Medicine For Fear

 

05.27.2022 MEDICINE FOR FEAR Many of us have been conditioned to believe that if something doesn’t feel good, then it must not be good for us. But what if we were to make use of our difficult emotions and fears as a way to learn about ourselves? What if our “problems” are actually the solution we’ve been looking for? When difficult emotions arise, it’s common to push them away when they make us feel uncomfortable. However, this suppression can exacerbate the emotion. As we push away or ignore our feelings, we begin to feel even worse, often turning minor worries into full-blown panic attacks. Maybe we need to have a difficult conversation with someone in our life. Rather than confront them, we put it off in fear of what they might think or how they will respond. Is the issue really how the other person will respond, or is it how we will feel once they respond? Perhaps we’re afraid of the feelings that arise within us — not so much the conversation itself. It makes more sense to develop a relationship with fear rather than trying to rid ourselves from it. But how? If you want to cultivate the ability to smile at your fear, find the wisdom within your difficult emotions, or learn how to work with anxiety and potentially transform it, the resources below will be of help. If you’re interested in going deeper within your own fears, our new online course, Medicine for Fear, can help you do just that. It features a fantastic group of teachers who share their personal experiences with fear and how they continue to work with it. May you benefit from them. –Chris Pacheco, Associate Editor, Lion’s Roar AV

Smile at Fear: Pema Chodron on Bravery, Open Heart & Basic Goodness If you want to pitch in and help solve the world’s problems, says Pema Chödrön, you’ve got to start with yourself. Here’s her advice for making friends with the fear that can hold us back. If we come to the understanding that we are needed and commit ourselves to doing something about our own pain and the pain around us, we will find that we are on a journey. A warrior is always on a journey, and a main feature of that journey is fear. This fear is not simply something to be lamented, avoided, or vanquished. It is something to be examined, something to make a relationship with.

The Wisdom in Dark Emotions Grief, fear and despair are part of the human condition. Each of these emotions is useful, says psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan, if we know how to listen to them. Grief, perhaps the most inevitable of all human emotions, given the unalterable fact of mortality, is seen as an illness if it goes on too long. But how much is too long? My mother, a Holocaust survivor, grieved actively for the first decade of my life. Was this too long a grief for genocide? Time frames for our emotions are nothing if not arbitrary, but appearing in a diagnostic and statistical manual, they attain the ring of truth.

The Lion’s Roar Podcast: Anxiety and What to Do About It with Bruce Tift This episode of The Lion’s Roar Podcast features psychotherapist and author Bruce Tift. Anxiety can be a pretty reasonable response to times of wide spread disease, environmental disaster, social unrest and polarization. Associate editor Chris Pacheco talks to Bruce Tift, psychotherapist and author of Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, about attempting to control feelings of anxiety, why that only makes it worse, and what to do instead.

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