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Guided Meditation: Sitting with Spacious Awareness; Establishing Fearless Relationships with Fear - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 23, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Sitting with Spacious Awareness

Good morning everyone, and good day for those who are on YouTube. As I just know, this is live on YouTube as well. My name's Ying Chen. I'll be here this morning with you, meditating together, and will offer a Dharma talk after about a half an hour or so sit.

I want to see if any of you are brand new to meditation? I won't know on the YouTube, but okay, so we do have a couple of them who are new. I'm going to offer a guided meditation for today, and those who've been practicing for a long while, kind of listen to your own inner guide. For those who are new, if it's helpful, you can follow some kind of gentle guidance to invite us to practice along with me in some capacity. How does that sound?

My invitation is to just gently settle into the space you're in. I forgot to check the sound, is it okay for people in the back? Okay, great.

Maybe just take a few long deep breaths as you settle into the space. Begin with this word: pause. Just pausing momentarily. It's kind of a process to pause right here.

Just noticing this body sitting. This pausing has an effect; it allows ourselves to become present. Maybe momentarily becoming mindful of what's here and now. Maybe pausing deliberately with an intention to become more and more present. You may notice that our mind tumbles along with the momentum to think, to plan, to remember the past. Just being patient and persistent to pause and stay connected with what's here and now.

Maybe a few long deep breaths. Mindfulness is present. Noticing the sound and the silence in between.

When this pausing comes to an end, one may become more mindful and present. A felt sense of the body naturally arises. You may notice the body making contact with the floor, sitting here. The weight of the body settling down. You can rest your attention right where the contact of the body and the floor is at. You may feel the hardness, firmness, and pressure of the body against the floor.

Let the body rest on Earth. We don't have to do anything. Let the gravity do its own thing. Sitting like a mountain. Grounded. Settled. Open to receive the felt sense of the breath. Maybe the flow of the breath, the movements, the energizing quality of the breath. We notice the breath in a particular part of the body, or the whole body breath.

Let the breath massage the body. The movements of the breath naturally energize the body or soothe the body. A Chinese word, qi¹, an energetic feel. Expand to receive the dancing sensations in the body, some movements of the breath or tingling in some part of the body. Pulsations, vibrations, a gentle sway in the torso. Feel a kind of aliveness right here with all its dancing sensations.

Letting go of ideas and stories, dropping into the felt sense by feeling and sensing this body and this heart and mind.

Let the breath flow freely. Breathing in from the space all around, and breathing out into the space all around, and within. Allow your awareness to become spacious, expansive. The sound can travel through, the breath can flow. Feeling and sensing what's here with a spacious awareness, so thought bubbles can float away and emotions can move.

You may feel the heart open with the spacious awareness. Maybe the body can relax even further, softening and relaxing into the spacious awareness.

Know that if the mind wandered away into thinking, planning, storytelling—whenever we notice that, we have a choice. We can choose to pause again. We can choose to step out of the unconscious flow of our thinking mind and step into being present here and now.

(Bell rings)

Establishing Fearless Relationships with Fear

Good morning, and welcome to IMC. Thank you for that guided meditation, and good morning Ying Chen.

Good morning everyone. If you need to move about and shift postures or do some things to help the body, don't hesitate to do that. This is a good time to transition. I'm happy to be with you all, and feel just very delighted to be able to spend this morning with you.

The topic I brought with me, one part of it, is fear. I feel a little something in me to just name that. There is also a second part, and that is how to establish fearless relationships with fear. And so, don't panic! [Laughter]

So there are these two sides with today's topic. The word "fear" itself may bring a wide range of emotions and reactivities or responses inside of us. But we can't deny that fear is a very potent emotion in our human lives. It arises in all kinds of aspects of our lives, or all kinds of dimensions of our lives. It can arise out of physical challenges, illness, aging, and death. It can arise out of emotional responses—loss of loved ones, loss of financial stability, and all kinds of loss can evoke an emotional response. It can be a psychological kind of fear. Maybe a sense of self-image, a sense of who we are gets challenged, and there can arise a fear of different kinds.

