Here is the most recent free article from Robert Augustus Masters and the Masters Center for Transformation. To receive his monthly newsletter (always with at least one free article), you just need to sign up for a free membership at the site.
I've been meaning to post this for more than a week now. As I went to see my first clients last night as a counseling intern, I reread this piece and it helped. I felt fear, but not terror, so I moved inside it through breath and got the feel for what it had to offer me.
I just tried to keep breathing and soon I had seen my clients and it went well (considering I had no idea what the hell I was doing) and I even used some ideas from this article with one of the clients I saw.
Read the whole article.Cutting Through Personal & Collective Fear
June 1st, 2011 | By Robert Augustus Masters
Personal Fear
The key to working effectively with fear is to get inside it.
This means, among other things, that we need to have a clear knowledge of all the ways in which we’ve learned to get away from fear, so that when one of them shows up, we’re capable of looking at it — rather than through its eyes — and, to whatever degree, saying “no thanks.”
So instead of fleeing it, we stand our ground, however shaky our legs might be. And the more energy we put into grounding ourselves, the better able we will be to face fear, be it personal or collective.
Getting inside fear means getting past its periphery, getting past its defining thoughts, getting past its propagandizing sentinels, getting past our problematic orientation to it. Entering the dragon’s cave.
Once we are within fear, under its skin, with our attention scanning our surroundings like a miner’s headlamp, we can begin acquainting ourselves with its basic features, particularly those sensations and beliefs that together make it into a something we label “fear.” The closer we get to it, the better we can see it.
However, we need to learn not to get close too quickly, not to move so fast that we can’t keep digesting and integrating what we’re experiencing. If we’re entering something as intense as terror, we have to step very carefully. Taking on too much only increases our fear of fear.
So slowly and carefully we go, feeling our way in, remaining as aware as possible of our breathing, feelings, sensations, and intentions, keeping some connection with the “outside world,” letting our Ariadne’s thread of remembrance have some slack, but not so much that we forget to keep in palpable contact with it. In touch.
Asking certain questions of ourselves as we proceed can be very helpful: “What sensations am I experiencing in my belly, my diaphragm, my throat, my upper back, my forehead, my hands? And how are these changing? What is their texture, tone, temperature, directionality, color, shape? And what kind of mental processes are going on as I do this? And to whom is all of this arising?”
That is, we deliberately cultivate some curiosity as we make our way toward and into the dragon’s den — we are on guard, but we are not all that solidly armored. It is also advantageous to view the storyline presented by our fear as just that, a story — and then treat it as we would a dream that we’re beginning to suspect is indeed a dream.
Sometimes it may be useful to personify fear — and not only ours! — as a scared child, a very upset child, a child who is aching for our touch, our care, our love.
As much as that child, that self-conscious locus of frightened vulnerability, may initially shrink from us, it is only for as long as we forget or avoid our compassion.
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 our fear beyond itself. Once the contractedness at the center of fear ceases to be fueled, fear unravels, dissipates, and terminates its occupancy of us.
In entering our fear, we end our fear of it.
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