Wow - very powerful piece in the new Crucible of Awakening newsletter from Robert Masters. Giving our fear our full attention, being with it (presence) rather than obsessing about it (mind) really does help - it's the basis for Dialectical Behavior Therapy (as developed by Marsha Linehan) and so many of the other mindfulness based approaches to dealing with fear. However, my sense is that Masters takes it even deeper.
For fans of Robert Masters' work, he has a new book now available for pre-order at Amazon, which has received some seriously high-power endorsements.
When fearfulness infects you, neither avoid it nor let it recruit your mind. Don’t give it a thought.
Approach the infected areas with care. No antibiotic heroics, no psychosurgical wizardry, just ordinary everyday caring.
Touch the infection with undivided attention, while letting the raw reality of it touch you, penetrate you, shake you more awake. Make contact, intimate contact, allowing it to breathe, allowing to it vibrate, sound off, even grieve. Stop treating it like an adversary or disease.
When approached with sufficient care, fearfulness helps fuel our entry into a quality of openness wherein we cannot be threatened.
Fearfulness is our personified sense of separateness having a bad day.
Being invested in making a self out of our apparent separateness guarantees fearfulness. Nevertheless, the arising of fearfulness, however compelling, does not mean that we are afraid, but rather only that fear is present, coexisting with varying degrees of awareness of it.
When fearfulness does manage to infiltrate your mind, read its contents once-through as though they belonged to a supermarket tabloid, taking careful note of which headlines most easily snare your attention. Then immediately shift your attention, and shift it completely, to the physical correlates of your fearfulness, resisting the temptation to scoot back into your thinking mind.
Tour the somatic nooks, crannies, and grottos of your fearfulness, paying close attention to its textures, tones, directionality, shapings, and other anatomical peculiarities. Note that it is not static, not a noun, not a something inhabiting you, but rather a verb, a process, always on the move, riddled with impermanence.
Then ask yourself who or what it is that’s feeling fearful. Is it really you? Find out.
As you discover — and not just intellectually — that the awareness of fear is not itself at all afraid, then you can approach “your” fearfulness with a considerable degree of ease and spaciousness.
When we are sufficiently uprooted to be standing our true ground, we are positioned to be awakened by all things, including fearfulness The teacher is everywhere. Every moment is a potential crucible for awakening. It’s all a setup — set up by all — for realizing, totally realizing, what we actually are, asking only for undreaming eyes.
Fearfulness not only disturbs our sleep, but also can scare us scriptless. At that point — which may last for only a few seconds — we are so divested of our usual dramatics that we are the very openness for which we have yearned. All we have to do is not flee to the surface — like a dreamer desperately trying to exit a nightmare — but remain where we are. Then, into the openness that we are will flood all that is needed.
When we remain outside our fear, we remain trapped within it.
When we, however, consciously get inside our fear, it’s as if it turns inside out. Getting inside our fear with wakeful attention and compassion actually expands (or everts) our fear beyond itself. Once the contractedness that’s at the center of fear ceases to be fueled, fear unravels, dissipates, terminates its occupancy of us.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it.
Through attending closely, caringly, and carefully to the particulars of our fearfulness, we decentralize it, so that its intentions and viewpoint can no longer govern us.
When the light goes on in the grottos of dread, then fear is little more than Life-energy having a bad day. When we touch our fear with authentic caring, it de-tenses, de-compresses, usually quite quickly becoming something other than fear, something unburdened by fearful agendas or headlines. Fear met with an open heart does not usually take long to dissolve.
The key is to actively and decisively disidentify with our fear.
Don’t give fearfulness a thought.
Instead, give it your full attention. Go to its core. Its dark heart is but the shell, the calcified chambering, of a love beyond imagination, a love that effortlessly dissolves all fear.
Now available for pre-order on Amazon!
SPIRITUAL BYPASSING: WHEN SPIRITUALITY DISCONNECTS US FROM WHAT REALLY MATTERS
This, my next (and now-being-edited) book, will be published by North Atlantic Books this Summer. Here are a few of its endorsements:
“This is a wonderfully significant and important book, and is highly recommended. Its contents are truly mandatory for this day and age.”
— Ken Wilber, author of The Integral Vision
“This timely and penetrating analysis of spirituality’s shadow provides a much needed counterpoint for those who tend to get blinded by its light.”
— Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs
“There is much wisdom and good information in this book. Robert joins a growing number of wise teachers who understand that the personal and the universal must be combined to bring true and genuine spiritual awakening.”
— Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
“Traversing the muddy waters of contemporary spirituality requires a willingness to meet its seen and unseen challenges with ruthless self-honesty and keen discernment. Robert addresses “the many faces of spiritual bypassing” with intellectual rigor, hard-earned insight, and emotional intelligence. It is a lucid, well-written, and practical guide for both new and seasoned practitioners on the spiritual path.”
— Mariana Caplan, PhD, author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: the Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
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