Good evening, dear friends. Good to see all of you again. Thumbs up if the sound's okay. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much. That's a standard Zoom event, right? How's the sound? How's the sound? Well, it's a joy to be with all of you again, as usual. And I look forward to our practice this evening. or this morning or this afternoon, depending on where you're at. And just briefly for anyone who is new, welcome. Welcome to these twice a week online practice sessions. They're actually going to go to three times a week because the Abbots of Green Gulch Forum through Schrader is going to start offering a practice session on Sunday nights at 5 o'clock. So we'll have a practice session on Sunday. Tuesdays and Thursdays. So whatever we can do to support and nourish and encourage your practice.

[02:20]

And if you're new to the online practice sessions, what we'll be doing is start with about 25 minutes of meditation with Zazen. I'll lead in for anyone who's new with a bit of a guided meditation and then finally kind of fade into silence. And then... After the meditation, around 6 o'clock, we'll have what I call a dharmet, a mini dharma talk or dharma encouragement. And that will go for about 15 minutes or so, depending on how verbose I feel this evening. And then I'd like to leave time for you all to share anything you'd like to bring forward in terms of your practice, any questions you have about something I said this evening, or what's coming up for you just during the week or during this evening's practice itself. And the aim is to finish around 6.30 or so.

[03:21]

So without further ado, why don't we get ready for our meditation. So I'll welcome you to kind of find your posture, whatever works for your particular body, and comfortable seated position if that works for you. Whether you're on a Zafu, on a chair, in a wheelchair, if you need to lay down for your body, that's also fine. Or sometimes people do a standing meditation depending on what they need. So find the comfortable position, upright posture, alert, attentive, sense of extending your body and opening the chest. Open chest. supports easier breathing, and it also supports having an open heart and an open mind. And then consider resting your hands in your lap. You want to take a typical cosmic mudra, which we use in Zen.

[04:25]

You can place your left hand in your right hand and then form an oval with your thumb tips lightly touching. And then draw your chin slightly down and in, kind of lengthening the back of your spine very gently, lengthening the back of your neck, so the crown of your head is reaching towards the sky. Rest your tongue at the roof of your mouth, with your lips slightly parted, enough to take the breath gently in, through the nose, typically. And in Zen, we traditionally have our eyes open, but kind of half-lidded, focusing down softly in front of us. And if it works better for you to maintain attention, you can also close your eyes. Just be careful about not getting sleepy.

[05:26]

And then throughout the meditation, giving yourself over to both the physical and mental posture that is attentive and yet relaxed. So I'm going to ring the bell as I do so. Simply note the sound when it first arises, following it for its duration, and then as it fades away, continue to be aware of what is it that remains. It remains welcoming to the next experience of the next sign of the bow that arises. I'll ring it three times to begin, and at the end of our meditation, I'll ring it just once. I invite you now to take a deep breath in, deep breath in through the nose and getting a fresh inhale of nourishing breath.

[07:06]

You might wish to take the breath in for a moment and hold just for a few seconds, like four seconds. And then releasing, releasing the breath and Maybe as you do so, extending the exhale to a count of eight, so twice as long. So doing this several times, taking in a deep breath, holding for about four seconds, and then releasing. And as you release, imagine you're releasing any kind of tension or holding or kind of effort. that you've carried in your body through the day, allowing it to be released with each breath out. And slightly a little bit more deeply into the body, into right where you are,

[08:22]

into this present moment with each exhale. And after the third time of intentionally extending the exhale, then let the breath simply return to its natural flow. No longer needing to control it or change it in a way, but just bring open awareness to the sensations of breathing. And if it's easier for you, you might also just focus on the sound of the breath. Or any other object of awareness that helps you to stay here in the present moment. Bringing awareness to the embodied experience.

[09:26]

being right here and right now. Using the breath as a touchstone or an anchor to staying present. Some people find it helpful to count a breath. From one to ten, I count on each of the exhales. and then starting over again at one. And others find simply noting the exhale as a one. Whatever helps you to stay present. Continuous contact, the direct experience of the now. wish to me, do a brief body scan, simply scanning from the crown of your head down to your feet, like a flashlight, simply noticing as you do so very slowly and gently.

