be around food? Maybe we realize. Maybe we don't realize. Maybe we want to experiment a little bit with it. There's no 'should' here. Zero 'should.' It's all in the realm of investigation, of kindness, of exploration. Maybe you want to see: what happens if I go without a meal?

Or sleep. How sometimes we can get very tense around our sleep, and are we getting enough. Maybe one day, just say, "Okay, I'll have two hours less. I'll be tired." Or with generosity, as I talked about before. We have this tradition of generosity in this particular meditation tradition. And oftentimes, when generosity is sort of a possibility in front of us, for many of us, for most of us, the fear is, "I don't want to give too much," fear of giving too much. Can we play with that? I had a yogi a few years ago who, to me, gave what seemed like a lot of dāna. It was great, but ... [laughs] I felt a little bit uncomfortable. I felt like I wasn't quite sure where it was coming from, so to speak. And we talked about it, and it turned out that it was actually a lot of fear about being perceived as someone who's not generous. She was really trying to counter that. So it can be fear about all kinds of things, as I said. Can we see what our particular flavour is, and just play with it a little bit, just explore it a little bit?

Maybe sitting longer -- you know, we have these forty-five minute or half an hour sessions. No 'should' here. No 'should.' But maybe, what would it be to sit ten, fifteen minutes longer? Or to sit every day. Sometimes it's actually sitting less. I remember sitting around with a group of friends some time ago, and we were talking about daily practice and that sort of commitment. Dave, one of the friends, sort of asked people, "Do you sit every day?" and everything. He came to me, and he said, "Do you sit every day, Rob?" I said, "Yeah, I sit every day." And then he said, "Well, when was the last time you didn't sit? When was the last day you didn't sit?" And I was like, "Hmm." And I remembered it was the day I was under general anaesthetic. [laughter] Well, okay! But it made me think: is there actually a little tightness here? Am I holding on to this precious, pristine radiance of mind that I've ... cultivated. [laughter] That maybe I've cultivated. You know? It can go anywhere. Fear can snake around and go anywhere, and to kind of shake it up a little bit, and just see. And then we have an option: how do we want to work with this?

So we can also challenge fear in the realm of thought. When we're working in the realm of thought, it's really important to be quite connected to the body, mindful of the body. From that anchoring, we can then look at thought and begin to not be so pulled by it, and work in more creative and skilful ways with thought. In the realm of thought, what am I believing? What am I assuming? What is going unquestioned about myself, about a situation, about an event, about others, about whatever it is? In the situation of fear, what am I believing? What's going unquestioned? And how am I reacting to those beliefs?

One of the things I struggle with is Crohn's disease. I have Crohn's disease, which, some of you may know, it's just a chronic disease. It's an ongoing disease for which they haven't found a cure yet. And it comes and goes in waves, basically. So I'm fine for periods of time -- at the moment, long periods of time -- and then other quite long periods when I'm really not very well. And I began to notice at a certain point some years ago, began to notice: there's a sort of period when you feel like you're beginning to get ill, and they're sort of on the edge, the symptoms. You're on the edge, and there's a sense of fear, really, is coming up, and fear of getting ill.

And I began to notice, again, questioning the assumptions, and I realized there were a whole bunch of assumptions that were unchecked there. The thoughts, the assumptions were, "Crohn's, if I get ill, I won't be able to work. I won't be able to travel. I won't be able to eat certain foods. It will curtail my social life. It will restrict my social life." There were all these assumptions that were just under the surface, so to speak. I had to really kind of shake up the rug and have a look at them. Then I realized, "Well, how true is all that?" And I looked back at the past, at the times I'd been ill, and I actually did quite a lot of work. It usually took me much longer and was more complicated, but I did that. Still had a social life and intimate partners and all that. Certainly true that I couldn't eat certain foods, but so what? And still travelled. I still travelled. It was more complicated, etc., but still did it. But yet, the assumptions were fuelling the power of the fear, because they were going unchecked, unquestioned.

