I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.
—AUDRE LORDE
For Charles, courageous presence is accompanying his father to Sloan Kettering to discuss his inoperable cancer. For Steve, it’s leading a memorial service for his best friend’s young daughter, who fell to her death off an ocean cliff. For Tracy, it is being torn apart by both grief and love as she sits at the bedside of her dying mother while holding her newborn son. For Jackson, it is going to a maximum-security prison to sit face-to-face with the man who murdered his mother. For Terry, it is allowing his body to tremble and shake for three days while the contractions of old sexual traumas are released during a meditation retreat. For Joanna, it is embracing a new lesbian lover at age seventy-five, when she had imagined that she would never have another relationship.
When fear speaks, courage is the heart’s answer.
I have known Janet for twenty years. She is a student, friend, and living reminder of the basic goodness in humans.
Years ago, Janet was enjoying a backyard BBQ with her husband, their good friend Albert, and their families. Looking around, she couldn’t see her three-and-a-half-year-old son, Jack, or Albert’s son, Daniel, in the yard. Concerned, she said that she was going to check on the boys. But her husband and Albert called her back, saying, “You’re always jumping up. Sit down with us. Relax.” They assured her that the kids were fine, likely playing inside the house.
Moments later, they all heard a crash and a scream. Young Daniel came running up to the adults. Janet ran past him to the front of the house, where she found Jack lying near-lifeless in the middle of their normally peaceful neighborhood street. The car that had hit her child had driven off.
Janet scooped up Jack, and they all piled into the truck, heading to the emergency room as quickly as possible Albert was a physician, so he worked heroically throughout the ride to restore Jack’s breathing. Janet felt overwhelmed by guilt and shame, though her primary concern was for Jack’s obviously broken leg. How could she have allowed this to happen? she wondered as they drove.
It turned out that Jack had suffered injuries far worse than a broken leg. The doctors at the hospital did their best to save the boy, but they explained that his head wounds and the resulting brain damage were too severe. Janet’s son would not survive. She and her husband eventually made the decision to unhook little Jack from life support. He died almost immediately.
Everyone was in shock, frozen in time and disbelief. Janet held her baby close, rocking him as she had so many nights as she settled him to sleep with a sweet lullaby. There would be no waking from this dream.
Full of fear and sheer horror, the parents drove back home shortly before dawn. The country road hugged the nearby river. Janet noticed the rising full moon reflected in the water. This contact with something outside herself helped her sense a deep, clear part of her being, a calm awareness that, for a moment, could cut through the guilt, grief, and disbelief. An inner guidance spoke to her, saying, “If I am going to honor Jack’s life, I cannot let this accident destroy me.”
Still, the next day, when the police phoned to confirm the hit-and-run, her whole being filled again with the heat of rage. Then, at 11:00 A.M., another shift occurred. There was a knock on the screen door. An older man, a stranger, appeared on the other side. Instinctively, Janet knew he was the driver of the car. The anguish on his face temporarily washed away her rage, and the grieving mother invited the stranger into her home.
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
The driver apologized, admitted his liability, and explained that he did not know that his car had hit anyone. Once again, Janet’s guidance spoke to her with an inner strength reminiscent of the drive along the river. She looked compassionately at the man and, without any false sympathy, spoke honestly. “Jack’s death is a responsibility that we four adults all share,” she said.
Janet and the man who had accidentally killed her son talked awhile longer. Janet cried as she spoke of how she, her husband, and their friend had been preoccupied and hadn’t kept a close enough eye on the young boy. The driver explained how his daughter was getting married and that he had been rushing to the wedding rehearsal. In Janet’s mind, it was a moment of distraction on all their parts that had led to this disastrous outcome. A brief moment of inattention, nothing more.
We tend to like simple causes: they tidy up life’s uncertainties. We want such accidents to be brought under human control. We want someone to be held accountable. We want the outrageous and impossible to be understood, so as to alleviate our sense of helplessness. But life does not always present itself in ways that are right or reasonable. The truth is, we are rarely in control of such catastrophes, of the twists and turns of fate, and most especially not of our deaths.