[11:18]

Is there any particular place in the body that's holding a little bit more tension than usual? you do this scan and you come upon those particular places, painful, maybe uncomfortable, just simply a sense of tension and contraction. If you can invite the breath into those particular places, just offering them spaciousness in the form of the breath. to change them or fix them in some way. It's not a problem that they're there. It's just to note them completely. To hold a loving, accepting orientation to those places.

[12:20]

They have something they want us to know, to be aware of. to illuminating the mind's awareness, and with the brain. And if in time you notice a softening or a change, then that's what is. And if it doesn't change, then that's what is. Meditation is simply noticing what is happening now. What is the truth of the reality of this present moment? And doing our best to be with this truth, to open to it. Find a way to be with it that might bring us a little bit more ease

[13:31]

As we said, continuing to settle a little bit more deeply into the body, into stillness, to silence. Now in ourselves to rest, to deeply rest and experience of just being. Meditation is not a doing.

[14:37]

We can't do meditation. Meditation is what we are. It's being, presencing, the fullness of our life. So sitting now in stillness and silence, courageously presencing the form inside my life, allowing it to flow, to make itself known, to be released,

[15:41]

for that which never changes, to continue, or is being present. Thank you again for sitting together in this way, coming back to stillness and silence and just to the nourishing, grounding experience of just being, just resting as awareness in our fundamental, open-hearted aspect.

[31:21]

So for the Dharmat, This week, I wanted to say a few things about practicing with fear. And a number of you joined me on Tuesday, where I started the conversation, and I wanted to, this evening, continue the conversation. And depending on how things go, I may actually lap into next week, but we'll explore that. For many of us, obviously during this time of pandemic, fear is something that has... been moved to the forefront, you could say, of our awareness and our lives. And if we deeply consider our lives, even before the pandemic and frankly after, if there ever isn't after the pandemic, and I imagine there will be, we're also going to recognize that much of our suffering as individuals and as a society is caused by fear. Is that something that rings true for you, that you could recognize for yourself in some way?

[32:25]

At the root of much of our suffering is this quality of fear. And according to Buddhism, fear is in fact at the very root of both our ego, our sense of a separate self, and samsara, the basic way of experiencing suffering in the world. So none of us are immune to fear. It's part of and parcel to being human. The question, of course, then, is how do we practice with fear, particularly in Buddhism? What's the Buddhist approach to practicing with fear? And I'm going to suggest tonight that we can approach that question, how we practice with fear, at several levels. The first, we can start with our immediate response to fear and how to manage our symptoms when fear arises in the mind-body. And then secondly, we can look at the ways to change our relationship to fear by shifting our mental, emotional perspectives around fear.

[33:32]

And then finally, the third way, we can consider how the ultimate result of Buddhist practice is fearlessness. And another way that I like to think of fearlessness is as courageous presencing. And I mentioned this last week. Courageous presencing is being fully present with reality, standing courageously in the truth of the way things are here and now, not turning away in any fashion. The Buddha actually was well known for his fearlessness. He's often depicted with his hand held up in the famous Abhya, mudra, which is a gesture of fearlessness. So his right hand is usually up and kind of outward, and then his left hand, you can't see mine, but his left hand is kind of in his lap, kind of in the half cosmic mudra. And sometimes he's sitting in this position, and sometimes he's standing in this position.

[34:36]

And it's said that when the story of this mudra comes out, when Chakanuni Buddha was attacked by an angry elephant charging towards him, he made this gesture. which quickly calm the animal down, right? So it's kind of a gesture of, there's no threat here, right? No threat here, nothing to worry about. Open-handed, open-hearted, right? Nothing concealed here. I wonder if this same gesture would work with COVID-19. If we could just walk around, no fear here, right? No fear here. COVID-19, you don't need to attack, right? You don't need to infect. And in terms of fearlessness, there's actually an entire sutta in the public canon, which is the collective teachings of the Buddha, in which he gives an in-depth teaching on working with fear. And he particularly talks about working with fear of death, which is a very fundamental fear for us. Most of our fears go back in some way to the fear of death, to getting to the roots of fear in that sense.