Even in the spiritual dimension, there can be fear. For many people who practice in the Buddhist tradition, and maybe many other spiritual or religious traditions, they will come to a point where there is a recognition that all kinds of things we thought we had reliance on, we actually can't really rely on because they're ever-changing. It feels like the rug gets pulled from under us, and that can be a terrifying sense. And so there can be a spiritual fear that arises even in this domain.

It's quite pervasive. And yet, how do we understand fear, and how do we relate with this emotion? This is a big part of our Buddhist practice. I want to say there is a way that we can relate to this strong force within each of us wisely and compassionately, so that this can be a force that is rather transformative, rather than feeling like we're narrowed down, limited, and getting stuck by it.

Understanding Fear

I decided we'll talk about this in two dimensions. The first part of this talk will be learning a little bit about fear and understanding it. I looked it up, and the dictionary definition of fear is actually a pretty good one, so I thought I'm just going to start right there.

The dictionary definition of fear is: an unpleasant emotion caused by belief, perception, imagination, recognition, or expectation of some kind of danger or threat, which leads to pain.

There's a lot in this definition right here. I was amazed when I read this, so let's tease this apart a little bit.

The first part is that fear is an unpleasant emotion. I think we all know this, right? I think all of us have experienced some kind of fear or worry, and it's an unpleasant kind of emotion. And it arises out of causes and conditions. It's not just something randomly popping up, but the causes and conditions are this long list of keywords here: perception, belief, expectations, imaginations, and recognitions of some kind of danger that's there.

This is fascinating. When I saw this word "imagination," I realized how many times we're afraid because we have a certain imagination about a kind of threat. We are on an earthquake zone here; IMC is actually on an earthquake fault. Now, if we start imagining what might happen, we could be panicking right now. So many of our fears kind of arise out of that.

I'd like to differentiate a little bit here, which is quite important in this definition: the difference between danger and fear. Danger we can't avoid. By being human, we have a human body, mind, and heart. There is danger in this world, like the potential danger of an earthquake right here. The danger we can't deny exists. You know, we have a danger that I didn't walk properly and might break my leg getting off this platform, and that's a possibility. But danger doesn't necessarily mean fear. A lot of times we mix these two things up. We think danger means fear—that you're going to immediately worry and immediately panic. But that's not necessarily so.

There is a primal response, a survival response built into this system in response to a danger. Like a car coming in front of you, you jump out. That's primal instinct. It doesn't necessarily mean we immediately panic; we actually just know to get out of the way to be safe. But it is true that often fear can happen. I want to stay with this point that danger doesn't necessarily mean fear.

You all probably have heard stories of the great Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh², who spoke about people sitting on refugee boats to go across the ocean. It's dangerous, no doubt. But if one person is calm and peaceful, the whole boat can be saved. A whole boat of people might survive this. But if everybody panics, nobody might survive. It is possible in a dangerous situation for someone to remain calm.

You can say, "Oh wow, you know, that's a Zen Master, I'm not really sure." So I want to give a personal example. I think all of you probably have experienced something like this, but for me, this personal example was quite powerful in my own path of practice.

Some years ago, I was driving and merging onto an expressway from the right-hand side. I saw a Jeep coming towards me on the lane that I was merging onto. It was driving very fast, but it was very far away, so I thought, "Okay, they will see me, I will be able to merge, they can change a lane." I had just these few thoughts and said, "Okay, I'm going to go." So I merged onto this express lane.

As soon as I got onto the lane, I looked back from the rearview mirror. This Jeep wasn't going to slow down or change lanes, and the people in this Jeep were waving and shouting. I just thought, "Wow, this is not stable. I'm not really sure what this Jeep is going to do." So I felt the danger right there. My instinct was to pull off the lane completely. I got onto the shoulder and I pulled off and just stopped right there.

Then the Jeep zoomed and zipped right past me, and the people were still shouting and yelling. And right at that moment, what came to me was: May you be safe. May you know peace. May you know the deepest, deepest well-being. I kind of surprised myself. I was like, "Wow, okay, I didn't panic and I didn't curse them." That just came spontaneously.