In her humility, Janet understood that she could only be saved from this inexplicable horror by accepting it. She said to herself, I need to take my share of responsibility in order not to live a life full of shame and blame. She found a middle ground, one without unnecessary internalizing (“It’s all my fault”) or externalizing (“It’s all his fault”).
There were still years of grief work to be done, pain to be felt, anger toward the driver, herself, and even Jack for dying. It all had to be reckoned with, and it took courage to face it directly. But Janet recognized the importance of meeting her suffering if she ever was to have a good life again. Her small rural community of Mormons, Mennonites, old-timers, and hippies helped her to heal. A bouquet of flowers would appear on her doorstep one day, a basket of fresh eggs the next.
Janet told me later that being with her grief opened her to a new level of love. For a while, she lived with the fear of the absolute precariousness of life, warning other young mothers of dangers to their children that they might not recognize. In time and with attention, however, her heart cracked wide open. Her relationship to the precariousness of life transformed, giving rise to gratitude and a sense of being fully alive. Now she would not turn away from any part of life.
Her marriage didn’t survive the trauma of Jack’s death, but Janet did. She went on to become one of the most amazing hospice professionals I know. She has taught hundreds of volunteers and family caregivers how to live with grief and accompany death. She is the person her community calls to stand beside parents when there are sudden or traumatic deaths of children. Jack made all that possible. What a powerful little guy to have made such a difference in so many lives.
The old Buddhist texts refer to “the great and courageous bodhisattvas.” These are beings who, like Janet, have the fortitude to stand with suffering that might bring the rest of us to our knees. It’s not that such people have no fear. Rather, they are able to maintain a courageous presence while they are afraid. They open to fear and are willing to hold it, learn from it, and be transformed by it. In this way, fear serves as a catalyst, a doorway to compassion, and a pathway to transformation for all beings who are afraid.
Janet’s actions in the face of unimaginable grief and pain show us that courageous presence is not only for the rare bodhisattvas, brave soldiers, and Mother Teresas of our world. Ordinary people put courageous presence into practice in small, beautiful ways every single day.
I know a brave man named Julio. Julio is a nursing assistant in a major metropolitan hospital, whose job it is to clean up the emergency room. After the pandemonium of a “code,” during which the medical team has tried and failed to resuscitate a trauma patient in cardiac arrest with shock paddles and chest compressions, the adrenaline stops pumping, and the team walks away. This is when Julio enters the room.
There, he finds the patient lying motionless on the stretcher, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown. An intubation tube awkwardly protrudes from the body’s mouth. The floor is speckled with puddles of blood and the gauze pads thrown aside during the procedure. The red crash cart drawers dangle open like a mechanic’s neglected toolbox in an auto shop. The room still hums with residual activity. The walls seem to hold the lingering voices of the emergency room team shouting their instructions and reports just minutes before.
Julio enters silently. He spends a moment taking in the chaos, letting his eyes and ears move over the room, establishing what needs to be done. Then his gaze falls gracefully on the now-dead patient, whose name he does not know. He approaches, leans over respectfully, as if bowing to the person’s nobility, and whispers softly in the ear, “You have died. It’s okay now. I will do my best to wash away all dust and confusion.”
Once Julio has straightened up the room, closed the crash cart drawers, picked up the bloodstained gauze, and mopped the floor, he washes his hands. Then he begins to bathe the patient. A recently hired nursing supervisor sticks her head in the door. “We need the room as soon as possible,” she barks. Julio pays her no mind. Others on staff at the hospital know of and respect his work—they will protect this sacred moment. Julio takes the time he needs to honor the dead.
* * *
The willingness to sit with fear is an act of courage.