[35:42]

As I mentioned earlier, On Tuesday, in Buddhism, rather than trying to get rid of our fear, we are encouraged to instead get to know it, which is an essential step in cultivating fearlessness. So fearlessness is not the absence or the denial of fear. It's actually intimacy with fear. To be intimate. So a skillful approach. To working with fear, then, is to, what I like to say, befriend it, to get to know it. Then my children says, smile at fear. That sounds a little flippant to me, but I'd actually say, become a friend of fear, get to know it, be a companion to it. Deliberately turn towards fear mindfully, and then study its nature. What is the nature of fear?

[36:44]

How do you know fear is present? What are the physical sensations that tell you you're feeling fear? And what are the thoughts or stories that are the fuel for fear? What exactly are you afraid of? And last Tuesday, I invited the folks who were participating to kind of consider these questions. Hold them, study them, use them to examine and turn over and investigate. What is fear for you? How do you know fear? What is the nature of fear? So there are two overall Dharma approaches or aspects to working with fear. And I would say it's a relative one and an ultimate one. And I'm going to kind of cover these two tonight. The relative approach is about what we can do in practical terms to manage our relationship with fear and prevent it from controlling us or from causing us a lot of pain when fear arises.

[37:57]

So on a practical level, what do we do when we notice fear? And then the alternate approach or aspect to working with fear is to see that there is no separate thing No separate being to be threatened. So no separate beings or phenomena are doing the threatening. And in fact, there's actually no problem when fear arises. Fear is not a problem at the ultimate level. So when dealing with fear, it helps if we have some grounding in the sense that no matter what happens, everything will be okay in the most broadest sense. You have to be careful, though. We don't want to kind of just jump to the ultimate, right? It's actually the ultimate comes a little bit further along. So it's best to start in the relative, in the practical. Deal with the, work with the experience of fear as it's arising in your mind and body.

[38:58]

And as you study fear in time, it will lead you to this quality of seeing the emptiness of fear, seeing the ultimate aspects. what it is to be with our experience. So let's look first at a few relative approaches to practicing with fear. And the first I'm going to suggest is to calm the mind-body whenever fear is present through foundational shamatha meditation practices. For those of you who are not familiar with that term, shamatha means peaceful abiding or tranquility. And the purpose of shamatha meditation is to stabilize the mind by cultivating a steady awareness of the object of our meditation, such as the breath. So awareness of the breath provides an anchor to ground us in the here and now whenever we find ourselves caught in a turn to fear, right?

[39:59]

So this is why when I give guided meditation, whenever you come to your meditation instruction, you'll often encourage to first find an object that's consistently present, such as the breath, that you can just follow. But follow it with a physical experience. So in other words, don't think about the breath. I should go into the body and feel the breath. Know the felt sense of the breath. So go out of your mind and into your body, in other words. So having this awareness, the anger of the breath, its constant presence, right? means that you can stay in the present moment. And Thich Nhat Hanh says, when we are fully, truly present, we are free from fear. When we are fully, truly present, we are free from fear. In other words, the secret to fearlessness is being in the present moment.

[41:01]

So letting the past go and not worrying about the future, why it might come. Both of those are just ultimately ideas. Thinking about the past now is just thoughts, ideas about the past. Same thing with the future. The only time that exists is now. So stay here now. Find something that helps you anchor in the present moment. So staying anchored with the breath, we can notice any uncomfortable sensations that appear in our body, such as tightness in the abdomen, wherever you notice fear in your body. And then let go of any tendency to resist the sensations or to stay focused on being with the sensations. Kind of hold them, right? Hold the sensations spaciously with the breath. That's why I keep saying the breath as space itself.