I recognized that was a powerful learning moment for me. It's not automatic that we would just become panicky, or angry, or even have rage. That doesn't have to be the case. That was a moment of the fruit of practice showing up. It's not so much about me doing something; it just came spontaneously. By recognizing that, I came to have so much trust and confidence in the practice. I know next time something like this happens, I might trip again, because I have those habit forces. But it doesn't have to be the only way. Through practice, some other possibility can become available to us.

It is true, sometimes you probably have noticed, that it often happens even when we get out of danger—like you jump out of the way of a racing car coming at you—fear can come immediately after that. Why? This definition gives a pretty good explanation, and we can notice this ourselves: we begin to imagine what could have happened. "Well, that is scary!" Even though we're out of the danger and we're kind of safe now, that imagination can happen. That belief can happen: "Wow, this could have ended really badly." Building upon that imagination, we now can start panicking. We can begin to have fear.

This is very interesting. So many times, our fear and worry can happen like that. Even though we're not physically or even emotionally in the danger zone, we can have this downstream sequence of reactivity.

The deep root in this process is that fear is a reactive movement, an emotional movement based on this set of imaginations, beliefs, and perceptions of something dangerous that may be there. In the present moment, we're not clearly seeing and knowing what is really happening here. We did not see that we're actually in a safe zone right now. We did not see, "Oh, this is my imagination at work," or "This is a perception that's at work." We also do not see oftentimes that the fear is present; it's just a form of emotion that's present.

So what can happen is, often fear doesn't stop at just this momentary movement of the emotion. We can become frozen, frustrated, angry, depressed, and very contracted. We may even do something harmful to ourselves and others. There is this whole sequence of reactivity that can happen that becomes, in fact, rather dangerous to ourselves and to others.

Having some understanding about fear may be from our logical and conceptual mind, but I also don't want to diminish this. We're not alone in this department. This is a strong force. Thousands of years ago, I was looking into the suttas in the Pali Canon. Most people know the three unwholesome roots³ of greed, hatred, and delusion. But in fact, if you look at the suttas, there is a whole set of suttas that talks about a list of four, with fear in it. So it's a strong force.

Befriending Fear

I'm going to shift to talk about a possibility through our practice to begin to establish more wholesome or skillful relationships with this form of emotion called fear. This is what I call fearless relationships. I'll unpack that a little bit.

The first kind of relationship that's helpful to establish with fear is this word: befriending. Befriending fear. This is part of us being human. When we befriend something, we can know it, we can learn about it, and we can begin to understand it. When we have an aversive, "push away," "get rid of," or "run away" kind of relationship, we can't know them. We just can't know them. So the first step in this whole process of establishing skillful relationships is to befriend our fear.

It's like if you have a terrified child. If you're meeting a terrified child, you don't want to just beat them up, or try to make them happy—it doesn't happen like that. You give them a very kind, safe, open space for them to be, to feel that they can be themselves. And then they can soften, they can thaw in that field. The same thing is an analogy for being with our own fear, our own emotion: making space so that the fear can feel safe to be here, so they don't feel like we're going to fix them up right away.

There is a process to befriend fear. It takes time, and it doesn't work mechanically, but I have to say something that feels a little logical. The first step to befriend fear is to come to a conscious relationship with it. If we're flowing in this unconscious stream of reactivities, we wouldn't even know that it existed in us. We just keep on doing something to try to fix it up and get rid of it, or we never really pay attention that it's here. So the first step is just to become aware: "Oh, this is present in me." That's the practice of mindful awareness. "Oh yeah, okay, I can pause for this now."

Once I know that, the second step is to begin to feel and sense the texture of the fear, the form of the fear, and to get to know it. Now, I use this word deliberately: feeling and sensing it. Fear is a form of emotion. It doesn't necessarily speak English. Emotions are movements; they are motions. They move. It's an energy form in us that moves through. So often we use our logical, conceptual mind to try to deal with emotions. Oftentimes we'll find out, "I want to get rid of it, and I've got a lot of strategies to deal with it," but we know it doesn't quite work.

You can think of emotions as if you're going to a different country that speaks a different language from your own. You don't just keep talking to them using your own language; no one is going to understand you. But you can be in that environment, at least for a while, to observe them, to feel them, to kind of feel their body posture, body language, facial language, and how they move in the space. You get a sense of how they are. Being with animals is kind of like that also. It's like our animal nature being shown.

