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Guided Meditation: Protection

Welcome. At the moment, my wish in welcoming you is certainly to welcome you to this meditation, and in a sense to IMC online. But I would really like to welcome you to yourself. When we sit down to meditate, ideally we welcome ourselves. We offer a welcome to however we are at the moment.

Sometimes we're a stranger to ourselves. Sometimes we know ourselves all too well. Sometimes we come in all kinds of moods. It's like a stranger or a neighbor who you never know is going to come knocking on your door, and they have a need, and you welcome them in. So, meditation is a time to welcome yourself in.

When we meditate, there is a healthy and unhealthy fear. There is helpful and unhelpful fear. There's fear that pulls us away from the present moment. There's fear in which we freeze or get lost. There's fear which keeps us apart from our experience of the moment.

There's also the fear that keeps us in the present. There's a fear that keeps us close to a sense of peace, non-conflict, ease, or calm. That is the fear of losing that—the fear of losing our balance, losing our peace, losing our well-being. That's a worthwhile fear to have, in two ways. When we lose our well-being or our balance, then we're much more likely to create more problems for ourselves, more stress.

When we protect our peace, if there's some fear like, "Don't lose that. It is dangerous to lose this peace. It's dangerous to lose myself. It's dangerous to lose my welcome to myself and really be present here." That fear might encourage us to let go of the other fears that take us away. That fear leads us, maybe motivates us, to protect our mindfulness, our presence, our being here. In doing that, it's protecting our practice, protecting our inner well-being. If there's a protective fear connected to that, hopefully, it won't be stressful because it's pointing you back to that place of the absence of stress. It's the protection, it's the safeguard. It's the fear that points us back to where there is no fear, because we know it's dangerous to lose it. So here we are, welcome.

Gently close your eyes. What do you welcome? What is happening with you right now that you're going to open your door and welcome in? This is what's happening. You are the welcomer. If you're distressed, you're not the distress; you welcome the distress. If you're calm, you are not the calm; you welcome it. Whatever there is, welcome it here in this body, this mind. Feeling and sensing how you are.

Then, within this body, allowing yourself to take a few deeper breaths. As you inhale, feel a fuller, maybe a stronger connection to what is here for you, how you are, what you're feeling. In a longer exhale than usual, let go, relax, soften the body.

Here the inhale is almost like a welcome: "Here, let me feel you. Let me recognize what's happening." And exhaling, settling in, relaxing into the middle of it.

Letting your breathing become normal. Still, on the exhale, soften, relax wherever you can in your body, even if it's micro-muscles. Let there be a gentle movement of relaxation throughout the body, sometimes in particular spots, sometimes the whole body. Almost as if you're relaxing into how you are. Relaxing into what you welcome here now.

And then continue, as you exhale, to relax a bit. But let the welcomer relax. That part of you that knows, that feels, that recognizes what's happening—let that relax. So that your awareness, your mindfulness has no fear in it, no hesitation. Relax the witnesser, the welcomer, the awareness of it all.

And then sitting here so far, is there something about how you are—some inner sense of balance, or calm, or peace? Is there a sense of openness and welcoming, something that's appropriate to protect? It's appropriate. There's a healthy concern, maybe fear, of drifting away from being connected to yourself, being present here. There's a danger in drifting away from whatever degree of calm or presence there is here.

Maybe there's a way of being motivated by that fear, that concern, to love and stay close to that place within where there's a sense of well-being, or the place within where there could be a sense of well-being. Stay close to the place that's safe inside.

Through these minutes of meditation, have you come to a time or a place where you have a clear sense that there's something here to protect, to nourish, to support, to safeguard? Some sense of well-being, or clarity, or calm. Maybe there's a healthy concern of fear that motivates you to stay close to that well-being, not to lose it.

As we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps you can consider whether there's a healthy fear that is the fear of losing our respect, love, and care for others. Even losing it temporarily, or having it be eclipsed by other feelings. The fear of losing a kind regard of others—maybe this is worth protecting. Maybe there's never an occasion to be mean, hostile, or unfriendly. So to fear going in those directions, and for that fear to be motivating, helps to stay close to your kindness, your friendliness.

Or maybe it's meaningful for you to wish well for others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Fear (5 of 5) Protecting What is Important

Thank you. We come to the last and fifth talk on fear. I hope that during this week I've been able to offer you some new perspectives on practicing with fear, living with fear, and understanding fear. I'll continue with that today. I thought the subject for today would be the wisdom of fear.

Part of the wisdom of fear is understanding that fear can be wise when we think that one of the functions of fear is protection. It's an attempt to protect something. Then, what are we protecting? What is being threatened? Some things are worth protecting; some things are not worth protecting. There is this notion in Buddhism that there is healthy fear and unhealthy fear, helpful fear and unhelpful fear. Having a categorical attitude towards fear as being wrong or bad is not so useful. What's useful is to practice with fear, to normalize fear, to not identify with fear, and to learn to hold fear with kindness. To hold it gently so you can really see it and know it. It's helpful to have it sit on your shoulder and accompany you rather than be you—all things that I've talked about this week.