[42:02]

When we stay with the breath and kind of feel that spaciousness throughout the whole body, it creates a container for holding all of our experience in a spacious way. So we might even think of practicing by thinking, having the thought hollow fear. Welcome. Welcome sensations of fear, whatever you are. Just allow them to arise. Invite them. You know, welcome. You're fully accepted here. Breathe in to relax the areas around fear. It might not, you know, it's not necessarily the core physical sensations of fear itself. Now, that might be too much at the beginning. But maybe you can kind of breathe in to relax the areas around fear. So, for example, If you're feeling anxiety or fear acutely in your chest and your throats, don't try to kind of breathe into those areas.

[43:06]

First, breathe into the shoulders. Focus on the shoulders. Allow the shoulders to relax. Allow the arms and the abdomen, the outer areas around that contraction that comes to fear. And then time slowly, kind of ease into those areas and see it making space for fear, allowing it to be known. You know, even allowing it to be uncomfortable helps to, in time, create more spacelessness with the fact that fear is present. So keeping your attention on the sensations of fear and anxiety, you can then investigate how do they change, noticing what changes, and then stay with the experience. And in doing so, you get to see the nature of impermanence, you get to see that all these experiences are empty. They're impermanent, and they're empty of any fixed or solid entity.

[44:10]

Like all conditioned things, they too are going to pass with time. So the goal is to observe our experience without turning away, and only when emotions are truly attended to can they be endured. And in that endurance transformed into useful energies that express our needs and help us guide through life. So noticing those sensations tell us where we need to bring attention. Tell us where there's some sense of a separate self, a solid, separate self that we believe in or are contracted around. And the more we stay with that and see that actually that doesn't exist the way we think it exists, we actually become free of it. That thought begins to lessen in time. And our tendency to hold on to that sense of the self also lessens. And with that, we experience a sense of freedom. So another relative approach to working with fear is to offer yourself loving kindness or goodwill or friendliness.

[45:25]

And for those of you who are familiar with loving kindness, another term for that is metta. And metta practice, loving kindness practice, has been called the healer of fear. So the Buddha first taught loving kindness to a group of monks who were frightened by malevolent spirits in the forest where they were meditating. These spirits were said to be tree spirits hanging out in the trees, and they were a little bit upset by these monks just barging into their forest and trying to take over. right? And sitting there in their space. So these monks went to the Buddha and said, Buddha, what are we going to do? These spirits are scaring us off. They're frightening. And the Buddha taught the monks the metta sutta as an antidote for their fear. So the monks did loving kindness for themselves. They went back to the forest and they sat there and they did a loving kindness practice for themselves first. and then extending it out to the spirits. And eventually, these angry spirits, because they felt the loving kindness from the monks, they also calmed down, and they lost their anger and their own fear of the monks.

[46:39]

So fearlessness also comes from benevolence, from a sense of goodwill in the face of whatever oppresses you. You are afraid, but instead of fighting what happens, faces you, what makes you afraid, you embrace it, you accept it. You develop loving kindness as a direct antidote to fear. And we can practice metta by first establishing mindfulness of the breath, shamatha, and then feeling into the body and noticing what's going on for you physically and emotionally. Noticing the internal landscape of your being, of your experience. And then begin to repeat metaphases a few times yourself with real intention, with sincerity. For example, common ones are, may I be safe and protected from inner and utter harm. May I be truly happy and deeply peaceful.

[47:45]

May I live my life with ease. May I have love and compassion for myself. And may I be free. So as you repeat these metaphases, as you're doing this, notice any feelings that are coming up in you. And just acknowledge them and just be with them. Let them be. Accepting that they are present. Over time, practicing shamatha meditation also not only calms the body, but it calms our thoughts and our emotions. including those that give rise to fear. So we experience tranquility of mind and calmly abide with our faults as they are, just viewing them as you would passing clouds in an open sky. The open sky being our natural state of mind, clear, boundless. And over time, this practice leads to a decrease in negative or unhelpful faults.

