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...
The old Buddhist texts refer to "the great and courageous bodhisattivas." These are the beings who 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 severs as a catalyst, a doorway to compassion, and a pathway to transformation for all beings who are afraid.
The willingness to sit with fear is an act of courage...
Either way, compliance or rebellion, in the end, unaddressed fear is a self-imposed exile, a prison of our own making...
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.
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.
Vulnerability, the third type of courage is the doorway to the deepest dimensions of our inner nature...
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 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, and more receptive to others and to our own inner guidance...
The courage of vulnerability opens the doorway to the invulnerability of our essential nature...
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."
— Frank Ostaseski
Excerpted from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death
Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Excerpts are from Chapter 14: Courageous Presence
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