“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” – Dogen Zenji
I was speaking with a practitioner recently who confided in me that they were going through a really challenging situation, and that there was a tremendous amount of fear coming up for them. She told me that she was doing her best to observe the fear, without being it. Sensing a slight separation in how she was describing her strategy, I sort of re-framed the question to her, “How can you be it without becoming it?” This question is radically different. As the observer we are disconnected, ever so slightly, from what we experience. There is a “me” over here, observing an “it” over there. As long as there are “mes” and “its” floating around terrorizing each other, there will be “fundamental suffering.”
She asked me what I meant in being the fear without becoming it, which on the surface does sound like a paradoxical or even illogical suggestion. I explained it this way: When intense experiences arise, especially the difficult ones, we seem to have an immediate tendency to think and feel that these feelings shouldn’t be present. I shouldn’t be feeling fear, anger, shame, etc.! It’s almost as though it’s hard-wired into our biological system to approach difficult experiences this way. And so what actually happens is that we have the difficult experience arising, in this case fear, and then a resistance to the fear. These are two separate layers to our experience, the fear and the resistance to it.
The practice then is to trust that we have the capacity to hold whatever arises. That in fact, by trusting that we can hold everything, we are inviting our deepest nature to shine forth. Our deepest nature is that we can hold it all. We do hold it all. Then by allowing the fear to arise completely, just as it is, the resistance drops. The fear literally fills our experience, and we become the fear, no separation between me and fear. Just fear.
And fear, as we know, is a transient experience. It will dissipate. It will change, and be gone. As Jalaludin Rumi so marvelously put it, “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. … The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.” A guest, by its very definition, is one who comes and goes. Yet another reason we can trust our experience; because it changes.
As I made this suggestion to her, which is something I’ve learned (and continue to learn) from trusting my own experience, I could feel a shift in who I take myself to be. I experienced her fear and pain as my fear and pain. My suffering became hers. There was, and is, nothing that can separate this experience from the Big Heart and Big Mind that holds it all. We can trust that completely, because we are that.
I found your blog quite interesting and relevant to myself. I think that it is hard for someone who might have witnessed something traumatic like a death or abusive situation in that some of this experience might not disappear after one sitting. You might not overcome these feelings just by doing this once or twice but have to make a practice out of it. I think that being able to talk to others who are good listeners and empathetic also helps overcome some of these feelings as well.
In the end it is being able to accept yourself and your feelings as being a part of yourself that seems to help them dissipate. Being able to be compassionate to yourself with all this luggage seems to be a good path to healing.
Like I said I don’t think we can expect these feelings to disappear with implementing this approach immediately but in time after making it a practice they become less and less intense and overwhelming.
Hi Taylor,
Yes, there is a practical element to this, which can be quite a process. In some ways I was speaking to what it seems to be about, at the most simple & direct level. But then, dropping resistance to something and allowing it to flow fully, is a huge practice in-and-of itself. Meditation techniques are, in large part, about exploring what that resistance is like and gently unwinding the various levels of added contraction and confusion around experience (and experiencer). Just as you say, it doesn’t (usually) happen all at once.
And I might also add, that I’m not entirely sure how letting experience flow fully, from a phenomonological point of view, relates to deep trauma. What I’ve found in exploring the intersection between Western psychology and meditation, is that sometimes the phenomonological approach doesn’t always allow people to heal from psychological trauma, as its too dissociated to even access directly or takes a different kind of tact to really work with (ex. cognitive behavioral approaches). Then there are all sorts of skillful methods and techniques in the Western psychological tradition that help do that in more effective ways. That said, from all the sources I’ve read on this topic, my conversations with people who are in both fields, and my own experience, meditation and psychotherapy are highly complimentary.
Words are so tricky! You made a positive suggestion: “How can you be it without becoming it?” and then could see that a positive thing might happen: “The fear literally fills our experience, and we become the fear, no separation between me and fear. Just fear.” Which came out a little contradictory sounding on the surface but I think I’m understanding what you meant. I will try to rephrase it: For as long as it takes we accept that fear is our experience, but we don’t lock into it? And we have confidence in our ability to be present with the fear with the knowledge that it is not a permanent part of us?
Hi Star,
As far as your rephrase goes, I think that’s close to what I was trying to get at, yes.
What I meant by “being without becoming” has something to do with experiencing something in a completely unimpeded way, to the point where there is no separation between me and my experience, between subject and object. In this case I could either say that all is subject, all is object, it’s beyond subject-object, or is a unified subject-object. That’s where the words break down to me, as the move is more essential than any of these word combinations used to describe it.
That said, I feel like this is a work-in-progress for me, and I’m still trying to find the best way to talk about these things. Words are tricky sometimes, but they I don’t think they always have to be.