There’s something interesting about the way we experience fear. We don’t just feel it. We immediately start fighting it. We feel something uncomfortable in the body, and before we even have a chance to understand what’s happening, the mind jumps in with a story.
Something must be wrong. This shouldn’t be happening. What if it gets worse? What if something terrible happens?
And suddenly, we’re not just experiencing a racing heart, a tight chest, or a wave of anxiety. We’re experiencing all the stories, predictions, and worst-case scenarios that the mind has attached to those sensations.
It’s exhausting.
One of the things we can begin exploring in meditation is what happens when we stop treating every unpleasant experience as an emergency.
Not everything uncomfortable is bad. Not everything unpleasant is wrong. Sometimes tightness is just tightness. Fear is just fear. Anxiety is just anxiety.
That doesn’t mean we have to enjoy it. It doesn’t mean we have to pretend we’re happy or convince ourselves that everything is wonderful. It simply means we can begin to experience what’s happening without immediately turning it into a personal problem.
Taking a Walk Through the Landscape of the Body
One way to practice this is to approach the body almost as if we’re taking a walk through nature.
When you go for a walk, you might encounter a beautiful flower, a dead tree, a muddy puddle, or the unpleasant smell of a pond. You don’t necessarily take any of it personally. You simply notice what’s there.
We can approach the body in the same way.
Instead of saying, “I have this terrible feeling,” or “Something is wrong with me,” we can simply notice the sensations themselves.
There’s a racing heart. There’s tightness in the chest. There’s contraction in the stomach. There’s tension in the shoulders.
And we can just look.
We can investigate what’s happening without immediately deciding that it shouldn’t be happening.
This is particularly important when there’s one overwhelming sensation that captures all of our attention. We become so focused on that one thing that we forget about everything else that’s happening.
Maybe there’s tension in the chest, but there’s also softness in the hands. Maybe the heart is racing, but the legs feel perfectly comfortable. Maybe there’s anxiety, but there’s also a little openness somewhere in the body.
We don’t have to ignore the unpleasant sensations. We simply don’t have to make them the entire landscape.
And when something particularly uncomfortable shows up, instead of immediately turning away, we can try moving toward it.
What’s here?
What does it feel like?
Where is it located?
Does it change?
Can I soften around it?
Can I allow it to be here without making it into something more than it is?
This is the beginning of a different relationship with our experience.
What Happens When We Stop Fighting?
A lot of our suffering comes from the resistance we bring to what’s happening.
It’s almost as if we’re standing in the middle of a road, controlling traffic. We’re allowing certain things to pass, but we’re stopping anything we don’t like.
Pleasant experiences? Those can come through.
Unpleasant experiences? Absolutely not. Turn around. You’re not welcome here.
But what happens when we simply get out of the way?
What happens when we stop standing in the middle of the road and allow everything to pass?
There’s a saying from one of my teachers that I really like: If there’s nobody there resisting, there’s nobody for the experience to take over.
Think about that.
Fear might still arise. Anxiety might still arise. Physical discomfort might still arise. But when there’s no longer someone fighting against the experience, there’s a different quality to it.
The fear comes up, moves through the body, squeezes a little, and eventually changes.
It doesn’t necessarily disappear immediately. But it doesn’t have the same stickiness.
It doesn’t have the same power.
We spend so much energy trying not to feel certain things that we never actually get to know what those things are like.
And sometimes the way through an experience is to stop trying to get through it.
Turn toward it. Feel it. Hold it. Be curious about it.
Even if it’s unpleasant.
Even if it feels like it’s getting worse.
There’s a story about Milarepa, the great Tibetan yogi, who encountered demons in his cave. Rather than trying to chase them away, he eventually offered himself to them.
Essentially, if you’re going to eat me, then eat me.
It’s a rather extreme example, but there’s something beautiful in that attitude.
Instead of spending all our energy trying to protect ourselves from every uncomfortable experience, what would happen if we could simply say, “All right. Here you are. Let’s see what happens”?
Making Friends With Our Biggest Fears
This becomes particularly important when we’re dealing with our deeper fears.
For some people, it’s the fear of death. For others, it’s the fear of losing control, being abandoned, getting sick, or something terrible happening to someone they love.
And the mind can become incredibly creative when it comes to these things.
It can produce an endless supply of possibilities, each one more frightening than the last.
The problem is that we often spend our entire lives trying to avoid experiencing the feelings associated with those fears.
But what if we started training ourselves to sit with them?
Not because we want something terrible to happen. Not because we have to convince ourselves that we’re okay with everything. But because we want to become more comfortable experiencing discomfort.
Imagine someone experiencing a racing heart and immediately thinking, “Oh my God, something is wrong. I’m going to die.”
The body responds to that thought with even more fear. The heart races faster, the body tightens, and the mind takes that as further evidence that something terrible is happening.
It’s a cycle.
But what if, instead of fighting the sensation, we turned toward it?
“Okay, heart. You’re beating pretty hard. I’m here. Let’s feel this.”
“There’s fear. That’s okay. Let’s be afraid for a little while.”
This isn’t medical advice or a reason to ignore concerning physical symptoms. It’s a way of working with the fear that can accompany our experiences.
And over time, something interesting happens.
We begin to recognize the feeling. We realize that although it’s unpleasant, we can experience it without being completely consumed by it.
We start to understand that a feeling can be uncomfortable without being an emergency.
The more we practice this, the bigger the container becomes.
Something that once felt completely overwhelming might eventually become something we can hold with a little more space.
We’re not necessarily getting rid of the fear. We’re developing a different relationship with it.
The Bigger Container: Becoming a Loving Presence for Yourself
Sometimes our fears aren’t just about what’s happening right now. They have roots in much earlier experiences.
Maybe something happened when we were very young. Maybe we experienced a loss that we didn’t know how to process. Maybe there was a time when we felt completely helpless, and some part of us is still carrying that experience.
Therapy can be incredibly helpful in uncovering these things.
You might begin to recognize that the intensity of your current reaction isn’t entirely about the present moment. There’s a younger part of you that learned something about the world, and that part is still trying to protect you.
And when you recognize that, you can begin to relate to yourself differently.
Instead of criticizing yourself for being afraid, you can almost become the parent to that younger version of yourself.
You can say, “Oh, I see you. I know you’re scared. I’m here. We’re okay.”
This reminds me of the story of the mother’s kiss.
Imagine a three-year-old child falling down and scraping their knee. They’re crying, they’re upset, and they want their mother to kiss the injury.
The mother’s kiss doesn’t magically make the pain disappear. It doesn’t reverse what happened. The scrape is still there.
But something changes.
The child now has a loving presence accompanying the pain.
There’s someone there to help them experience it. Someone who isn’t telling them they’re wrong for crying or that they should stop being upset.
The pain is allowed to be there, but it’s no longer being experienced alone.
That’s what we can begin offering ourselves.
We don’t have to fix every feeling. We don’t have to eliminate every uncomfortable experience. Sometimes what we need most is a loving space in which we can experience what’s happening.
And that changes everything.
The Fear of Death and the Fear of Living
I don’t know that any of us will ever get to a point where we’re completely comfortable with dying.
Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t.
But I think there’s a distinction worth exploring.
We might never be entirely comfortable with the idea of death, but we can become more comfortable with being afraid.
We can allow fear to be present without fighting the fear.
And perhaps that’s a much more workable place to begin.
The mind wants certainty. It wants guarantees. It wants to know exactly what’s going to happen, how things are going to turn out, and whether we’re going to be okay.
But we can’t have that certainty.
We don’t know what happens after death. We don’t know exactly what tomorrow will bring. We don’t even know what the next five minutes will look like.
And the mind doesn’t particularly enjoy that arrangement.
It’s designed to help us survive. It wants to identify danger, avoid discomfort, and keep us safe. That’s not a personal failure. It’s simply the nature of the mind.
Some people seem to have an easier time letting things roll off their shoulders. Others experience things much more intensely.
There are many factors involved: genetics, sensitivity, past experiences, conditioning, and all sorts of things that make up our particular relationship with the world.
But ultimately, here we are.
This is the conditioning we have to work with.
We don’t need to spend our entire lives trying to figure out why we’re the way we are before we can begin practicing with what’s happening right now.
And perhaps one of the most interesting things to investigate is the possibility that we’re not quite what we think we are.
Our bodies change. Our thoughts change. Our emotions change. Our moods change. Everything we can point to as an experience is constantly changing.
But what about the awareness that knows these experiences?
Think about how many times you’ve sat in meditation. Sometimes you’ve felt wonderful. Sometimes you’ve felt miserable. Sometimes you’ve been anxious, distracted, peaceful, angry, or completely bored.
The experiences have changed, but the capacity to know those experiences has been there every time.
Awareness doesn’t become anxious when anxiety arises. Awareness doesn’t become depressed when depression arises. It simply knows what’s happening.
Even when fear passes, there’s awareness.
Even when fear returns, there’s awareness.
There’s still awareness. Awareness that is still.
It’s not moving around with every changing condition.
And the more we become familiar with this, the more we begin to see that we don’t have to identify so completely with every passing experience.
We can experience the body without being defined by the body. We can experience fear without becoming nothing but fear.
We’re Training for Living, Not Just Dying
There’s a quote I want to share from Tamara Engel, a meditation teacher who was sick and dying with cancer.
She said:
“My days are short, and as I grow weaker, I experience so much gratitude for my meditation. Not only the joy and ease it brought. But the hard parts, for every bored and restless sitting, and every fearful fantasy, and every pain and ache I sat through, and every itch I witnessed and did not scratch, was a training for kindness, a training for the muscles for bearing witness, for trusting the spirit that carries me now, even as I face my death.”
I find that incredibly powerful.
Think about what she’s saying.
All those seemingly insignificant moments of meditation were actually training.
Every restless sitting. Every uncomfortable sensation. Every time she wanted to get up, scratch an itch, or escape what was happening.
All of it was training in how to be with life.
We aren’t necessarily training to die, but in a sense, that’s part of the training.
We’re learning to remain open when things are uncertain. We’re learning to experience discomfort without immediately running away. We’re developing the capacity to meet life with kindness, curiosity, and a little more stability.
And that’s not just about dying.
That’s what living is.
We tend to think of living and dying as two completely separate things. But they’re not nearly as separate as we imagine.
Living means constantly encountering impermanence. It means experiencing change, uncertainty, loss, and the inevitable movement of things.
Every moment requires a little letting go.
Every moment requires us to release what came before and meet what’s here now.
In that sense, we’re dying to the previous moment over and over again.
And maybe that’s part of what makes life so difficult. We want to hold on. We want things to remain the way they are. We want to know what’s coming next.
But life doesn’t offer those guarantees.
Before we were born, we weren’t particularly concerned about what was going to happen. We weren’t lying awake worrying about what it would be like not to exist.
And every night, when we fall into deep sleep, we surrender into something we don’t consciously control.
We let go.
Yet somehow, the mind has a very difficult time with the idea of letting go when it comes to the rest of life.
Perhaps the practice is simply learning to do that a little more willingly.
To be open to uncertainty.
To be open to discomfort.
To be open to the things we cannot control.
To be open to being afraid.
Because the goal isn’t to create a life where nothing unpleasant ever happens. That’s an impossible project.
The goal is to develop the capacity to meet whatever happens without constantly fighting ourselves in the process.
We don’t have to like everything that happens. We don’t have to pretend that loss doesn’t hurt or that fear isn’t frightening.
We just have to stop making our experience of being human into something we need to escape.
And maybe that’s what meditation is really preparing us for.
Not some perfect state of peace where nothing bothers us.
But this.
The messy, unpredictable, uncomfortable, beautiful experience of being alive.
Practice, not perfection.