A Safe Container for Fear

When you embrace your emotional experience, anxiety fades away.

Adam Fuss, Untitled, 2006. Unique gelatin silver print photogram, 20 x 16in. Courtesy the artist/Cheim & Read Gallery.

At parties and network events, family gatherings, and even in daily interactions
with friendly colleagues, one of my Dharma Punx community members, Paulina
(not her real name), found herself shutting down, tripping on her words while
others would talk comfortably about their lives and goals. She felt anxious to the
point of immobilization at the thought of making bids for attention. Eventually,
this painful anxiety led to avoidance coping: she started dodging social
interactions. Confronted with an ever-shrinking world, she began to experience
convenient somatic symptoms—she was too tired for this work event, she was
coming down with a cold or headache, so she couldn’t go to that party, and so
forth.

Many individuals with chronic phobias and anxiety disorders are not so much
scared of the external situations they avoid at all costs. Rather, they are often
frightened of the physical feelings triggered by those situations: a rapidly beating
heart, hyperventilation, contracted abdominal muscles, tight chest muscles, and a
spinning, dizzy feeling in the head, along with the parade of inner chatter
predicting catastrophic embarrassment.

I was not surprised to hear that Paulina had tried, without success, to implement
the typically suggested practices, like pretending there is no fear, reciting self-
affirmations aloud in front of the mirror, and so on. (Although such endeavors
sound good as suggestions, they fail to address the underlying feelings that seek
our attention.) And, as I fully expected, she asked for tools to “get rid of her
anxiety” so that she could live up to her ideal of being a self-assured, successful
career woman and, as a first-generation immigrant, a fully assimilated American.

In my experience from over a dozen years of providing spiritual counseling to

hundreds of practitioners, anxiety arises as the expression of an internal conflict,
generally between our felt experience—in Paulina’s case, her feelings of anxiety
—and our self-concept, which is an array of beliefs we hold that outline how to
act and feel in order to “succeed” in this world. Paulina’s self-concept was the
strongly held view that women, especially in professional environments, should
always be calm, collected, and effortlessly assertive.

When our felt experience clashes with our self-concept, rather than update our
self-concept so that it accounts for our authentic experience, we often respond by
suppressing any feelings that contradict our views of how we need to appear if we
are to achieve success and acceptance from others. When we do that, the anxiety
only grows worse.

The solution is to develop anxiety tolerance—to learn how to observe and hold
our felt experience, which involves the ability to greet and observe our most
uncomfortable and inconvenient feelings with “unconditional friendliness.” This
kind of mindfulness means we can provide a safe container for our fear and soften
it into a manageable state.

Perhaps the greatest irony of healing is that it occurs when we accept our felt
experience, rather than rely on willpower or focused effort to get rid of the
unwanted. In Paulina’s case, the first step toward alleviating both her social
anxiety and its attendant underlying fear of rejection was deceptively simple. I
suggested that instead of trying to act as if she were calm and collected, she
should take the opposite approach and express her felt experience as if
authenticity were a sacred spiritual doctrine, first in daily calls with one of her
closest friends, then with open-minded colleagues at work. Having a secure base
(what the Buddha called kalyanamitta, or a group of supportive friends we can
count on to normalize our feelings through empathetic understanding) allows us
to express and explore the limits of our felt experience knowing that if we
struggle or stumble there will be people to reassure us, through warmth and
compassion, and help us deactivate our feelings of embarrassment. And at social
gatherings, at the outset of each bid for attention from others, Paulina began to
issue a brief acknowledgment of her underlying fear, embracing it without
embarrassment—something along the lines of “Please bear with me, as speaking
in groups isn’t my forte, but I’d like to say. . . .” As her resistance to anxiety
abated and was replaced by acceptance, the situations she had previously avoided
lost their terrifying aura, and her life opened up.

As many wonderful psychologists have noted—one is the esteemed Harvard

psychologist Daniel Wegner— when we stop suppressing our emotional
experience, stress and anxiety are invariably alleviated. Instead of the dreadful
acting as if there were no fear, we would do well to disclose and own our feelings,
for they are every bit as valuable and worthy of attention as our ideas and
accomplishments.

Working with Fear Exercise

After developing some state of ease via a concentration-based meditation
(observing the breath or reciting lovingkindness phrases, for example), bring to
mind a situation that causes fear, a desire to flee or to isolate yourself.

• To further activate the emotion, ask yourself, “How does it feel to be vulnerable?
How does it feel to be unsafe?” or other resonant questions.
• Notice any uncomfortable sensations that appear, such as tightness in the
abdomen.

• Let go of any tendency to resist the sensations or to stay focused on the mental
image that activated the feeling. I’ve even practiced thinking, “Hello, welcome”
when fear arises, to remove any tendency to avoid my inner experience.

• Breathe into and relax the areas around the fear, but not the core physical
sensations themselves—for example, if we feel our anxiety most acutely in the
chest or throat, allow those areas to remain activated; focus on relaxing the
shoulders, arms, and abdomen. We’re making space for the fear, allowing it to
grow, even though it is uncomfortable. Recognize the impulse to turn away from
fear and return to the actual sensations.

• Keep your attention on the sensations of anxiety and investigate how they
change, as if you were a zoologist observing a different species.

The goal is to observe and nurture our anxiety. Only when emotions are truly
attended to can they be endured and transformed into useful energies that express
our needs and help guide us through life.

To read more about fear, see the Special Section of Buddhist Teachings on Fear.