[48:53]

The amount of clouds in the sky, when we just let them pass through without grabbing onto them, decrease, they kind of fade away. And all that remains then is this open awareness. So eventually shavata practice leads to meditating on emptiness itself, on open awareness. This is how we make this transition. then to meditating on emptiness to the second approach to practicing with fear. And this is to understand the ultimate aspect of fear. Sometimes we say the absolute aspect. I like the word ultimate better. On an ultimate level, we see into the emptiness and the dependent arising of all phenomena, all conditioned things. And we see that things are just as they are. We see the totality of all being is perfect, just as it is.

[49:55]

We don't need to change it. Nothing we need to do but just bear witness to this unfolding of awareness. And another name for this kind of seeing is vipassana. We work with fear by practicing shamatha, mind calming, and vipassana, or insights. into the true nature of reality. And this entails letting go of all our perceptions and ideas about the world, which is what we're doing in meditation, right? We're sitting there just letting our perceptions and our thoughts go by. And we simply rest in pure awareness, in pure being, pure presencing, you might say, to Rest in the direct experience of the aliveness of the moments. Free of dualities such as good or bad or right or wrong.

[50:59]

Free of our preferences. We simply allow ourselves to open. And open. And open. How far can we open? There's no end to openness. We just continue to open and open. And to truly, to be truly in touch with our vulnerability at a fundamental level means that in time we recognize there is no separate self that could be harmed in any way. So coming back to fearlessness, coming back to courageous presence, as I like to call it, courageous Presencing entails having the courage of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the doorway to, you might say, the deepest dimensions of our true nature, this boundless open awareness.

[52:02]

Buddha nature is another term for it. We often associate vulnerability to weakness, of getting hurt or harmed if we're vulnerable in some way. On a relative level, we need to attend to that. But on the ultimate level, we need to see that vulnerability is not a curse. It's actually a blessing. It allows us to be able to be with our pain and disease, as well as the pain and disease of others. Without any kind of bias, we're all trying to fix it or change it in any way. So vulnerability, with vulnerability, we can be with our fear. Volatility is not a weakness. It's a defenselessness. So without defenses, we can be more open to be more sensitive to all of the experiences of life, including joy and love and basic goodness.

[53:07]

Because what is there to defend ultimately? If there's no separate self, if we're not separate from anything, at all. If we're all one life blooming in this present moment, what is there to defend? The unconditioned does not need to be defended. So what we do is we notice the unalignedness and complexness of our life. We allow ourselves to feel it, to appreciate, to live into our vulnerability, which means we get to experience not only the joys, but also the sorrows that come with being human. So our vulnerability of not contracting to protect the illusion of our separate self becomes an invulnerability. This invulnerability is not a stance against feeling.

[54:13]

It's not a stance against emotions. It's actually a pure openness, undefended consciousness, open awareness. Then we take the step backward, the backward step we say in Zen, allow mind's fear to kind of just blow right through the open sky of our being, not getting caught on anything, seeing there's no place for it to stick, no place for it to land. The only place that fear sticks is on the idea of a separate self. So we can drop the struggle at the ultimate level and rest, yes, in the kind of state of defensiveness, and begin to see that we're not separate from anything and anyone. And that is a true place of liberation, a true place of freedom. But it takes a while to get there. And we do it in little fits and starts. We have little insights here and there.

[55:13]

So start with the relative. That is equally important. So ground there. Start with that experience. And in time, as you practice, you'll notice that this ultimate area, this ultimate aspect will make itself known to you, will call you forth in some way. Okay. I chatted on longer than I intended to. Once again, my apologies. And I hope we won't do that next week. But why don't we open up now and see if there's anything you'd like to share about your practice this evening, what you've noticed, and anything else that would be of interest. So Barbara, I believe, or unless it's not tonight, has given instructions how to raise your hand. And... Share something with me. Share something with us.

