When I very first started climbing really seriously in my early 20s, I would go to bed at night, camping out, lying in my sleeping bag near my friend who was my climbing partner. And as I was falling asleep, I would suddenly have an extremely vivid sense of tumbling through the air down the face of the thousand or more foot cliff we had been climbing that day, falling down toward the hard boulders at the bottom to smack on them. Whoa! That was a shocker.
So I would pull myself up and out of that experience, shake it off, and start falling back into sleep again. And then, boop, there I was, tumbling in space, falling to my death. And so as I’m falling asleep, it starts again and I let it happen. I let go all the way to completion, where smack, right on that gray granite flat boulder, and then in the moment just before impact, a millisecond just before, I realized, oh, what I was experiencing was an upsurge of the fear that I had been suppressing all day long as an inexperienced young climber on the lead, so that if I fell, I might go 20 or 30 or more feet with a little tiny piece of metal holding me. It was a little scary. I just shut it all down and it was now flooding up again.
And I learned there’s a middle path, there’s a middle place, what a surprise, for healthy anxiety, healthy fear, and to allow it, to make room for it and find that middle place where one is not overwhelmed by it and also one is not trying to lie about it or numb to it or push it all the way down.
Then on the other hand, there’s problematic anxiety. Often, due to some kind of underlying physical condition, the body will generate chronic anxiety. One of the major symptoms of an underlying health condition is an internal sense of alarm. Even before you identify what that internal condition might be, the early warning systems in the body-mind are bubbling up alarm into your consciousness.
So if you’re dealing with a chronic health problem, for example, or you’re in the middle of a difficult situation, you lost your job, or you’re someone in a country who is being targeted for mistreatment of various kinds, well, it’s understandable that you feel scared. Your heart is pounding or your body is tense. It’s really understandable if you’re desperately worried about somebody else.
This is where the Buddhist teachings about how to bear and how to live with, and in some senses shift our relationship to, ongoing painful experiences are really useful.
1. Step Back and Witness It
These are teachings around mindfulness, so there can be a witnessing of the anxiety. Not being identified with it and hijacked by it. We’re not trying to reduce it, we’re just simply stepping back from that. If anything, it’s helpful to the extent you can open to it.
That’s where establishing a base comes in, a refuge of calm strength, as best you can. There are other things that can help you establish that, such as warmheartedness, flowing out and flowing in. It’s a major factor of being centered in the body-mind. Establishing that base then enables us to be more open to the anxiety, to feel it, to let it flow.
If you bump into difficulty, it’s okay, you’re normal. Calm is a normal state of being, a sense of strength is normal, openness is normal, warmheartedness is normal. It might be difficult to access, but it’s a normal range of experience, which means that it’s natural to us. And over time, as you work through the obstructions to that and come home to what is natural to you, you will be increasingly successful at it.
