Question
I have recently begun mindfulness meditation, and it feels as if it has unleased many mental ghosts in my psyche. I am feeling a nagging anxiety most of the time, and then encounter very intense moments of extreme fear during the day. Fear I'll obsess about a noise; fear I'll obsess about not hearing every word that was spoken; fear that I'll not be in control of my mind. I feel like I'm up against a wall and I do not know how to surrender to it. Please help!
Lisa
Answer
Hi, Lisa.
You may need to find out for yourself how to meet what is coming up. That's not much help, is it!
You mentioned the idea of "surrendering" to it, but that may not be what's called for. "Surrendering" isn't necessarily the all purpose response, though certainly fighting against feelings isn't helpful. Sometimes, though, what is coming up is itself, by nature, a kind of internal fighting. If that's what's going on, it feels more like "I'm not doing the fighting. It's happening on its own. So I can't stop fighting because I'm not doing it. So there is no surrendering."
So how to meet what is going on??? What does your intuition say? How do these feelings and reactions that are coming up want to be met? Or do they want to be left alone, left invisible? Do the fears speak to you? Is there something they are trying to say?
These are just possible responses. They may not apply to your situation. They are things that came up for me in considering what you have said. The important thing is the interest to be in touch and to let these difficult things open up and reveal themselves, if possible. Out of interest may come insights for you on how to do this.
Interest includes patience and compassion, as well as curiosity and vulnerability. If you think there is a real danger that you might offend someone, you might need to do something - excuse yourself for a moment, or something else - to momentarily put aside the fear.
How do you find a space - in the middle of roiling anxieties and anxieties about anxieties - to be patiently interested? I don't know how it happens. Experiment for yourself and see if it is possible, even if for just a second. You may find that in that brief moment, the "problem" is no longer a problem, that it is simply something that is going on that can be seen, felt, heard, sensed, along with the feel of air on the skin and the sense of the breath moving and heart beating. In that moment the reaction is put into a new, fresh perspective, possibly for the first time.
You may also notice that the many ways that the mind wants to get out of these difficult states of fear the moment that there is awareness that the state is going on. We distract ourselves through entertainment, gossip, praying for help, shutting down into helplessness, closing down our perceptions through self-blame, and so on and so on. Have you noticed what patterns are strong in yourself for trying to escape or get rid of the fear feelings? Or maybe they are so strong that there is no possibility of escape. But maybe don't assume that there is no escape reaction happening. You can experiment to see what is going on, what you think about, and if you are doing something that actually tries to take you out of touch with the fear instead of in touch with it.
Another really good exploration is to realize that what we label a situation, eg., "I'm having a fear reaction" is, on close inspection, not really what the reality of it is. It may have some provisional accuracy at first but if you don't buy too much into the idea that "this is a fear reaction" but instead stick with what's going on over time, you will get a much more realistic sense of what is going, albeit a much less defined, meaning "limited" sense. So can you for the moment drop the word and concept fear and find out what it is that really is going on. It's sort of like someone telling you that a pond is "cold". The word is so completely inadequate to describe what happens when you dive into it.
Maybe this is enough for now. Feel free to write back if something I said was not too clear or with further explorations of coming in touch with what is going on.
Best wishes,
Jay Cutts