Fear is both a psychological construct and an irrefutable biological function of stimulus/response involving the release of adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, increased heart rate, tightening of certain muscles, the formation of goose bumps, and the dilation of the pupils. Fear is a normal human reaction, sometimes a necessary survival response to a perceived threat, which generates a specific pattern of behavior.
We speak about rational and irrational fears. But all fear is subjective. What makes me only nervous, such as the possibility of a huge earthquake hitting California, can generate full-blown panic in another person. What makes you cringe in terror, like a spider, might not cause me any apprehension at all. Fear can arise from an accurate perception of a situation, or from a completely distorted view.
The fear of saber-toothed tigers is real—or at least it was when saber-toothed tigers roamed the earth. Now that fear is a story, an old story that lives inside our imaginations. Still, we can scare ourselves with the thought that we always are being hunted or that we must hide away after dark to stay safe. We can even get anxious about the possible return of actual saber-toothed tigers in the future.
Fear doesn’t require a basis in reality in order to have an impact on us. No matter what its cause, the fear still feels real. That said, it’s best not to treat fear as the absolute truth.
Living from a place of fear can narrow our vision, shrinking our lives down to what is comfortable and familiar. We easily become consumed with safety precautions and the dread of uncertainty, constantly looking over our shoulders. It is reasonable to want to protect ourselves and those we love. But being driven by fear alone, we stop using our common sense and make unwise decisions. We grow less willing to take risks and face conflict or disapproval and may even slip into compliance to gain the security promised by authorities.
For some, fear manifests in counter-phobic tendencies. We engage in dangerous, high-risk activities, continually testing our own limits or others’ loyalty. We become aggressive, even bullying, to mask our fear or deny its impact on our lives. When we place all our emphasis on overcoming fear, there is no rest.
Either way, compliance or rebellion, in the end, unaddressed fear is a self-imposed exile, a prison of our own making.
There will always be things that frighten us. It’s foolish to imagine otherwise. I have a lot of fear. My fear shows up as second-guessing myself, procrastinating, difficulty trusting, and looking for reassurance from others. The goal is not to one day get rid of all fear. It is rather to free ourselves from fear’s choke hold around our lives, to learn to face our fear with courageous presence.
When Gabe was five years old, he developed a typical childhood fear of monsters in the closet. One night when he couldn’t get to sleep, I climbed into bed with him and pulled the covers up over our heads so that we could hide from the monsters.
“Do you think they’re out there now?” I asked with utmost sincerity.
“Yeah, Dad. They’re in the closet,” Gabe replied, eyes wide as saucers.
“You think so? You want to go see?”
“No!” he said, pulling the covers up even higher.
I let a playful, comfortable atmosphere sink in as we lay there under the covers giggling for some time. Then I suggested, “You sure you don’t want to go see? We could bring the pillows with us for protection.”
“Okay,” he said.
So we scooped up the pillows, got down on the floor, and crawled very slowly toward the closet. I opened the door just a little bit, and then shut it quickly. Over and over I did this, making a big show of peeking inside to look for monsters, then crawling back to safety. It made Gabe laugh.
After a time, I swung the door open wide and chucked all our pillows into the closet. A few items came tumbling out onto the floor—a pair of sneakers, a soccer ball, an empty box—but no monsters. Gabe began laughing hysterically. The more he laughed, the more relaxed the atmosphere became, and the more curious he got, until he was climbing into the closet to explore what was inside. Slowly but surely, his fear drifted away.
Gabe didn’t get scared of monsters anymore after that. He didn’t have to be afraid of them because he had gone and looked for them himself. He had faced his fear directly. If I had only told him, “No, don’t be silly. There aren’t any monsters in your closet. Now go to bed,” and shut off the lights, then he would have had to take my word for it. This way, he realized that the monsters didn’t exist. They were only stories inside his head.
It turns out it’s not so different for us grown-ups. The monsters we face may feel bigger and uglier and more challenging than the ones who lived in our childhood closets, but just like Gabe’s, our fears boil down to the stories we tell ourselves.
