Letting Go of Fear, and Resting in Peaceful Confidence

Anxiety, fear, being scared, feeling nervous, feeling uneasy, butterflies in the belly, apprehensive, unsettled, shaky, panicky, obsessive, compulsive, phobic, terrified.

These are all words, these are all shades of the broad experience of anxiety, which is certainly a normal experience.

And for many, it's been intensified by this time of political conflicts in my home country of America.

And certainly other countries around the world have experienced significant internal conflicts as well during this time.

So it's understandable if there's anxiety, including garden variety anxiety, like trying to remember whether you locked the front door on your way out.

Or you're wondering why your lipid levels and your cholesterol are still high after you've had this very holistic diet.

Or you're, you're worried about a friend of yours who maybe has, has lost a loved one recently, and, you know, your friend still, still seems really pretty upset about it, and you're starting to, to worry, to worry about her.

Different kinds of anxiety.

Feeling worried about whether you said the wrong thing in a conversation with someone recently.

Did that other person take offense? Worried that you won't find love in the second half of your life.

Uh, worried that you'll never really turn the corner on a business problem you're, you're grappling with.

These are different concerns of various kinds.

And I wanna talk tonight about five different ways to practice with anxiety, to practice with fear.

And as a bit of a context for this, I think it's quite arguable that the very first emotion that began to evolve, or the neurological capabilities for which began to evolve in our ancestors, beginning maybe six hundred million years ago even, when the nervous system first began to emerge, certainly by five hundred million years ago, when complex creatures with nervous systems were living in the primordial seas.

And arguably the very first emotion of all is fear.

Fear and its cousin, disgust, which are both emotional reactions to threat, including potentially mortal threat.

Fear is deep.

Fear is fundamental.

Our sense of fear is grounded in that imperative in nature, live to see the sunrise and pass on genes that pass on genes.

So fear is really, really natural, and it can be challenging to disengage from fear.

We can become afraid of not being afraid, because if we're not afraid, then we might lower our guard and wacko, that's when we get smacked.

So it could be hard to release fear, even if it creates a lot of suffering for you and contraction and conflicts maybe with other people.

Or maybe if the price you pay for your fear is you swerve away from opportunity, you live smaller than you need to, you live inside the bars of an invisible cage when you don't have to today, even if you maybe needed to in years past.

So there's a price we pay.

There's a price we pay for needless fear.