We can also sometimes go to the end of our thought chain. So there's thought in terms of the fear, and it's going towards the future: "If such-and-such happens, or if such-and-such doesn't happen, then dot-dot-dot." Sometimes, again, that's operating, and we don't go to the end of the dot-dot-dot. Sometimes we can turn around and say, "Well, so what if dot-dot-dot?" And really, to have some bravado. (I can think of other words, but!) So what if they think I'm stupid? Really, so what? So what if I fail? So what? So what if I'm tired tomorrow, if I don't get enough sleep? So what if I get ill and lose weight? So what, sometimes, for some people, so what if I die? The sort of challenging of fear can [have] such a strength to it.

I used to live in America. I lived in Boston for fifteen years, and I was living there when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 happened. I'm sure many of you remember. The climate of fear that was around in the two, three days after those attacks -- enormous! Absolutely enormous. And, you know, quite understandable, but it felt like it just had a kind of manic momentum to it that was just a little bit crazy. There was a meeting of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Boston, and a number of us went with other groups, and we had a peace vigil. Quite a number of people went. And it was on a day where -- I can't remember how they did it -- they used to have these different levels of alert. Was it red? Was it colour? Yeah, red. So it was a maximum level alert for Boston three days or two days or whatever it was after 9/11. And we all went and stood and had this peace vigil right underneath the tallest building in Boston -- which, by the way, is an insurance building. [laughter] The two tallest buildings in Boston are insurance buildings. Fear is big business. It's big business. [laughter] And we stood there, and we had the peace vigil. It was almost as if, "This is mad, and we're not going to get swept up in this madness. Just don't want to be swept up in this madness."

Oftentimes a lot of our fear is connected with assumptions, or is fuelled by assumptions about what we need, and particularly what we need to be happy. This is a whole area that all of us need to explore, and very thoroughly, I think, very ruthlessly, you could say, almost. I was reading this article. I can't remember where it was. It might have been in the New York Times. It was about a high school in New York. I can't remember the name of it, and I can't remember the names of the other schools it was talking about. I think it was a boys' school, and there were boys in this school, of about 12, 11 or 12 or 13, and they had these special exams that they had to take at that age. Tremendous amount of pressure on them -- tremendous amount of pressure.

The person who wrote the article was interviewing these boys, and they were describing quite extreme manifestations of stress, basically, and anxiety. I actually recognize it from my past, also having been sent to one of those kind of institutions. But one of the boys was interviewed. The exams were to split the students up into streams, so A stream for the sort of 'bright' students or whatever, B stream, etc. He said, "If I don't get into the A stream" -- I can't remember the schools, but -- "I won't get into Harvard. If I don't get into Harvard, I won't get into Yale Law School. And if I don't get into Yale Law School, I'll be on the street." [laughter] I was like, "Whoa!" But for him, it was so real, and who knows -- family and school basically pipe that in, you know? And it came to be believed as a sort of, "Well, that's a natural jump." We laugh, you know, and it struck me, but we also have those jumps. We have those jumps too. And to question these leaps of non-logic that we have.

[48:07] Another whole area is, why is there so much fear for us around the approval of others, that we're almost beggars for the approval of others? Why is that so strong? Why does that have so much power in our lives? I think part of the reason is that we don't yet, perhaps, have enough inner resources of well-being, of happiness, so we're looking out for it. We're looking out to get something, and a lot of what we're looking out for is someone else to say, "You're fantastic," or "You're beautiful," or at least "You're not too bad." [laughter] Sometimes it's like, even that's good enough! Why does that have so much power? Because we don't have yet the inner resources. And this is a huge question in practice: what is it that builds my inner reservoir of sense of well-being, sense of happiness in life, so that I'm not so much a beggar for the approval of others, those that I know, those that I don't know?

Earlier I just mentioned, fear is often around future thinking. It's often around thoughts of the future. Here's another quite challenging question that, again, we all, all of us, every single one of us needs to ask ourselves: do we really know how to really take care of the future, really take care of the future? Are we really sure about that? What is it that builds this, that deepens this inner reservoir of happiness, of well-being? What is it? Where does that come from?