Taking fear as our teacher and learning to work skillfully with it can lead us to some degree of inner freedom. We quickly see that operating from a place of fear means we have little trust in reality. We are separated from others, from the possibility of unity. This is our default position. In Buddhist circles, the small, cut-off sense of self is sometimes called “the body of fear.” It takes physical form as a shell of tension around us, a stiffening of our bodies, a thickening of our defenses against the fear. Then the mind becomes rigid and confused. The heart closes.
A separation does need to occur, but not the one we might have imagined. In coping with fear, it is helpful to distinguish our emotional states from the object of which we are afraid. When we obsess about the objects we fear—insects, identity theft, rejection, terrorism, speaking in public—we avoid contact with the emotion itself. Like the monsters in the closet, the thing we fear may not even exist, but all of our attention to it turns the illusion into reality.
When we discern the difference between the emotion and the object, we can see the part we play in the process. Then we can begin to unhook ourselves from the overwhelm. We relax and temporarily hold the fear in the container of the body, supported by steady breathing, so that we can examine the mind’s operations—the beliefs, assumptions, memories, and stories that underpin the fear. In this way, we can begin to reduce our reactivity.
When I was a boy, I would get called into the principal’s office fairly often. At my school, this usually meant one thing: you were in big trouble. In my case, however, I knew I wasn’t being summoned due to misbehavior. My mother regularly would call the school asking for me to come home.
Usually, she wanted my help because she was having trouble breathing due to her emphysema. I would arrive to find her on the back porch gasping for air. I would get her inhalers, have her practice pursed-lip breathing to increase air flow, and put her at ease while I set up the nebulizer. When her breathing was especially difficult, I would help her use the portable oxygen tank. I was surprisingly unafraid of her poor health condition or assisting her with these medical procedures.
At other times, when my parents had been drinking heavily, my house would become a place of fear. My mother would speak of suicide, and my father could get violent. I wasn’t sure what kind of situation I might encounter when I walked through the front door. I vividly recall the feel of the cold brass doorknob as I turned my wrist slowly, the creaking sound of the hinges, the effort required to push the door open, and the courage it took to step through to the other side. I moved apprehensively through the many rooms of the house. I might find the kitchen stove left on. I might find my mother passed out on the basement floor. My mind was hypervigilant, my body tense as I crossed multiple doorways.
Many years later, when I took up meditation, a teacher gave us instructions on being mindful in all activities. The idea was to reduce our automatic behaviors and increase our capacity to be present. One exercise emphasized careful attention to the way we opened and closed a door when entering a new space. I was surprisingly adept at this particular exercise. I found myself keenly aware of the approach, sensing the temperature of the door handle, feeling the door’s weight, opening it with purpose. But emotionally, I was absent.
So I started to practice sensing my body as well as the door handle when pausing at the threshold. I felt a clenching in my belly and noticed an uneasiness that seemed unrelated to the task at hand. Suddenly, I began to cry so hard that I couldn’t get through the door.
The teacher was a great support in helping me make the connection with the fear I had experienced earlier in life. He explained that it was no big surprise I was having such a reaction to the exercise given my upbringing.
Opening doors became a central practice in my life for a time. Gradually, with practice, mindfulness replaced my learned hyper-vigilance and contributed significantly to a process of healing my old wounds. One way we express courageous presence is through the mindful practice of touching with mercy and tenderness that which we previously touched only with fear.
* * *
There are three types of courage needed to live fully, face death directly, and discover true freedom: the courage of the warrior, the courage of a strong heart, and the courage of vulnerability.
Our most common image of warrior courage is related to bravery in emergencies or dangerous situations. We might think of soldiers who demonstrate vigor and persistence, and whose training, beliefs, and pure adrenaline allow them to take risks, override fear, or at least learn not to be stopped by their fear. Physicians and health care professionals receive a similar type of training in pushing past exhaustion. For some people, simply getting out of bed in the morning requires warrior courage. For others, it is summoned to bear emotional turmoil, start a new job, or live with chronic illness, depression, and despair. For most of us, everyday life takes some degree of courage. Courage may be the choice to do what we believe is right.
