The choice to reject fear and choose love can feel like something that only applies to moments of crisis, when we’re leaving a marriage, starting a new business, preparing to climb Mount Everest. But in truth, the opportunity to choose love and reject fear presents itself in the smallest moments of life, and specifically, in relationships with those closest to us. Love over fear is a choice every time someone tells us something about ourselves or has an experience of us that we don’t want to hear.

We hurt each other in intimate relationships—intentionally and unintentionally—that’s a fact. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we discover that we have hurt the other person when they come to us and share their pain, express their experience, and verbalize what we said or did that upset them. But often we discover that we have hurt the person through a different avenue, that is, when they criticize us or tell us what (they think) is wrong with us. In these cases, we generally feel blamed or attacked, and as a result, it can be more challenging to listen, imagine the situation through their eyes, and often impossible to empathize with their pain. We have a tendency in these situations to strike back (the best defense is a good offense) or alternatively, defend ourselves and prove the other person wrong. It’s a survival instinct and indeed, it can feel as if our very survival is at stake.

What’s at stake is not our physical survival, but the survival of our version of ourselves. The person we are being characterized or experienced as is not the person we think or believe ourselves to be. And so, we try to protect the identity of the good self, the self who is innocent, not to blame for what is being accused.

It’s a healthy instinct to question accusations that feel unfair or unwarranted. It’s also important to be able to set boundaries that prevent others’ projections and deflections from landing on us. If you are being assigned intentions that don’t belong to you, it’s important to be clear about your truth. It’s also healthy and necessary to protect yourself from pain that takes the form of emotional attack.  Emotional attacks and insults, meant to harm, are not okay, and need to be stopped. This is not an article about learning to be a doormat in service of some false spiritual goal.

And yet, there is an enormous opportunity in these relational moments, when someone we care about is hurt, and when (whether we understand it or not) we seem to be a part of their pain. There is an opportunity in these situations to choose to respond from love rather than react from fear.

When we feel emotionally attacked, blamed, or criticized in some way, we experience fear, even if we are not consciously aware of it. Our ego is threatened.  Our identity is threatened. Our narrative on our self is threatened. Conflict feels dangerous to the survival of the ego organism.  As a result, we react from the place of fear, which means defending our ego or attacking back, attempting to disable the threat. Fear, as a primal emotion, can sweep over us like a tsunami and cause us to react without thinking or consulting our more evolved and loving self. Our reaction is often out of alignment with how we feel, in our heart, about this other person.

If we want to choose love over fear as a life practice, we don’t have to wait for a crisis situation. We can simply use the opportunity presented in these tiny moments that happen every day, at all different levels—when the person we imagine ourselves to be, see ourselves as, doesn’t align with how we are being seen in that moment.

To choose love in these situations is to first, pause and take a full breath before doing anything. It is to stop and get quiet, to do our best to actually hear what the other person is saying without defending our version of who we are or what we think happened. It also means refraining from attacking back with a criticism of the other, or with something that they did or said (related or unrelated) that hurt us equally. It is to just listen—without conditions.

Operating from love is to set our own ego aside long enough to listen to the experience of the other, to be courageous enough to be willing to try and understand what the other person is experiencing, no matter how radically different it is from what we intended to happen, think happened, or believe was the cause of what happened. It is to have the strength of heart to understand and open our heart to what the pain is that the other is skillfully or unskillfully trying to express. A response (not reaction) that comes from love is listening to the other’s upset as if we were just ears hearing, ears alone, not ears attached to a head, attached to an ego, attached to an identity, attached to a person intent on remaining intact and unchanged.

To live from love not fear, on a practical level, is to shift from a goal of protecting our ego, being right, winning the argument, being not to blame, and move into actually being kind, being loving—in our actions. It is to be willing to stop proving that we’re a good person and actually be that good person—to be courageous enough to open our heart and be love even when our ego is screaming in fear.

And amazingly, in the moments when we have the strength to choose love over fear, we are rewarded not only with the knowledge and confidence that we have done something incredibly challenging and beautiful, but also, with the gift of experiencing ourselves as love, and something infinitely more than just the small, fragile ego we thought we were and so desperately needed to protect.  We are rewarded with a freedom that surpasses all other freedoms.  Ultimately, it is through our willingness to stop defending our idea of ourselves that we discover our true and indestructible self.

