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A story to begin: a man is
sitting on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet and he's blind
and he says 'I'm blind, please help me' with this, you know, kind of a bowl and so on,
and a creative publicist is passing by and he notices there's only a few coins
in the bowl, and so, without asking permission, he just takes the sign
he rewrites it, puts it down, and leaves. End of the day, he comes back from work,
sees the blind man sitting there and the bowl is
overflowing with coins and with cash and so on...
Now the blind man heard his footsteps and recognized him
so he said, you know, 'are you the one that did something to my sign?'
and the publicist responded: 'I changed it a little, but I didn't write anything that wasn't true.'
Here's what he said, the sign read:
'Today is spring and I cannot see it.'
Now, as you can tell from the story, this has nothing to do with physical blindness.
This has to do - and when we feel a pang in our hearts that can resonate,
this has to do with moving through life
but not really being available, not being able to
really see or feel or be touched by what's happening.
This is when our senses are closed off and in some way,
we are caught up in reactivity. And if we look at that,
it's a deep inquiry, you know, really 'what's between me and being open to the life that's here?'
And what we find is either our mood is depressed or we're caught up in
some sort of a judgment or reactivity towards others or towards ourselves
or we're just restless or distracted. But if we look more carefully,
underneath any of those moods or states, what we find is fear.
That's the core emotion. And it's ironic because
our fear is about losing life; and by being caught up in fear, we lose life.
So the suffering of fear, just to sum it up,
is that, when we're living in the fear body, when we're living in the thoughts that are
anticipating, in the body that's tense, in the heart that's squeezed, when we're in that fear body,
we lose our sense of belonging.
We lose our sense of belonging to the moment, we just can't open to what's right here,
we lose our capacity to really be intimate and belong with each other,
when we're afraid there is not that tender, open receptivity.
We lose our belonging to the earth - of course we're going to
politically make decisions that are not sensitive to the needs of Mother Earth
if it's a fear-based culture, Earth is separate, it's not part of us,
we are not made of it, we forget.
We lose our sense of belonging to awareness,
we become small and separate. So that's the suffering of it.
Now the hope? The hope is that fear can either trigger reactivity, fight/flight,
or it can be a call to deepen attention.
If you leave with even a little more interest in 'oh okay, so here's the fear management strategy'
'Can I pause, even for five seconds?'
Even five seconds - it's radical.
In five seconds, there's a little more capacity to begin to deepen attention.
So that's what I want to explore with you now: how do we
deepen our attention in a way that really wakes us up from the body of fear?
That really lets us know who we are beyond that small separate sense of self?
And we move on this path not only for a sense of our own inner freedom,
but because this is what's necessary for the healing of our world.
For there to be peace on Earth, for there to be that care for our environment,
for there to be social justice, for there to be anything that we want and long for,
we need to be able to attend and befriend the fear.
And you can't do it with others, in other words, you can't attend and befriend others,
if you haven't with the life that's here.
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