But then it's also important to be able to look deeply at fear: Is this fear healthy? Is this fear helpful? Is it really protecting me in an important way? Is it really a protection, or is it the opposite? Am I actually more in danger by having this fear? Some fears and anxieties, especially anxieties that are quite strong, probably put us in greater danger than if we don't have them. We're more likely to make mistakes. We're more likely to act impulsively. Some anxieties are self-fulfilling. If we're anxious something's going to happen, that very anxiety makes it more likely to happen. The analogy that is sometimes used is around dogs. If you're afraid of a dog, the dog is more likely to attack you. We want to protect ourselves, but the very movement of anxiety is the thing that keeps us from being protected. So we have to look at what we are afraid of here, and whether it is a healthy or an unhealthy fear.

If it's a healthy fear and we're protecting something worthwhile, then the fear has a function of being motivating. There's energy in fear, and that energy can be motivated to actually do something that protects what needs to be protected. Sometimes that's to do things in the world, maybe put a lock on your door, for example, if that's what's going to keep you safe. Sometimes it's to really practice careful self-monitoring so that you don't succumb to unhelpful states of mind. You don't succumb to anxiety, anger, hostility, or greed. And you don't succumb to attachments that are maybe even the source of the fear itself. A healthy fear protects what needs to be, what should be, and what can be protected. It's helpful to protect.

What are some of the things that are helpful and healthy to protect? Certainly, our ethical integrity. One of the sources of fear is when we live unethically and are afraid of being caught, or afraid of our own conscience. There's a fear of wrongdoing. If there's a healthy fear of, "No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to lie. I don't want to get in that kind of situation," that keeps us from doing it and keeps us from even getting into those situations.

The deeper and more peaceful meditators tend to become, the more likely they're going to have a fear of somehow harming themselves with their ethics or harming anybody with their ethics. The fear of causing harm—that's a healthy fear. It can become an anxious or neurotic fear not to harm others, and that might not be so helpful. But if there is a healthy not-wanting to cause harm, the heart sings when it doesn't cause harm. The heart stops singing when you think about causing harm, or think you have caused harm. That's worth protecting, being close to it.

Then there's a sense of well-being we get, whatever that is. I use that word very vaguely. As we practice and go through our lives, there are times when we feel a degree of peace, happiness, and connectedness that is nourishing and supportive for us. It brings us joy and delight. That's worth protecting. It's remarkable how easy it is to give it up, how easy it is to get distracted and caught up in sometimes very petty concerns that wipe away the sense of balance, inner strength, or peace that we might have. So it's worth protecting that.

How do we protect that? Maybe we protect it by being careful with what we watch on TV. Maybe we're careful about who we spend time with, or how much time we spend with people. Maybe we're careful about where we go or the activities we do. Some activities, like watching a shopping channel or looking at catalogs, maybe stimulate unhealthy desires and attachment. That stirs up and causes us to lose the fact that we were pretty content before we looked at the catalog.

The wisdom of fear is to understand that fear is trying to protect something, and is what it's protecting worthwhile? Is it appropriate? Is it helpful for us?

There is a quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti^[1] that used to be read quite a bit: "There is fear as long as you want to be secure. Secure in your marriage, secure in your job, secure in your position, secure in your responsibility, secure in your ideas, in your beliefs, secure in your relationships to the world and in your relationship to God. At the moment the mind seeks security or gratification in any form, at any level, there is bound to be fear."

There can be attachment to a security, to a certainty, in a world that has much more uncertainty than we often will admit. All these things we search for and try to hold on to for our security—is that really the right place to feel secure? For the Buddha, the ultimate security, ultimate safety, is found in letting go. It is found in peace, in non-attachment, non-clinging. That can make us feel very vulnerable, very challenged. But we can find strength, courage, and stability in that place of non-clinging, non-attachment, and realize that it is portable. We can learn how to take that with us into all the insecure situations in life, all the uncertain places in life.

Life is uncertain; there are dangers in life. But the biggest danger is what we do to ourselves through our attachments, through our karma^[2], the actions we do, through the dispositions of the mind to hate, to be greedy, or to be caught up in something so that we lose ourselves in anxiety.

There is a place of security within that is worth protecting, worth finding, getting close to. It's a place within that cannot be threatened no matter what happens in the world. That place is not touched. To be centered there, to know that, is the ability to go through the world without fear. Until we get to that point, any hints or sense of that possibility of inner well-being that moves in that direction can be protected. We want to be careful for that. That is worthwhile protecting because we're moving towards freedom. We're moving to the place where we're really bringing the greatest spiritual health, the greatest freedom to our hearts.

Fear is an all-too-human experience. There's a healthy movement of protecting something. We don't want to dismiss fear. We want to be able to be friends with fear, connect to fear, and see it deeply. As we see it deeply, probably at the very root of what all fear and movements of protection are about, is this desire for ultimate safety. Many fears are misunderstandings of what's really important. Meditation hopefully will connect us to what is most important so that we remember that as we go into the world, and we don't fear things which are not that important. There are plenty of things that we might fear that we don't have to worry about.

I'd like to end with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that brings this topic of fear into our social domain: "People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other."

To the degree to which we are afraid of others, maybe we haven't really gotten to know them, and maybe we really haven't let them know us. To develop real communication between people is one of the benefits of becoming wise with fear. Because then fear does not interfere with our ability to communicate, connect, and have real friendship with other people.

Thank you for all this. May you now take time to really become wise about your fear, maybe even courageous around it.

I'm going away again next week for another week of vacation this summer. I'm happy that Nikki Mirghafori^[3] will come back. She's come often to be my substitute, and she's a wonderful teacher. She teaches Happy Hour at IMC, which is a time for loving-kindness practice in the afternoon. She'll be here next week, and I'll be back the following. Thank you.