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What was clear was that Kate was not only living the experience of fullness that day, but also the experience of what that fullness meant about who she was as a person. It was in that secondary experience, the story about herself, that the unbearable suffering was housed. It wasn’t the Moo goo gai pan in her belly that kept her from being able to be in the present moment, but rather the “me” story her mind had crafted out of the previous evening’s experience, which in fact made her present moment intolerable.

In a similar event, while out walking together, my friend stubbed her toe. I could see from her reaction that she was in real physical pain. But as I soon also witnessed, the suffering that the stubbing caused was not in her toe or foot—the real suffering was in her mind—in the story that she told herself about herself, as a result of what had happened to her toe. In the minutes that followed the stubbing, I watched as my friend transitioned from a happy, confident, and calm woman to a clumsy, inattentive and anxious little girl, the person that her father had berated and in whom he had been chronically and un-correctably disappointed. I watched as she re-dressed herself in an old identity, which included being a person who was perpetually distracted and to blame for not being able to improve her life. The pathways that connected the pain in her toe to the suffering in her mind moved with lighting-speed and were mighty powerful.

Back in my office with Kate, I asked if she could, just for a moment, experience the physical phenomenon that made up what she was calling her fatness and her disgustingness. Quite simply, what it felt like in her body at that exact moment, twelve hours after having eaten the last bite of food. At first she reported a series of emotions; she felt icky, leaky, fleshy, gross, a mess, and more. But all of her descriptions related to how she felt about herself, about who she was. Her body’s experience was nowhere in her description or awareness. I could only hear her mind raging on about how it felt about her, what it had decided about her worth and value—as a result of what she had eaten. When I brought Kate’s attention to this distinction, she immediately switched to a new chapter in the story about herself, specifically, her own psychological problems. At that point, a host of interpretations about herself and why she had eaten the food came tumbling out of her mouth; ideas about her parents, her psychological trauma, and her need to escape the moment into the anesthesia of food. Her body had still not been invited into the dialogue.

It took many attempts, but when Kate was finally able to drop out of her mind and down into her body, this is what she found: a tightness or presence at the waistband in her pants, a kind of achiness in her knees and pelvis, and a mild sense of fuzziness in her head. When the body’s present moment was allowed, such was the extent of her actual experience of the Moo goo gai pan and the whole event. A bit of tightness at the waistband, an achiness in knees and pelvis, and mild head fuzziness. When Kate was able to experience the moment directly, having untethered it from what it said about her and her identity, she felt profound relief. She even started to laugh, and suddenly she was entirely present in the room, the very same room she was going to have to leave just minutes before.

In that moment, stripped of its “me” story, the bloatedness (as she called it) in her body could just be what it was, a set of mild, completely bearable sensations. She realized that the problem, the suffering, had never been the sensations or the food in her belly. In fact, the sensations themselves had never even been experienced, never made it past the mind’s gate and into awareness. At last her experience could simply be what it was, which amazingly, was virtually nothing. Lightness entered the room, and the day once again belonged to Kate. Having unhitched her me-story from the present moment, disrobed her experience into its sensorial nakedness, Kate was delivered back into her life.

In the Advaita tradition (a part of Hinduism) there is a remarkable expression. It says this: you are not experiencing suffering, you are suffering your experience. Experience arises but how we want to be in relationship with that experience is up to us. An experience always appears as sensation in the body; it may be unpleasant or not, but either way it need not become an experience of profound suffering. Our experience becomes suffering when we give it to our mind to run with, and to use as material in its narrative about who we are and how we’re doing in our life.

As an experiment, try unhitching your experience from what the experience says about you. Try experiencing the present moment directly, as sensation. Try refraining from using the moments of your life as material with which to construct your “me” story. Try experiencing your life instead of using your life to define yourself. It turns out, not taking your life so personally can bring great relief and even give you back your life!

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The point of mindfulness, ultimately, is to get free from the tyranny of ego mind, to unhook our being and our identity from the unstable mind. The goal is to be able to see what is happening inside ourselves, without ownership, judgment or reaction. And simultaneously, to lose our great belief in and reverence for the productions of our mind. When we are identified with mind, that is, believe that we are only our mind, we are constantly being dragged around by it, having to respond to and interact with each thought and feeling it generates, regardless of whether it is interesting, important or serves us in any way. Mindfulness gives us a seat from which to watch the movements of mind, its carnival of cravings, complaints and opinions. Without the need to react to everything the mind suggests, we are then free to choose where to place our attention, and consequently, how to live our life. Mindfulness allows us to use mind for the incredible tool that it is, but without needing to be the mind. Mindfulness helps us to discover the awareness to which our mind’s play appears. I think even our minds would agree to such an opportunity, at least as a concept.

