Learning to flow in meditation to fearlessness and relaxing into the feeling that everything is unfolding perfectly.

I wanted to share something meditation as a process of entering into fearlessness, to present what meditation might be in relationship to our feeling side. Sometimes meditation is looking at from the view of calming the mind by letting go ...of thinking. When we meditate there is sometimes an LA freeway of thoughts running through our internal highways. This kind of mind cannot be forced into mental silence. This kind of intention only drives the thoughts into the unconscious where they manifest in turbulent dreams. It is wiser to feel the emotional tone of the thoughts and notice that they are processing a lot of fear. When we accept that we are afraid and anxious, then the mind starts to calm down. When we can look at our fear, own our fear, embrace our fear, and become friends with our fear, then we relax even more. In a paradoxical way, we are no longer afraid of our fear, we are no longer trying to become fearless. If we try to become fearless, then we are in resistance and actually get more stuck in the pattern of fear, and our thoughts race faster and faster in an effort to lash out at something that seems responsible for the fear. It is really perfect that this kind of meditation awareness can possibly arise when everyone might be dressing up as their favorite fear and wandering the streets on one side and everyone is campaigning against what they fear might happen politically.

When thoughts are felt and we acknowledge the fear tone about them, then the intellectual details of our fears become secondary to what is being felt. We do not analyze in meditation, we do not add thoughts to thoughts. Simply feeling the fear and noticing how fear was trying to escape itself and is no longer doing so is already a deep relaxation. We notice that analysis and debate are driven by subtle fears. The thoughts slow down naturally as we notice this. Ideally, if we have not already done so, our breathing reflects this process and also calms down into deep and full inhales and soft and slow exhales with gentle transitions of one turning into the other, rather than holding our breath anywhere.

If we are sensitive enough, we will notice certain thoughts are more core to the movement of fear than others. Most thoughts are reactive and merely embellish the fear, but some thoughts are very core to the fear, like a whirling vortex, like a tornado, and having a kind of empty center to itself. The energy of the tornado is fueled by a subtle sense of self clinging, of feeling a need to protect oneself as a body and mind, as a self identity, with all its system of attachments, possessions, resistances, and opinions about what is right and what is wrong. This subtle self clinging is behind a kind of constructed "me", our personality, and which holds the energy of anger, fear, and sadness. Again the secret is acceptance that this is what we have made ourselves to be and what we sometimes keep reinforcing through our seeking, latching on to things, and resisting other things, especially on the level of thoughts and emotions, anchoring in the sensation of being hurt and feeling pain, and not wanting to repeat a karma rerun and yet doing this very often both internally and externally as the tornado keeps spinning in circles.

The paradox is that we can release the whole energy of this tornado by surrendering into the fear happening, by releasing our resistance to what is feared. The object of the fear, the mental pictures of past atrocities and future apocalypses, are, as the Buddha said, "empty of a solid self", they will probably not ever really happen and if they did they would pass away very quickly anyway. It is the fear that makes what it resists feel solid and real, just as it makes the constructed self identity feel solid and real. It is, in some sense, this fear tornado that makes our world. When the fear is met inside and we surrender to our Golgotha, we die very quickly, and we notice a level inside us that cannot die. It is silent, eternal, peaceful, empty, clear, wise, compassionate, and creative without needing to manifest anything to show that it is creative. It may feel like a leap to go from the depths of fear into fearlessness so easily, but when a tornado stops whirling, a fever does calm down, and the landscape feels both quiet and cleansed.

I do find the metaphor of a tornado to be a good one, because inside the eye of the tornado is a quiet empty space, nothing solid, nothing that seems real, and yet this empty space is more real than the tornado itself, which is just a frenzied activity which disappears completely in one moment of not doing. In a strange way, one does meet a "new heaven and a new Earth" after our tornado apocalypse, or, as one poet said, "both a new world and the old world made explicit" or as the Upanishads said, "the ancient yet evernew". The "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" comes to an end, and the silent Earth remains. The Buddha conquered all the forces of Mara by simply touching this Earth.