Fear

"Fear is a universal experience.  Even the smallest insect feels it.  We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up.  Everything spontaneously does that.  It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown.  It is a part of being alive, something we all share.  We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to.  Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.


If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid.  Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape."  - Pema Chondron "When Things Fall Apart"

The Halloween season lets us indulge in fear, lets us experience it in an unthreatening way. So do horror movies.  Then, it's fun to be scared, right?  It's practice for real fear.  It can be swallowed with popcorn and junior mints.

"The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That's what we're going to discover again and again and again.  Nothing is what we thought.  Emptiness is not hat we thought.  Neither is mindfulness or fear.  Compassion - not what we thought.  Love, Buddha nature. Courage.  These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience them.  These are the words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment." - PC

At some point, if we are lucky, we decide to let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.  We decide to stand still where we are and feel our feelings.  See where fear takes us.  See what insights it has for us.  I am feeling fully alive with fear, right now.  I cannot run.  I cannot hide.