Can we feel and sense into our emotions? Can we really listen, not necessarily using all of our logic and analysis to try to map it out? That's very important.

I was looking at the Chinese characters. Fear is not just one thing, and there are so many words in Chinese—and even in English—that are in this domain of fear. Almost all of the Chinese characters have the character of a heart in it. It's quite somatic. You feel like the heart quivers, or the heart feels constricted, or the heart feels tight. It's very somatic. So we can get to know fear through our somatic experience, through an embodied sense.

Those are the two steps into beginning to understand, know, and feel our emotions: to become aware, and to begin to really feel and sense them. At some point, our logical mind may have some recognition of what is happening, but we don't want our logical, conceptual mind to always dictate that everything has to happen based on what we read in a book. Let yourself really feel into this.

Becoming Fearless

Once we befriend fear and keep practicing this way, then we can begin to open ourselves to new kinds of relationships with this emotion. One of those really important relationships is to not be afraid of our fears. Fear tends to have a really bad rep, and so we almost automatically have a sense that it needs to go away. It doesn't work that way.

For me, the turning point in my relationship with fear was recognizing: "Oh, I don't have to be afraid of my own fear." Wow, that's liberating! You're allowed to have them. They don't have to immediately go away, and you don't have to beat them up. I can just not be afraid of it.

When we're not afraid, emotions are just movements; they actually have a chance to move through us. We have this more open space for it to move through us. Befriending fear and becoming fearless of fear creates possibilities for us to then establish a wide range of wise relationships with fear.

I think sooner or later we all know there is no "one-size-fits-all" way to be with this strong, potent domain of our lives. We need to learn a wide range of skills and cultivate capacities to be able to relate to fear. Part of this is to discover for ourselves what might be needed at different times.

Sometimes those emotions can be like a tornado. They're very overpowering. It's just not steady, and it's really strong. We get swept away. How to be with that when it's very overpowering and overwhelming? One thing to know is that it is a strong form of energy, so we have a choice to redirect the energy in some other way. You can get physical—meaning not to punch it away, but you can get moving. Go for a hike, maybe a rigorous hike, do some exercise or movements. Being in nature sometimes allows us to shift that energy. It's not helpful when that strong form of reactive energy is doing its thing that we just get stuck with it and feel like there's absolutely no other option. Know that there are other options.

In Chinese martial arts and forms of qigong⁴, when you move with certain movements, it releases certain emotions. This is a skill; it's not some kind of escape. It's something that we come to know: "Oh, this is one way that I can be in this territory when it becomes overpowering." Doing this is also like Chinese medicine, where it's not targeted. You work around the system rather than directly engaging with the symptom. If we just try to "be with it" when it's overpowering, we can get looped in and overpowered by it. Redirecting your energy into other forms can be very useful.

In other cultural backgrounds, sometimes when faced with really strong, powerful emotional reactivity forces and they don't have resources to be with that, they chant. They come to a temple and they chant out loud. Some people take refuge and just come to bow to the Buddha, to a Buddha statue. It can be a way to shift our orientation. We don't all have that cultural background or that way of being with a really strong force, but that can be useful. For myself, in a strong wave, if I don't know what else I would do to be with this, I'll just come and really bow. I bow a lot, and when I finish, I feel, "Wow, something opens up in me," or something that was really bothering me is not there anymore. I realize I don't have to solve it.

Developing Inner Capacities

There are other times when you feel you're resourced enough, you have the inner capacity to be with the fear just as it is. Then you have a choice to say, "Oh yeah, I'm just going to be here and feel it, and see how it comes and how it goes, and just be with it."

There is a sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya⁵ called the Bhayabherava Sutta (Fear and Dread). This is talking about the Buddha meeting his own fear before he was awakened. He lived in the wilderness. There are fears that come—twigs making sounds, something makes sounds, and fear comes. But he said, "I've developed a lot of inner capacities to be with fear, so I'm going to be with this." And he used very specific language. He said, "When I'm walking, if the fear arises, I'm not going to change my posture. I'm just going to walk and be with the fear until it goes away. And if the fear comes when I am sitting, I'm not going to change my posture. I'm just going to sit and be with the fear until it goes away." And so on and so forth with the different postures.