The Buddha, as some of you will probably know, has all these lists of factors to cultivate and develop, and generosity and loving-kindness and compassion and calmness and mindfulness -- it goes on and on and on. Sometimes it can just seem like chewing cardboard, all these lists. Part of what he's pointing to is, these are factors, these are qualities to develop that build, that widen and deepen that reservoir of well-being, and it's so important for us. It's so important. And we can cultivate them and develop that reservoir. That's one aspect of taking care of the future in a very genuine way. And it's interesting -- I think we can hear that and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." How many of us really live that way, really live that way? To me, it's a sign of really great maturity in practice, that one is genuinely putting one's eggs in that basket, that genuinely one's -- what's the word? -- investment portfolio is in terms of inner qualities of heart. One knows unshakeably: that's how to safeguard the future in the most fundamental and real way.

So this huge importance of cultivation, and also, taking care of the future, we take care of the future through our relationship to the present. If the relationship to the present is one of openness, of kindness, of interest, of attentiveness, of letting go, of non-clinging -- taking care of the present, taking care of the relationship to the present, and the future tends to take care of itself. Those two things together -- the cultivation and the relationship to the present -- that's really, really taking care of the future. And then, in a very real way (and I really mean this), what happens is, there is a decrease, a genuine decrease in our worry about the future: will I be okay? Will it be okay for me? Will I have enough money? Will I be secure? Will I be alone? Will my partner leave me? All this, all that. There's genuinely, genuinely a decrease in that kind of worry.

So just finally, all this fear is kind of centred around the self and the self-sense, the ego-sense. I think Fred is going to talk about this self, I think tomorrow night. So I'm actually not going to go into it. Just to say that that's a hugely important area for investigation. Any real, full inquiry into fear needs to look at this question of self. I just want to touch on one other aspect that's there in the teachings. We tend to assume that there's the thing or the event or the situation that I'm afraid of, there's that thing, event, situation, and there's the fear. And we tend to assume, "That's that, and this is this," and that they're separate and independent. But they're not.

At one level, it is the case that there's the object, and there's a relationship to it. But at another level, perhaps, it's not actually the case that here's the thing, here's the event and situation, and here's my relationship to it. They're not separate. Fear colours our perception. It colours our thought. It shapes our thought. It shapes our perception of the object of fear. Now, sometimes that's extremely obvious. There's fear around, and we're seeing ghosts, and we're seeing shapes moving in the dark, whatever. You can see this. As I said, it's quite obvious at a certain level, but we need reminding of it. How much, in a situation, is the fear shaping the thing it seems I'm afraid of?

It goes further: any thing -- a thing, an event, a situation -- is always being shaped by consciousness. It's always being shaped by consciousness, by the mind state in consciousness, whether it's fear or whatever it is. If I believe that what is in the present, that the present moment has a kind of independent existence, independent of the mind and the way the mind is looking at it, then I'm believing in a kind of really existent, inherently existent, independently existent present. If I believe in the present that way, it's inevitable that there will be fear of the future. It will follow, to borrow an analogy from the Buddha, like the wheels of the cart follow the ox that pulls it. It's inevitable if I believe in the reality, in an inherent reality of the present.

What I see, though, if I really go into this, if we really go into this, is that the present and the past, we say they're empty of inherent existence. They depend on how we look at them. You can see this from the past. Past seems this way when I'm in this mood, and when I'm in another mood, a relationship or how my childhood was or whatever just seems different. Present as well. The future, where fear goes, to the future, that will become present, and it will become past, and it's empty in the same way. When I begin to really genuinely explore this and get this sense, it's almost like we can't believe fear in the same way. Can't believe it.

So all that that I've talked about tonight, all that's actually available for us, available through the teachings and through practice to us. They're all ways to work with fear, and as I said at the beginning, a very real possibility for us in our lives, to move towards, to open a genuine sense of being free from the power of fear in our life.

Let's just sit quietly together for a few moments.