A healthy warrior courage is motivated by honor, loyalty to comrades, service, or commitment, and is balanced with intelligence in its application. However, there is a shadow side to this type of warrior courage. It can be aroused by shame, coercion, a need to control, or a desire to gain approval, leading to defensiveness and a false sense of invulnerability.
When I was coming up in Buddhist practice, I heard a lot of talk about “spiritual warriors,” illustrated with stories carried over from the Asian traditions. Buddhist texts are replete with battlefield imagery. One suggested the meditator imagine being surrounded by an army of ten thousand soldiers. It was said that conquering this army would be easier than taming one’s mind. These teachings never resonated with me. I found that such images encouraged a great deal of striving and rejection. They were of limited value and little service to people with wounds of self-hatred and self-judgment.
Nevertheless, there is a place in our lives and meditation practice for warrior courage. It helps us to stay steadfast in the face of difficulty, to turn toward suffering, to risk the known for the unknown, and to confront ignorance. It keeps us from being seduced by the habit of complacency and the pull of uncertanity. We may feel the ground of this courage in our bellies.
This story of a samurai and a monk illustrates the unshakeable warrior courage and integrity needed to release our attachments and face fear directly.
A samurai climbed a mountain to reach a small temple. There, the warrior found a monk calmly sitting in meditation. “Monk,” the samurai barked in a voice accustomed to obedience. “Teach me about heaven and hell!”
The monk looked up at the warrior and replied with utter disdain, “Teach you about heaven and hell? I couldn’t teach you about anything. You are ignorant, dirty, a disgrace to the samurai class. Get out of my sight.”
The samurai grew furious. Overcome with rage, he pulled out his sword and prepared to slay the monk.
Looking straight into the samurai’s eyes, the monk said, “That is hell.”
The samurai froze, recognizing the compassion of the monk who had risked his life to show him this lesson. The warrior put down his sword and bowed in respect and gratitude.
The monk said softly, “And that is heaven.”
Fearlessness is not about eliminating, ignoring, or pushing fear away; it is about developing a capacity to be courageously present with our powerful states of mind and heart even when facing terror.
Courage of the heart asks us to be undefended. It is the courage to feel, to allow both beauty and horror to touch us. It calls for a different kind of fearlessness, which requires as much, if not more, passion than the courage of the warrior. We find this type of courage when we are lionhearted in our dedication to staying with the truth of our experience, when we don’t reject our experience and instead face what is right here, right now.
The courage of a strong heart activates a fearless receptivity to what is happening, which creates space for us to recognize, explore, and integrate our fear. Then, we can include whatever it is that we had wanted to avoid. Not only that, but this type of courage opens us to a deep compassion for the suffering of all beings. We realize that we all have fears, and, like bodhisattvas, we stand with others in their fear.
With so much mass violence in the news these days, it is easy to miss the underreported stories of courage of the strong heart. Jencie Fagan, a Nevada gym teacher, risked her own life to stop a fourteen-year-old boy who came to school one day with a handgun. He walked into the schoolyard and fired three shots. The first bullet struck another boy in the upper arm. A girl was hurt when the second bullet ricocheted off the floor, burying itself in her knee. The third shot thankfully did not hit anyone.
Jencie calmly approached the boy, walking right up to face him and his gun. After talking with him for a while, she persuaded him to drop his gun. This is where the courage of the warrior would have stopped—with an undeniably brave act, and one that almost certainly saved lives.
But Jencie demonstrated the courage of the strong heart when she then surprised everyone by hugging the shooter. She reassured the young boy that she would not leave him alone. She would accompany him to the station and throughout his legal process to make sure that he was safe and to ensure that the police didn’t hurt him.
Later, when asked why she had acted so compassionately toward the shooter, Jencie, who is a mother herself, replied, “I think anybody else would have done it. I look at the students as if they’re my own.”
