Fear and anxiety are widespread human experiences in this modern age. In modern societies where many of the external pressures of subsistence are solved for us, our attention settles on less tangible problems to fret over. We have food and shelter and, for the lucky ones, health care, but now we worry about our careers and our behavior and the success of our children. And of course death is an ever-present specter – although we experience a lot less of that than our ancestors did too. Now we can expect that our children grow into adulthood, and our parents grow into old age, and even our pets survive for a decade or more. We are living lives free from existential threat on a personal level, and usually fail to appreciate this because we are so anxious about the shifting landscapes of interpersonal relationships.
Dan Harris says that anxiety can arise from two sources: Overestimating the threat presented by a situation, or underestimating our ability to handle a situation. I’m usually struggling with both of these. I’ll be certain that my cat Fatberry experiencing certain symptoms means his death is imminent (it is not). This is a way of overestimating threat. But another way of overestimating threat is to think that death is more of a problem than it is. Will his death be horribly sad and something very difficult to go through? Yes. Is there anything exceptional about this pain and grief? No. People have been through much, much worse. Admittedly, sometimes people can go through so much that they are scarred for the rest of their lives. Fatberry’s passing is likely not going to qualify in that category. As “they” always say, death is a part of life. Letting go is part of loving something mortal. And we are constantly overestimating the threat of ordinary conflicts at work, disagreements with people in our lives, and other interpersonal strife.
The other side of this coin is underestimating how we are equipped to get through the tough stuff. Whether it was solving problems at work, straightening out relationships, managing financially, or living in my own head, I have chronically assumed that all of my problems would require intelligence, emotional stability, money, and insight I just didn’t have. Most of all, I have historically assumed that dealing with death was something I couldn’t handle, and required the crutch of alcohol rather than grappling with my feelings.
People drink over grief because they are smart. Drinking really does offer you something in these situations – a way to put more time between you and the grief, a way to make the days go by faster so you don’t have to sit with your sadness all the time, a way to feel something other than grief for a little bit – or, paradoxically, a way to connect with the grief in your gut, to let it all out in a way you can’t when you’re sober. People turn to alcohol because it feels like it helps. Of course, when you wake up sober and hung over, you’re still mired in sadness. So you drink some more. And now you have two problems: Sorrow, and alcoholism.
Meditation teacher Matthew Hepburn says, “When you are afraid to feel fear, you will act in ways that cause you to avoid fear.” This rings so true. I would also say, when you are afraid to feel pain, you act in ways that cause you to avoid pain. Drinking was my primary tool for avoiding pain and fear. When you act in a way to avoid fear, you don’t take risks – you don’t do things that require actual courage. Courage, it’s been said, is knowing something is scary, and doing it anyway. When we don’t underestimate our ability to handle what’s scary, we are stepping into an expanse where many more things are possible – and the more we handle, the more we know we can handle.
My meditation practice puts me in a situation to sit with uncomfortable emotions like fear, pain and anxiety. I sit with them in full sobriety. And they do not kill me. I hear advice from meditation teachers like, “Be curious about the feeling – what does it feel like?” “Investigate the feeling.” “Label the feeling.” Or, my least favorite, “Where do you feel the emotion in your body?” I feel it in my head and in my heart and in my gut. What difference does it make where I feel it? I feel it effing everywhere. I’m not sure what this guidance is supposed to teach me. What I do think about is all the people out there who are experiencing the same emotion right now. I think about them, and their suffering, and my heart fills with a wish for us all to suffer less. It fills with a wish for us all to know that we can get through this.
Sometimes these emotions are really painful, but it is not more painful than I can handle. I don’t fear those emotions like I used to – and I don’t avoid those emotions like I used to. True tests have been few and far between, because I live a charmed life with very few actual problems. But maybe my meditation practice has also taught me that the things I used to think were huge problems were really just problems I was already equipped to handle.
Admittedly, with so few tests of my equanimity, it’s possible that I am actually overestimating my ability to handle pain and fear! As a person with a long history of chronic underconfidence, I suppose it’s possible the pendulum has swung too far the other way, but that feels unlikely. Probably what I am experiencing is the confidence that comes from good mental health and lots of really positive experiences managing difficult emotions. Meditation has been a huge part of that.
The one area where fear and anxiety seem out of reach of my meditation practice is around the life-or-death threat of climate change. Are we overestimating our ability to handle it? All signs point to yes. Are we underestimating the actual threat to us? Yep, we sure are. When climate anxiety, habitat loss and resource depletion overwhelm me, there is not much I can do but accept that I am powerless to solve this problem alone. I build a wall between my own emotional stability and the problems outside of that. If I can be happy and balanced within myself, this gives me more resilience and strength to work for solutions.
In a world that presents a mountain of potential problems, sorting out which ones are real problems is a good start. Meditation is a powerful tool for appreciating your depth of resources for living with negative emotions. Is it possible to live a life that is literally free from fear, because you know you can handle even the worst pain? I’m not sure about that – I think people have a lot of instinctual fear that can be quickly and effectively reduced by wise understanding, but they’ve got to talk themselves off the ledge for a minute. I do feel hopeful that the ordinary free-floating anxiety that used to characterize my mental health can eventually be eliminated with meditation practice. I’m only 3 years into a meditation practice, and I’d estimate my anxiety has been reduced 70%. I’m less afraid of pain, and I’m less fearful of doing things that are scary. It’s hard to believe that just breathing for 10-20 minutes a day can reduce anxiety dramatically, and help you live with even the hard stuff like fear and pain, but I guarantee you, it can.