While any toe dipped in the practice of awareness is beneficial, there is a trend in mindfulness, a habit if you will, which can interfere with and obstruct the full power of the practice. Without awareness of this habit, we can spend many years lost and asleep in yet another ego prison, another trap of the mind, and as a result miss out on the real gifts of mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is trendy; it’s hip. This is good news. But we must be careful that like other trends, this one does not get swallowed up in the next stream of orange, girls, yoga, tats and the like. With mindfulness on the radar, let’s not miss the chance to change what this powerful practice can change, namely, who and how we are.

The dangerous habit is this: The mindful witness itself is becoming yet another form of ego, a new identity, a new somebody that we wear with pride. That said, we must be mindful that the one who is becoming aware of the mind is not also being kidnapped by the mind. Take the following scenario… You become aware (through your mindfulness practice) that certain thoughts are arising within you, let’s say worry thoughts. This is a good step; there is a little space between you and your mind and you are witnessing what your mind is up to. But don’t rest yet… and don’t congratulate yourself yet either. What you may not be aware of is that the witness who noticed those worried thoughts has her own ideas about what she observed. For example, she may not like that such thoughts are arising inside you. She may judge and reject you as the person responsible for thinking such worried thoughts. Or, perhaps, she may feel pride and arrogance at being able to notice such thoughts, She may identify you as someone spiritual whose “got” awareness practice down. In either case, the mindful witness here is not a mindful witness at all, but rather ego mind hiding inside a new costume. This presence masquerading as mindful witness is not actually willing to observe mind as separate and autonomous from you, with its own random happenings-inside your awareness. This mind in a costume of mindfulness blames or congratulates you for its own output, and in so doing, surreptitiously merges you again with itself. The witness in this case is not an impartial witness, not true awareness, not a path to freedom. Rather, this witness is just a sub-structure of the very ego mind you are trying to observe, and liberate from. This witness will lead you down the same rabbit hole of mind and waste your time in the process, creating a whole new spiritual ego. The mind in its cleverness puts itself everywhere. It just does this; it is not your failing but rather something else to simply notice.

In our practices to observe the ego mind, we must remember and be ever conscious of the mind’s sheer brilliance and fierce survival skills. It doesn’t want to be watched. The ego mind will camouflage itself in infinite hiding places in an effort to avoid direct light upon it. It will mask itself as awareness, compassion, spirituality, wisdom and all the best places, all in order to keep from being seen, from becoming the object and no longer the subject. The mind will take on whatever traits it needs to in order to avoid a status demotion from our identity and the captain of the self-ship to just a worker bee, a tool that awareness can use when needed. Ego mind will take up residence in any location that is not watched vigilantly. So be vigilant. Don’t lose the chance that mindfulness practice offers, don’t go back to sleep inside another incarnation of mind itself.

In order to prevent the mind from posing inside the mindful witness, ask yourself a simple question again and again… and again. With each observation, each witnessing of something happening inside you, a thought, feeling or sensation, ask the following: Is there a feeling about the feeling, a thought about the thought? Observe this. And furthermore, Who or what identity is here now? Who is there witnessing what is being witnessed now? After some practice this way, you may realize that the mind is a bit like one of those Russian dolls, each one inside another. Behind each thought sits another thought, a thought about the thought, and another, and another, each a little harder perhaps to catch sight of. Behind each identity sits another identity, and another… and another. The place where they no longer come, where what is observed is no longer observed by an ego someone or something, when we are just eyes seeing, without reaction, without good or bad… this is the place towards which we practice. This is what warrants the buzz at the water cooler.
Mindfulness is an ancient and powerful practice and well deserving of all the attention it is receiving of late. Careful though, mindfulness is more than a social media trend, more that just an “About” entry on a Facebook page. True mindfulness is a challenge that requires the fierceness of an awareness warrior, but it is a challenge that is well worth the effort. Mindfulness practice requires not only becoming aware of what the mind is saying at any moment, but also of how that very same mind seeks to inhabit the ears of the one who listens. Simply put, don’t take your eyes or ears off your mind, not even for a moment—not even if it says it’s napping, it isn’t. When you become aware of the way the mind sneaks its way behind the eyes of the witness, and steals the seat of the one who is observing, then, you are indeed free—free to watch and experience yourself and your life radically change. This is mindfulness in its fullness.

Copyright 2014 Nancy Colier

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