[56:14]

We want to hear. Be fearless. Come forward. You're all one heart mind. Share this one heart mind. Oh, I see Barbara has her hand up. Can you unmute yourself, Barbara? I'm actually reading a message from Lori. Fear arise out of attachment. She said fear arises out of attachment. It's a question. Does fear arise out of attachment? Yes, I think that's true. You could say fear arises out of attachment. So fear fundamentally comes from this idea that there is something separate. And usually the main thing that we feel is separate is us, our sense of self. So we want to protect the sense of a separate self. And so we have attachment to this sense of a separate self, but we also have attachment to others who we receive as also separate, also being okay and safe in many cases.

[57:20]

Or we see them as kind of not being safe. So we may have attachment to our dear loved ones, right? We have fear that they're going to get harmed or sick or something's going to happen to them. So that's a loving attachment, and that's understandable, and I think that's a good thing. We care about each other. At some level, we care about each other because we actually see we're not separate. And so just as we love ourselves, we love others. And sometimes it's easier to love others than it is to love ourselves. But at a fundamental level, fear is about attachment. It's about perceiving separation. and holding on to that sense of a separate self in some way, attaching to that separate self. So when you study the ultimate realm, when you look at the emptiness of self and other, you realize there's nothing to hold on to. There's nothing to attach to.

[58:21]

And that allows us to let go at a deeper level. Any other inquiries, sharings, discoveries, arguments? You could say, I don't buy that. I don't get it. I don't agree with you. So any queries? Does any of this ring true for you? A few shaking heads. So how do you work with fear? How do you work with fear? What do you notice? I see Laura. Laura Katrina. Hi there. Hi. So I can't remember who it was. Someone else had been a Dharma talk early on in quarantine, and they were talking about the...

[59:25]

I guess, forms in which fear manifests. And there were several different ones. And I think the fourth or of maybe five was they were referencing fear of being judged or kind of looking foolish to your peers. And they were kind of self-referencing like that in the notion of giving a Dharma talk. So I was curious about that. And also something that I experience in life in general is anxiety. And I associate that with fear, but maybe it's, outside of that. I'm just curious, like, how one might think about working with them together, because they seem to co-arise at minimum, if not be really integrally connected. Right, right. So the forms of fear and the public speaking and loss of life, loss of limb, and they're like, forget the other ones, but they're all, there's something related to a sense of separate self, right? If you're afraid of losing a limb, you're worried about your body. You feel your body is sometimes separate.

[60:29]

Fear of being embarrassed, giving a public talk. Again, that's about having a sense of self, right? So those forms, if I remember them, are all kind of circulating around a sense of self. Now, anxiety, you could distinguish fear in terms of how fear manifests. There's fear in terms of just the immediate, fear of pain and discomfort, right? And then there's also anxiety. So anxiety is kind of another force of fear. So fear can be a signal that you're facing some kind of imminent danger, right? Or a threat. So fear could actually be a good thing in some cases. It can tell us that there's danger. We need to do something to take care of ourselves. You know, the tiger jumps out and is coming after us. It makes sense to have fear. So it's not that fear is bad. We need to study what is it that's giving rise to fear and what do we need to do to take care of fear?

[61:32]

What's our relationship to fear in the moment? Is it helpful information and that we can take care of ourselves and take care of our loved ones? Or is it a concept, an idea that's kind of gotten out of hand? So anxiety, as I understand, is always focused on the future, right? Anxiety is always about the future. What's going to happen? It's a story. It's a belief. It's not something that's happening now. So we can look at the distinction. So when we notice anxiety arising, we can look for what's the story, the narrative that I have under anxiety. What's giving rise to it? What is it the story I have about the future? I don't know what the future is going to be. So this comes back to this teaching of stay in the present moment. If you stay in the present moment, you will be fearless. There will be less anxiety. If you entertain, if you go into your mind and entertain all kinds of scenarios and stories about the future, it's going to obviously be kind of wasted energy.

