A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities.… For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have avoided.
—KEN WILBER
FROM THE MOMENT we’re born, we begin to leave. From our first breath, we enter a lifelong conversation with presence and absence, with awe and fear, with life and death. From the first blink of our eyes, we grow and shed at the same time. The prospect of wearing away and not living is alarming, and so it’s natural to recoil from it. However, the more we pull away from what we fear, the stronger that fear becomes.
For much of our life, we bounce between our experience of wonder and impermanence. Along the way, we’re asked to keep leaning in after pulling back, because we need the wonder of life and the impermanence of life to inform each other, to illuminate each other, to balance and right-size each other. The wonder lifts us and the impermanence grounds us. Without wonder, we become oppressed. Without impermanence, we’re barely tethered. All the while, this basic paradox is unavoidable—that the spirit we carry is indestructible, though the container that we are will in time crumble. The very paradox of our existence underlies all other forms of fear.
In addition to this existential awareness, each person is born into a particular context. When blessed to arrive with enough food, shelter, and care, our first understanding of the world is that it is primarily safe. Awakened to this sense of safety, our natural resting position is one of accord with the Universe. When we stop, close our eyes, and enter silence, the still point we return to is calm and everlasting.
But when born without enough food, shelter, or care, we develop a primal understanding that the world is dangerous and not to be trusted. When we experience threat, violence, or abuse, we are forever on guard. The natural resting position here is not restful at all, but one of threat and anxiety. When burdened, we close our eyes and enter silence, often unable to find a still point to return to, and often left with the agitation and mistrust of a chaotic Universe. Yet depending on what happens to us, our sense of the Universe as safe or threatening can change.
On top of our existential fear of dying, and the safety or threat we’re born into, we are always confronted with the most immediate appearance of fear in our lives, which is situational. I knock the hot kettle off the stove and have a rush of fear that I will be burned. I come home for lunch to find my wife in bed and have a rush of fear that she might be ill. Or I lose my job and have a rush of fear about paying the mortgage.
These three continuums of fear have to be met, if we’re to know any peace during our life. Underneath the situations we face, we’re challenged to expand the nature of our resting position in life. Whatever situation we face or however we’ve been traumatized, there is a still point that exists beneath our personality. And that still point, that resting place—which all meditation practices aim to open—is where we can continue our fundamental conversation with the wonder of being alive and the prospect of dying.
Our primal conversation with living and dying is a central root in the tree of our life. The context we live into determines how our trunk will grow. And each situation we face challenges us to grow toward the light. But if our roots aren’t strong, the tree of our life, with all its branches, won’t survive to grow. This is why we must stay in our root conversation with life—engaging the mystery and miracle of being here, knowing we will eventually die.
Though no one knows how to do this, we’re asked to absorb the prospect of not being here in order to inhabit the gift of being here. This requires a quiet, ongoing courage that will, in time, lessen the degree of fear in all other aspects of our life.
During my cancer journey, I learned a great deal about fear. When first diagnosed, I was terrified by every poke, prod, injection, and conversation with the sober doctors who didn’t know what was going on inside my body. Within months, my fear of everything exhausted me. I was forced to discern among the many sensations that were overwhelming me, both physical and emotional. I began to realize that the first way to lessen my fear was to look more closely at it, so I could locate and inhabit the spaces in my fear. In the same way that quantum physicists look into the spaces between particles or that monks meditate until they descend into the spaces between their runaway thoughts, there are waves of stillness and peace that wait in the spaces of our agitations and fear.
Over the years, I’ve discovered that when I can stay open beyond my likes and dislikes, and stay devoted to a practice of gratitude, and take the risk to be tender, the habits of my fear unravel.
When obeying our fear, we begin to seek sameness and shun difference. The assumption that safety resides in seeking sameness is insidious throughout our culture. For example, while I marvel at the technology behind the music app Pandora, I disagree with its fundamental premise. Pandora is designed to only bring you music that is similar to what you already like. It hones the world of music to what is already preferred. I’m not singling out Pandora, just using it as an example of the difference between seeking experiences and people that will only confirm what we already know, and seeking experiences and people that will grow us and complete us because they are beyond what we already know. For welcoming experience beyond our likes and dislikes is what keeps us in conversation with life.