Vulnerability, the third type of courage, is the doorway to the deepest dimensions of our inner nature. Mostly we associate vulnerability with weakness, emotional exposure, and being susceptible to harm. Getting hurt. Being wounded. We are therefore terrified of vulnerability and want to avoid it at all costs. But our vulnerability is not just a curse; it is a blessing.
The courage of vulnerability enables us to sit with a friend whose child died in a car accident, to sense her pain and listen openly without preconceived bias. With vulnerability, we can acknowledge our fear of starting a new venture, share news of a divorce, respond to the yearning to get pregnant again after a miscarriage.
Vulnerability is not weakness; it is non-defensiveness. The absence of defense allows us to be wide open to our experience. Less defended, we are less opaque and more transparent. We become sensitive to the ten thousand sorrows and the ten thousand joys of this life. If we are not willing to be vulnerable to pain, loss, and sadness, we’ll become insensitive to compassion, joy, love, and basic goodness.
The courage to love requires vulnerability. Is there a more vulnerable state than love? It is full of risk, uncertainty, intensity, intimacy, conflict, and truth-telling. Being vulnerable means we are sensitive, impressionable, more receptive to others and to our own inner guidance. We recognize the illusion of control, the reality that suffering is inevitable, and we are invited to release our grips and let go into the inexplicable and unpredictable.
The courage of vulnerability opens the doorway to the invulnerability of our essential nature. This invulnerability is not stoicism or an immunity to the ups and downs of life. In our culture, invulnerability usually implies a stance against emotion, a false sense of being impenetrable, that this body cannot be hurt or will not die. But the invulnerability of our essential nature is a pure openness, an undefended spaciousness in which we step back and allow the winds of fear to blow right through us. There is no place for our fear to stick, no ground on which it can land. We can drop the struggle, relax our unnecessary efforts, and rest in a state of defenselessness. We recognize that we are not separate from anything or anyone. Fear subsides as we realize that the basic essence of who we are is never damaged, never gets sick, and never dies.
The night before my open-heart surgery, I was in an agitated state, with fears of disability, doubts about the need for the procedure, and endless questions spinning in my mind.
My friend Sharda, a Buddhist meditation teacher, arrived with no answers.
She sat beside me, held my hand, and barely spoke. We stayed in silence together for quite a long time, just the two of us in the hospital room. Every once in a while, I would say, “You know, I’m scared about this surgery. I’m scared I might die.”
She would nod and say, “Yeah,” and go back to being silent. She exuded love and served as a clear mirror for the deepest part of me, a part bigger than my fear. In her face, I could see a reflection of my own loving nature.
There’s a dynamism that happens between two people. After an argument, you can feel the negativity and tense energy in the room. The same is true under the opposite circumstances. You can feel when there has been a courageous presence in the room.
Sharda didn’t stay very long, half an hour maybe. Then she stood up calmly and said, “I’ve got to go home.”
I said, “Yeah, I know.”
She said, “I love you.”
And I said, “Yeah, I know.” And then she left.
After her visit, I felt calm, my confidence in the procedure, myself, and the world restored. Gratitude nourished a sense of well-being. I felt a connection with others who might be suffering that night and moved beyond the fear that had plagued me.
I slept well that night. Early in the morning, when they came to fetch me as they do in the hospitals at some gray and lonely hour, I was relaxed. My son Gabe and my wife, Vanda, walked my gurney to the doors of the surgical room. Equanimity took me the rest of the way.
Entering into a state of vulnerability makes us sensitive to experiencing the pleasures and pains of our bodies, to feeling our emotions, and to noticing our thoughts. It’s not easy to feel all of this or to face the root of our suffering, which is believing in our tightly constructed selves. But our capacity to be vulnerable also makes it possible for us to experience all levels of reality. We feel how permeable we actually are—how our identities are not fixed, nothing in existence is permanent. We see the emptiness of our compulsions and fixations. Undefended, vulnerable, we are open to all of it, to all the possibilities of human existence, including the subtler, deeper dimensions of our being. Hence, paradoxically, the courage of vulnerability brings us to rest in the openness of our ultimate invulnerability.