[62:42]

You're just going to kind of spin around. But if you come back to the breath, So when I teach workshops on transforming depression and anxiety, a lot of the focus is, you know, get out of your head into the body. In this moment, what is the grounded direct experience of reality now? So kind of coming back to the breath, coming back to the immediate sensations, even if those sensations are not comfortable, that's okay. But they're true in this moment. They're direct experience of reality. Your thought about the future is, It's still a thought. It's happening now, but it's a story, right? The content of the thought isn't true. So why hang on to it? Why entertain it? Why spin around that? Come back to the body. Come back to this present moment. So that's a lot of the ways of working with transforming depression and anxiety is depression is usually about the past.

[63:44]

This is never going to change. I'm always stuck. And anxiety is usually about the future. So they're always coming back to here and now. What's the immediate experience? Does that help? Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Laura. And Millicent. Where is Millicent? From down under. Millicent, your sound quality is not working so well. We're getting the Minnie Mouse sound again. Now you're on mute. So you might want to maybe type your question into the chat field at the bottom, Millicent, because I don't know if the sound system is going to work for you this time. Barbara, do you want to try one more time to unmute her?

[64:49]

Try again, Millicent. We're still getting the same sound. I'm so sorry, Melisins. So, but you're welcome to type something into the chat field. And I see Fred also has his hand up. Fred, where are you? Hello, Fred. Good to see you again. Yes, good to see you. Thank you. So, yes, actually it was actually answered. Can we get a little closer, Fred? We're having a little trouble hearing you. Thank you. So it was practically unanswered. I'm mostly telling how in teaching, I can see your testimony about going back to breath when focusing in the body of others as well.

[65:55]

during meditation time. And then I was also thinking about references of energy. How do we compose energy? How do we communicate successfully a positive family or transfer of energy? So I'm not sure I heard everything because that sound was a little muffled. But what I took away from it was this question about how to transform the energy and communicate that energy in some way.

[66:58]

So oftentimes, just being aware of energy allows us to transform. Bringing awareness to any energy in the body helps to actually transform it. So that's something to study. When we notice a particular energy arising in the body, Not in trying to change it or manipulate it or fix it or do anything else with it. Just shine the spotlight of awareness on that energy in whatever way it's manifesting. So it's kind of like a warm, just a warm sunlight, a warm friendly sunlight shining onto that energy in the body. What happens as we do that? Awareness itself has this quality of transforming. that particular energy. It will change, it will loosen, it will evolve in some way, right? So it's not that we're trying to make it into something different necessarily, but first working with it.

[68:04]

And even when you send loving kindness to that energy, so if you're feeling kind of a contraction in the body, to send yourself loving kindness, to send yourself good intentions, friendly intentions to that energy, right? That intention, that orientation of mind in and of itself can help kind of loosen the contraction. It's kind of like saying, again, sending a warm, friendly light to that area of energy in the body in some way. So I hope that helps. I'm not sure I fully got your question, but I hope that helps some. And I think there was someone in the chat field, I think that fear also arises out of the fear of rejection. And is that also a projection? I think, yeah, I think fear can, there's a whole series of things that can trigger fear for us, depending on our particular conditioning, right? Who we are as individuals, how our particular ego structure has been kind of built.

[69:07]

So for some of us, rejection is like, okay, so what? Others of us, we feel rejected. We really, we feel at a very deep level. And we begin to going around not wanting to fear, not wanting to feel that sense of rejection in some way. But again, coming back to this question of who ultimately is being rejected? If there's no separate self here, what is there to reject? And the other aspect of it is even if other people aren't able to unconditionally receive you and love you and accept you, that's their situation. That's for them to work with. The one that ultimately needs to accept ourselves and not reject ourselves is us. So how do we practice loving acceptance with who we are?

[70:08]

And I think many of us, I know I myself can speak to my own conditioning. There's parts of me that I reject. And I say, oh, that's not good enough. That's not worthy enough. That's not acceptable. And I want to kind of cut myself off and push away from it. And I'm afraid that if I accept those qualities, that somehow I won't be good enough. Or that others won't love me or accept me. But the work that I really need to do is accepting and loving myself. Because trying to get everyone else to love you and accept you and not reject you is an endless thing. You're never going to be able to measure up to the rest of humanity if you keep trying to measure up to everyone else's terms. Because most of the time, most of us have trouble loving ourselves. And we project that lack of love out onto others. So if we say they're not enough, at some level, we're saying we're not enough. So to notice that.