It was quite interesting what he is pointing to. He did not say, "I'm going to do something different to get rid of this, or do something to fix it up." The Buddha had a deep understanding that fear is a movement that comes and goes, and he had the capacity to just be with it without doing anything different—not even changing the posture. This is the notion of being with that terrified child, where you don't do anything. The system has its own way to dissolve, to fade away. As long as we are willing to be with this, that's good enough. Not only that, we can then really know fear in its raw way, not clouded by what we believe needs to be happening. So we can always go tinker with it; there is always a force saying, "I've got to do something, I've got to go interfere with this." No. The instruction was so simple: "Fear comes when I'm walking; I'm just going to keep walking with it." That is a possibility. It doesn't mean it's the only way, but it's an example of the wide range of ways to be with fear.

The last piece that I'll talk about today is that as we cultivate wise relationships with fear, we'll come to know that this is a gradual training. There will be a lot of times that we get caught up or get stuck, but there is a way to cultivate a whole set of inner capacities, resources, and skills to become wiser and more compassionate with fear. I'll name a few. This might be worth a talk of its own, but some of you are already cultivating this and you know, "Yeah, that's part of working with fear."

The first one is to develop sīla⁶, ethical conduct. That can feel like it's so far away. You think, "What? It doesn't have anything to do with fear." Well, so many of our own worries, concerns, and fears have to do with "I did something not quite right." That can cause a sense of concern for ourselves, a concern that we'll get blamed, or it just causes a lot of emotions that don't sit well within ourselves. So when we know that we live in this world not harming—in the way of not killing, taking something, or lying—our heart and mind are at ease, and a whole host of fears and worries will just not come. The Buddha himself in this discourse spoke about, "Yeah, I'm really skilled in sīla; I'm skilled in other capacities."

The second one is to develop samādhi⁷, a collected mind, a settled mind, unified and composed. Samādhi is a very beautiful inner resource, and sometimes when we rest in this peaceful, quiet abiding, we allow things to move through us without being shaken by it. Some people will say, "Oh, you know, it feels like a spiritual bypass." Not necessarily. If this is the only way you deal with fear, I would say yeah, you may want to look into it. But this can be a skillful resource if this is one of the ways that you use to meet with strong emotions. Samādhi is also a very healing place. A lot of physical and emotional things can heal in this samādhi space, and we don't have to do anything.

The third one is to develop paññā⁸. Sīla, samādhi, and paññā are three parts of the practice. Paññā is wisdom. We spoke a little bit about developing wise relationships and having some deeper insight into the nature of our own being and the nature of our lives. When that becomes available to us in our own lived experience, it allows us to become wise with many things, not just fear. For example, one of the key insights that arises through the cultivation of paññā is anicca⁹, impermanence. When we know fear is impermanent, emotions are impermanent, and we know that deeply within ourselves, then we can begin to have a different relationship with it. When we only feel like we're stuck and this is never going away, then we start having a feisty relationship with it. But when we know deeply this is moving, this is flow, this is impermanent, something else can open up.

Next is developing the Brahma-vihāras¹⁰: loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, and joy. For me, that example I used about merging onto the express lane is an example of the Brahma-vihara practice bearing fruit in that moment. In fact, the story about the mettā¹¹ practice came about when the monks got haunted by tree spirits. They felt like, "Oh, I can't practice here." And then the Buddha said, "I'm going to teach you a loving-kindness practice." And so they became fearless with the tree spirits.

The last one, but not the least, is kalyāṇa-mittatā¹². It's so good we don't have to do this alone. We can practice this together. In this full room, and with all the people who are on YouTube, if we're in a dangerous situation right now, here together, and there's one person in this situation who can express peace... wow, that gives everybody a possibility. It doesn't mean that we have to be like that all the time, but if one of us in one situation has a capacity to show up with calm and ease and love, that's good enough. We don't have to do this alone, and we're always being affected by each other. So allow that to uplift us, and allow our own practice to affect the people all around us.

I'm going to end on this note by just appreciating us practicing together and exploring Dharma together. May this benefit all beings everywhere. Yeah.