Expansiveness Now
If you feel trapped right now with nowhere to go, I encourage you not to distract yourself from that feeling but rather to sit with it.
Encounter it. Genuinely encounter it, with full awareness. Meditate on it. Chew it over. Don't look away.
Don't look at your phone.
Don’t turn on Netflix.
Don’t text anyone.
Don’t get up and get a snack.
Don’t start picking at your fingernails.
Just sit with it.
Just feel it.
Full mindfulness now.
Feel how fear shows up in your body. Where does it show up? In your muscles? In your stomach? In your chest? How is fear using your body to make itself known to you in this present moment?
Close your eyes. Visualize yourself in whatever the words “big sky, gentle expansiveness” bring to mind for you.
Look around. Take in expanse.
Now breathe in that big sky awareness into your body, deep into your diaphragm, below your belly. When we’re afraid, we tend to breathe shallowly from your lungs. When we do that, we deprive ourselves of calming oxygen.
So take care now to fill your entire torso with big open sky. Send that expansiveness down in your toes until you can feel the sky making contact with the ground.
Breathe in the rich sensation of enormity and forever.
Feel enormity charge through your whole body until you become enormity yourself.
Now return your awareness to that place in your body where you first encountered fear.
Filled with big sky energy, ask out loud now your unasked questions. What are you afraid of knowing about yourself right now? That you’re not really a hero? That you’re actually afraid? That you’re insecure and anxious about the unspoken catastrophes still yet to come?
Sit with those questions! Scream them out into the big sky. Big sky can take it. Big sky don’t care. Big sky has never bought into the dipshit story you tell about yourself; there’s no way it’s judging you now. Be honest. Let it serve as your witness. Express what you’re feeling and let your questions hang in big air.
Self-awareness can’t hurt you.
Precious teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh says, “The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.”
Can you walk into your darkness and just be there? Can you learn to sit with discomfort until the fear burns away you and you are freed to fearlessly serve others in suffering?
What might your shadows have to teach you if you would only first admit to yourself that you have them?
We think of ourselves as such geniuses but really, we are just silly sacks of shit and disease, so easily overcome by a truly meaningless drift in viral genetics. We are not that special. We’re not even very interesting. Statistically speaking, we are merely specks of nothing in the great cosmic truth of things.
So for humans, what we make of our lives is all that we have. But we’ll never really make anything of our lives if we don’t first learn to work with our own naked consciousness, even the hidden-away parts that horrify and humiliate us.
A mass crisis presents the opportunity not only to work with our shadow feelings of anxiety, panic, stress, fear, loneliness, distress, and grief but to work on them with other people who are processing the same terrifying terrain at the same time. We need not suffer alone. There is a unique opportunity for sharing consciousness presented in an existential crisis that we should never take granted. These glimpses of social clarity are brief and rare.
Take time to meditate. Keep a journal. Make time to call your friends and loved ones, especially the difficult ones who you put off calling because their personal issues make conversation uncomfortable. Ask them to really talk about their feelings. Don’t accept canned responses. Encourage emotional bravery and openness. Accompany them through dark, humbling times.
Focus on the breath.
Focus on each other.
Enormity now.
Holly’s Book Recommendations for Working with Anxiety and Fear:
(Note: these are Buddhist authors but the spiritual counsel given is intended for a general audience)
Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thích Nhất Hạnh
Standing at the Edge: Finding Courage Where Fear and Courage Meet by Joan Halifax
The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön