--- ai_generation_date: '2026-09-30' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2020-06-30' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/11620/20200630-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-fear_2_of_4_our_relationship_to_fear.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: Fear (2 of 4) Our Relationship to Fear url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11620 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: REqe9hQFdQs imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04' title: 'Dharmette: Fear (2 of 4) Our Relationship to Fear' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REqe9hQFdQs --- # Fear (2 of 4) Our Relationship to Fear - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1) _This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._ ## [Fear (2 of 4) Our Relationship to Fear](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11620) So, we're looking at fear these days. There are two kinds of fear: the fear which we are trying to become free from, and the fear that we want to listen to. There's the fear that is motivated by attachments, by greed, hatred, and delusion[^1]. And there is the fear that arises out of freedom, a sense of our wisdom, our love, our care. Healthy fear is the fear of causing harm. So, it is the fear of ourselves causing harm to others, or fear of ourselves causing harm to ourselves. To watch and see, and be mindful—when we're about to cross that line, and that hesitation, that feeling, "Oh, that's not a good place to go." That is a frightening feeling, but that is considered in the Buddhist tradition a very healthy kind of fear. The fear that arises out of greed, hate, and delusion, to support the greed, hate, and delusion—that is what the practice is really trying to address and learn to be free of. So, to learn to distinguish between these two... And of course, it's not always so clear that they're separate. Often there's a mixture of wisdom and confusion, a certain kind of greed and generosity that can be mixed up. And so, to sit quietly and begin unpacking the layers, or teasing apart the different aspects, is very, very helpful. Sometimes fear is the motivating force for greed, hatred, and delusion, for being attached. And sometimes when there's a lot of anger, for example, it can be useful to notice the fear that might be underneath it. Because if you can see the fear, then it's a different way to work with it. We work with the fear as the primary thing, and the anger and hostility is just a symptom, it's a messenger. And they say you're not supposed to kill the messenger; you want to go look at what the message is. And sometimes anger is the message that we're afraid, and that's what really needs to be addressed. Then sometimes greed and delusion is the cause of fear. We want something so strongly that we're afraid of not getting it, or we greedily want to hold on to what we have, and we're afraid of losing it. So to look at this and tease it apart is important. One of the ways of thinking about this is we want to understand our relationship to fear. How do we meet fear when it's there? I believe that just about all of us will have fear of some kind or other, whether it's healthy fear, unhealthy fear, or a combination of both. And the question is: what is your general attitude towards yourself and towards the fear that might arise for you? To begin looking at that, to answer that question for yourself, spend a day, a week, a year, a lifetime looking at what is the fear that's here. What is my relationship to it? How do I generally act? How do I generally meet fear when it arises? Do I believe it automatically? Do I recoil from it, and shut down, and pull away, avoiding everything that makes me afraid? Do I just put my head in the sand like an ostrich so that I don't have to look at it? Or when I'm afraid, do I attack? Do I get angry? Do I become critical? Do I blame someone else for my discomfort, maybe to deflect the attention from myself, or deflect my own attention from my fear, with some idea that I have to overcome it but not look at it, not be with it? When there's fear, do we feel bad about ourselves, that we shouldn't be afraid, and if we were a different kind of person we wouldn't be afraid? And so we begin oppressing ourselves and making our life difficult because of these heavy burdens of "shoulds" and how we think we should be. Are we afraid of fear? We feel the fear come, and we pull away. How are we with fear? How do we meet it? Now, of course, the answer I think has a lot to do with the intensity of the fear. There's a wide, wide range of what people can feel, and it all should be respected, and depending on the intensity of it, we might relate to it differently. But one area that is always useful to think of as a laboratory to discover, explore, and work with fear, is the minor fears we have. When I started looking at it myself, I was really surprised how it was such a constant companion in small ways. If I was standing in line in a store, I had a teeny bit of fear about who was behind me, in front of me, what they would think of me. Fear about what they thought of my shopping cart. This idea of fear in all these small ways was there. And as I looked at it more deeply for myself, I saw that for me, at that particular kind of issue, the particular fear was a fear of rejection. Someone would either reject me or they wouldn't like me. And then that became really what to see. The specificity of it really helped me to look at it. And it was relatively very mild in supermarket lines or things like that, but mild and small doesn't mean that it's inconsequential. Often, when you look at it, it taps into something which is really important for us, a deeper root in a sense. So I would really encourage people to spend time getting to know and working with the small anxieties, the small nervousnesses that happen through the day. Try to understand what's going on. Try to find a different way to be with it. One way of relating to small anxieties is to just ignore it, to not think it's important, or let it influence us but not really understand it. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are fears which are very, very intense. People can have panic attacks. People can feel terrorized, and it's so strong that sometimes the very idea of being mindful of it, or being present for it, letting it just be the river that flows by, could actually make it worse. Sometimes intense fear is self-reinforcing, and we spiral out. And so we have to see by asking a question: how do I relate to fear? What happens to me as I meet fear? We can also begin learning—when not through trial and error—that, "Oh, this is not the kind of fear to meet. This is not what to bring mindfulness to right now. I need something else. I need to ground myself. I need to even distract myself. I need to get some fresh air or the equivalent. Maybe I need to find a friend to talk to. I need to do something that stabilizes me, something that allows my whole system to come into a little bit more equilibrium by not paying attention to it right away." And of course, with certain kinds of intense, chronic fears, sometimes we need help from other people. But for in between the very mild and very intense things, there's a whole range of things where it's really fascinating and very helpful to sit and meditate with it. Sometimes even when you feel some fear in your daily life, and it feels like this is a good one, sit down and meditate there and then, and really be with it. But rather than investigating deeply what's really going on, investigate your relationship to it. Try to understand the attitude you have towards it, the beliefs you have towards it, the reactions you have to it, what are the secondary emotions you have about the presence of fear, and all those things. Many of those attitudes might be like a branch sticking out from the island on which a passing log gets hooked. You just get stuck on that. If we could understand the attitudes, the relationships we add to fear, then it might be easier to let the fear be, leave it alone, and let it go by, not reacting to it or getting caught by it. One of the ways to discover a useful, hands-off attitude towards fear is to imagine that maybe you're an island, and it's just going by. Or maybe it's a very big island, and there's a big mountain on the island, a big hilltop, and you can be way up on that hill looking down at the fear far in the distance. Then it's okay to be with it. Somehow being too close to it is too difficult. We have the ability with mindfulness sometimes to adjust the distance from which we look at something. And sometimes with fear, it's better to be far, far away, so we can just leave it alone. If we get too close, then it can be agitating. Or worse, we can get frightened by the fear, by the discomfort of it. And so, how close can you be, or how far away do you need to be, in order to really feel what's going on? Other times, the relationship we have to it can be very intimate. There are times when I've had fear where I kind of placed myself right in the middle of it and really allowed the fear to be flowing through me. And in mindfulness, the island was right in the middle of it. Then I really felt it flow. And there are times when that was not appropriate, that's too close. So, to look at our relationship to fear: how do we meet fear? What do we do when there's fear? One of the goals, and it might be a long-term goal of mindfulness practice, is to meet the fear with great simplicity, with just allowing it to be there. But not just allowing it to be there so it runs us and controls us, but allowing it to be there so we can see it clearly. The fear is part of who we are, it is not who we are. If anything, who we are is the awareness of what's happening. Even that doesn't work in the end, but provisionally that's a useful way of seeing it: that we are the island upon which everything else flows. That simplicity of just being simple and relaxed, and not being troubled by fear. To learn how to be comfortable with fear. In a certain kind of way, the relationship that we're looking for in practice that can be very helpful is to help our fear feel safe. So rather than fixing the fear, getting rid of the fear, or solving the fear, maybe the fear we have inside, what its greatest need is, is to be able to spend some time so that it feels safe. So what we can do from our island, or from whatever wisdom and place of stability we have, is that we can find a way to hold the fear, be with the fear, so what's frightened inside of us doesn't feel criticized, doesn't feel like we're poking at it or running away for a minute. Or we have all these unhealthy ways of being with it, but instead the fear begins to feel it's okay to be there, finally it's safe. For me, the image is of holding our two cupped hands together like this, and then just gently holding the fear, like we'd hold something that is precious, with caring, or maybe a little bird that's been stunned and we're just holding it to bring it outside the house. Maybe we can learn how to help our fear feel safe. And then the fear we have can begin to do what it needs to do: it can begin to thaw, relax, settle, unwind, and maybe even dissolve. So, to spend time looking at your relationship to fear is one of the great things to do. So thank you for today, and I hope that this exploration and consideration of fear gives you something to consider through your day, and in a way that helps you not be limited by your fear. Thank you. --- [^1]: **Greed, Hatred, and Delusion:** In Buddhism, these are known as the "Three Poisons" or three unwholesome roots (_akusala-mūla_) which are considered the primary causes of suffering and the fundamental obstacles to awakening.