The same assumption feeds the industry of movie and theater reviews. It’s fine to have discussion and evaluation around the merits of films and plays. But if we only expose ourselves to what others deem as good, we’re basically courting sameness and missing the basic wonder of anything new. Whether I like a film or a play or a song matters less than the fact that I’m being nourished by new forms of life. I can dislike a movie and still be nourished by it.
One way to lessen our fear is to let in anything new while we’re afraid. So if you’re having a bad day and can’t shake your anxiety, go see a bad movie or attend a strange play. Ignore the reviews and listen to music you’ve never heard of, even if it sounds odd. Don’t let your likes and dislikes limit your exposure to the full spectrum of life, because it’s the full spectrum of life that is healing. Being a cancer survivor, I can tell you that there is no bad weather. The only bad weather is no weather.
Staying devoted to a practice of gratitude is another way to lessen our fears. Gratitude is the way we meet life with nothing in the way. Since no one can do this constantly, gratitude is a tender opening and closing to the life before us. When grateful, even for the difficult passages that open us, we are closest to life itself.
Every day I’m grateful for just being here. At unexpected times, I’m returned to a gratitude for simple things: the innocent stare of my dog in the morning, the quiet breathing of my wife as she sleeps, the creep of morning light up the side of the house as the coffee drips, the mystery in how every person carries an unchartered world within them. Of course, I grow weary like everyone else, but it’s gratitude that refreshes me. I often follow the feeling of gratitude, not sure what I’m grateful for. And that deep and simple feeling that arises from direct living becomes my teacher, opening the bare isness of things, which no one can destroy. Gratitude is how the heart opens our inner eye to the majesty of life. Gratitude returns us to the still point that exists beneath our personality.
Taking the risk to be tender can also lessen our fear. Everyone has a tenderness that waits in the center of their hardness, the way the softness of an oyster waits in its shell as it settles in the deep. When hurt, we believe the point of life is to protect that tender spot at all cost, to never expose it to an uncaring world. But against our will and in spite of our fear, we can discover, in a moment when we drop all that we carry, that it feels quite wonderful to carry nothing. Then we might wonder why we should pick it all up. Then we might be lifted by a sudden revelation that it’s the other way around. We need to pry ourselves open and let the tenderness we were born with meet the world. We must risk being tender if we want to truly live.
Tenderness keeps us from running away. It opens us more deeply to where we are. Staying tender allows us to permeate hardship. When young, I’d feel afraid when poked with the wonder of being alive, and an urgency would overcome me to get up and run, to go somewhere I’d never been, to climb a mountain for the view or sit by a river I’d never seen. But now, when feeling afraid and poked by the ache of being alive, I move deeper into where I am. Now I try to part the moment like a wave and swim with my heart into the center of where I am, into the vibrant shimmering center that informs all moments everywhere. By staying tender, life has become a practice of opening what’s before me rather than running to where I imagine life is easier.
Yet no matter how tender or grateful we are, each of us will be broken open at some point in our life. Though this will intensify our fear, how we meet being broken open begins a deeper phase of our spiritual journey. For against our will, we’re made vulnerable and now the light we’ve carried within since birth can find its way into the world. At the same time, the light of the world can now enter us through a break in our shell, which we wouldn’t have opened willingly. Now the light of the soul and the light of the world merge, becoming one. Now it’s impossible to tell where the soul ends and the world begins, impossible to tell where you end and I begin. And so the heart is released into its flow of compassion.
In spite of our fear, in spite of whether we feel safe or threatened, when we love one thing, we begin to love everything. For love is not confined to what we love, any more than light is confined to the first thing it illuminates. When loving you, I learn to love the world. And seeing the truth in one thing, I begin to see the truth in everything. When facing my own stumblings, I learn to have compassion for the flawed beauty of humanity. When dipping my face in a pond, I honor the life of water that covers the Earth. When touched by the sweep of one chord in one concerto, I am touched by the river of music. When in awe at the workings of Einstein’s mind, I learn how to appreciate all I don’t know. And when feeling the devotion of someone praying to a face of God I don’t understand, I acknowledge that we are all on the same journey. All these engagements with life lessen our fear.
Sometimes courage is not defending what we know to be true, but letting in all that is beyond our understanding. Our trust in life returns when we can stay in conversation with the larger flow of wonder and impermanence in which our life swims.
Gratitude returns us to the still point that exists beneath our personality.