[71:14]

And then to give yourself what you most want. To love and accept yourself unconditionally. Turn that around and give yourself what you most want. Because ultimately, you're the only person who can do that. And I see that we run over time. And Barbara has her hand up. I think there's another question. Barbara. Yes, I'm unable to send this directly to you. Millicent typed in her question. Oh, okay. Great. Millicent, what's she saying? I'm going to read it to you. I've had a strange reaction during shutdown. When I cross a road, I experience out of nowhere overwhelming terror. The road becomes at the bottom of a cliff. My vision narrows. My heart races. I can barely walk. Nothing else exists. How to practice with that? You and I spoke a little bit about this before, Millicent.

[72:16]

I remember you sharing how that fear of crossing the road just inexplicably arises out of nowhere. So number one, I would say first, look both ways and make sure it's actually safe to cross the road, right, on a very practical level. Am I taking care of myself in this moment, right? So the fear can be here, that terror, whatever that feeling that's coming up can be there. But first, make sure you're taking care of your physical self. If there's someone around you, you might even ask them to help you to cross the street so that you're not trying to, in this kind of foggy state of being, trying to cross the street in an unsafe situation. And then maybe after you've crossed the streets, Or even before you cross the street, just sit there at the side of the road and look inward. Be with that experience of terror, inexplicable fear, whatever it is that's coming up for you.

[73:20]

Just be with it. Be a friend with it. Be friended. Be a good friend to yourself, sitting with yourself there along the side of the road and just listening to this, opening to that. I can't tell you what that fear is about. Only you can. Your own inner wisdom at some point may be able to illuminate what that's about. And you can even, in befriending that fear, to ask very gently the question, what do you want me to know? What do you want me to know? very gently, as a friend. I'm here, and I want to listen. I want you to let me know what's most important for you, for me to know. So again, this is invitation for fear, because fear has something to tell us.

[74:26]

And it may tell us that we're grasping on to a sense of a separate self. That could be the information that fear has to say. Or it could be telling us, there's something I want you to do to take better care of yourself. Or there's some experience that we need to open to in some way. So befriend that fear whenever it comes up for you. Say, hello, hello, old friend. I see you're back again. What would you like me to know? And again, if it's too overwhelming, don't try to push through it, right? Gently, just gently ease into it, very slowly. And again, ask a friend to help you cross the road, right?

[75:32]

Take good care of yourself. Good to see you again, Melissa. Okay, my friends, we've run over time. My apologies. Thank you for those who are still with us. Thank you again for your practice. And I look forward to hearing, maybe at some point, how is it for you trying on these different practice news about working with fear? What do you discover? Does it help in any way? And, you know, the truth is you do what works for you. I'm only offering some things that I've discovered work for me and that I have, you know, others have recommended. But you need to try these on and find out for you, do they work? And if they work, great. And if they don't work, then find something else, right? Continue to explore. You know, what does the dharma have to say about it? practicing with fear.

[76:35]

And maybe there's other readings or other teachers who can offer you different approaches. Kama Chodron is wonderful, right? She has her own orientation to it. So there are many teachers who speak. Thich Nhat Hanh, for example, has a whole book called Fear, Working with Fear. So I welcome you to explore those. So thank you again for your practice. and for your presence. I feel deeply nourished and supported by you all being here and being together in this way. And you also encourage and support each other. So take good care, my friends. Be well. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Good night. You're welcome. Take good care. Thank you, David. Be well. Thanks, David. You're welcome.

[77:36]

Bye, Nancy. Good to see you. Good to see you. Hi, Catherine. Good to see you, Kathy. It's Judy and Christian and Jean and Ron and Maria Elena and Rose and iPad, whoever iPad is. Okay, my friends. Take good care. Bye-bye.

[78:00]

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