* * *
In getting to know our fear, a dry fact-finding tour of the mind will not prove sufficient. To transform fear into courageous presence, we need love. One of my foremost teachers, grief specialist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, used to claim that there were only two primary emotions: love and fear. I’m not sure it’s that simple, but certainly, we could say that love and fear are two sides of the same coin. Fear is the contraction side; love the expansive side.
Can we befriend fear? Can we meet it with mindfulness, touch the suffering it causes with deep compassion and cultivate the loving equanimity that will allow us to stay with it? If so, then we can find a place of rest even with fear.
Ram Dass once said, “After many years of undergoing psychoanalysis, teaching psychology, working as a psychotherapist, taking drugs, being in India, being a yogi, having a guru, and meditating for decades, as far as I can see I haven’t gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one. The only thing that changed is that they don’t define me anymore. There is less energy invested in my personality, so it is easier to change. My neuroses are not huge monsters anymore. Now they are like little shmoos that I invite over for tea.”
It is possible for us to learn to love our fear. Choosing love over fear speaks to a trust in benevolence, in the basic goodness of reality, in something larger than the fear. But to embrace our fear, we need to feel safe.
Donald Winnicott, a preeminent English pediatrician and psychologist, developed the concept of the “holding environment,” which is foundational to attachment theory in contemporary psychoanalysis. He saw the mother’s holding as a prerequisite for a child’s healthy development—loving the baby in such a way that she feels cared for, safe, understood, and continuously adored. When a child is held like this, she develops a sense of trust in her mother, which she then extends out to others and the world. If the holding is less than optimal, the child is likely to be more reactive, seeing the environment as untrustworthy.
Watch an infant with relatively healthy attachment to her primary caregiver interacting with the world. When there is “good enough” holding in her life, the child ventures off to try new things. Maybe she tries walking and takes a spill. The mother figure holds her baby, filling her up with love so that the infant has the courage to try again. Each time, the little one gains the courage to venture further beyond her previous boundaries.
I experienced the power of the holding environment a few days after Gabe was born. Out of the blue, it seemed, he started crying uncontrollably. After trying everything to bring Gabe comfort, his mother was exhausted. The midwife and a friend who had raised her own four children, when called upon to help, couldn’t console Gabe, either.
Finally, I said, “I know I’m a guy, but let me try something.” I scooped Gabe up, put him right against my chest, and brought him outside into the open air. I breathed deeply and whispered, “I love you, you know. I will always love you.” Then I sang to him the song I had sung while he was still in his mother’s pregnant belly.
It was a simple but remarkably intimate contact with my child. As deep as any experience in meditation. In a way, I loaned him my nervous system. I wasn’t worried. I didn’t feel upset about his state of distress. I didn’t judge how he was feeling, either. I just held him within the safe container of my arms and chest, letting his upset spill out of him and evaporate into the spacious sky, until he calmed down and drifted off to sleep.
Suppose that we thought of awareness itself as this holding environment? Imagine if when we meditated, we first established ourselves in the posture, paying attention to the body and breath, and then evoked our loving attention as a way to foster trust. Sometimes when I sit, I like to imagine that I am my own “good mother.” I evoke the warm presence of an archetypal mother or grandmother. Occasionally, I repeat a phrase from the Buddhist teachings on loving kindness, the Metta Sutta: “Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world.”
I believe that when we feel the safe holding environment of awareness embracing us, it allows our fear, pain, and ugliness to come out and show themselves and to be gently held without judgment so that they can be healed. We feel the support and courage to go beyond our previously limiting beliefs. This enables us to face a seemingly impossible situation, such as our own death or that of a child, with grace. Awareness itself is the ultimate resting place.