by Bruce Tift
This is an informal technique I often use in my work. I call it the worst fear technique. It has to do with identifying the specific feelings and experiences that we have organized our life around trying not to feel and then, intentionally, going into exactly those feelings, especially as immediate, embodied, sensation-level experience, with no interpretation at all. The purpose is to find out for ourselves whether it’s true that we will be annihilated if we feel these feelings. What bad thing is going to happen? Why are we continually dropping into this sort of survival-level response, as if some really bad thing would happen to us if we were to feel these feelings? In my experience, going directly into the immediate embodied experience of our fear turns out to be a much faster, more direct way to dissolve neurotic organization than addressing the historic issues that gave rise to that organization in the first place.
STAGES OF DISSOLVING OUR INTERNAL DIVISIONS
This “worst fear” practice is part of a larger view of how to gradually—at a pace that is provocative but not overwhelming—move in the direction of dissolving our neurotic strategies. There seems to be a series of stages we go through as we dissolve these patterns and, by extension, dissolve the feeling of being divided from ourselves and from life. We can also understand these stages as representing our increasing capacity to be unconditionally kind to ourselves.
The first stage could be understood as awareness or recognition. We wake up out of our familiar trance states, in which we have been unconsciously taking whatever we experience as if it’s the whole story—whatever’s happening, that’s the way things are. We become aware that very powerful habitual patterns run a large part of our lives. We begin to see that we’ve unconsciously maintained these strategies in order to avoid our worst fears—feeling difficult emotions, not being who we think we should be—and we see the price we’ve been paying for pushing these aspects of ourselves away. So we might say the first stage is awakening out of taking our experience at face value and seeing what’s really been going on. Seeing these already-existing patterns can sometimes happen from reading a book or going to a talk, but usually it takes some type of difficult life experience or crisis to force us to look beneath what we have taken for granted.
The second stage could be understood as learning to tolerate our worst fears. We begin to trust that feeling our fears isn’t killing us. We hate the experience and want to get out of it, but as a practice, we hang in there longer and longer. This discipline begins to increase our tolerance for the feelings that our neurotic strategies have allowed us to avoid all this time. Our tolerance for those feelings is generally low, because we don’t like the experience of having them. We can strengthen our motivation at this stage by having a better understanding of how our unnecessary suffering is actually being perpetuated. We ask, “What is it that’s driving my habitual patterns? What am I trying to not feel?” What we usually find is that our habitual patterns are being maintained and driven by the attempt to not feel our core vulnerabilities—to not experience our worst fears. We see more and more clearly that neurotic strategies are avoidant strategies. Less neurotic suffering requires less avoidance of difficult experiencing. We don’t like the experience of feeling abandoned, not feeling good enough, or feeling angry. But these core vulnerabilities are already there. No matter what we do, they are a part of our experience. We’re already living with them. We are already acting like an abandoned person or an angry person or a worthless person, because that’s how we feel. But because we don’t want to acknowledge these feelings, these behaviors are expressed unconsciously and indirectly. We have a choice: do we work with the truth of these vulnerabilities, or do we continue to ignore them? Either way, they’re still there. An important distinction: it’s not our fears that are perpetuating our avoidant strategies but our efforts to not be aware of these fears. If my grief is the problem, then I have to somehow get rid of my grief. If it’s my avoidance of my grief, however, then the grief can remain, and my work is to train myself to have a relationship with that grief.
Almost all of us begin this investigation with the sense that our difficult feelings are being done to us; that they’re happening to us. “You’re making me feel like an abandoned person because you’re not paying any attention to me.” Or we believe that these feelings are a part of us that’s alien, bad, shameful, and to be fixed or gotten rid of. So the first step is realizing that feeling abandoned—or whatever our particular core issue is—is a vulnerability that we’ve been experiencing for a long time. The second step is to investigate and begin to increase our tolerance for this disturbance.
The third stage could be understood as acceptance. Here, we’re beginning to feel a little less panicky when the core vulnerability comes up. In my case, this stage came when I was finally willing to say, “Yes, I guess I am a dependent person! I can’t say it’s my favorite experience to feel dependent, but after sitting with it over and over, I can admit that it hasn’t killed me.” Once I realized I was out of danger, it was easier to practice acceptance of the truth of my experience—which sometimes included feeling dependent.
The choice is whether we’re going to approach ourselves with fundamental aggression or with fundamental kindness. If it’s the latter, we are able to say yes. “I’m going to say yes to this experience of feeling abandoned. I don’t like it. It’s one of my worst fears. I wish it were gone, but what can I say? If it’s there, it’s there. I’m going to say yes to it.” As we start to say yes to the truth of our experience, at some point we recognize that we’re not just saying yes to our fears and vulnerabilities—we’re actually saying yes to ourselves.
At this point, an energetic or experiential center of gravity begins to shift. Up until now, we’ve only reluctantly been willing to acknowledge the core vulnerabilities that have been there all along. But at this point, we enter the fourth stage, practicing being kind to our fears. We move toward our disturbance. As we move with kindness toward what’s difficult, the disturbance—which up until this point has felt bigger than us—starts to feel more manageable. When we start going toward our fears, we begin to have the experience that now we are larger than they are. We each have to find our own unique way of bringing this sense of warm engagement to our difficult feelings. It may be a sense of an open heart or of literal warmth or a shift in how we talk with ourselves—whatever works for us. This is a very important shift. We increasingly feel more relaxed, more confident, and more willing to be present with whatever may arise in our experiencing. In developmental language, this is where we can begin to really relate to our difficult experience from our adult capacities, rather than reenact the position of being a child.
After we have stabilized the capacity to be kind toward our disturbance, we practice actually welcoming our disturbance. At this fifth stage, we say, “I want to feel this feeling. I want to feel abandoned. I want to feel dependent. I want to feel my rage.” We don’t want to feel it because we like it; we’re never going to like these feelings. But we want to feel these feelings because they’re us. We’re starting to get some clarity that all of our experience is us. We are not actually divided against ourselves. We are not problematic persons just because we have aspects of ourselves that are difficult to work with. At this stage, we may find that we actually begin to look for feelings that we don’t want to experience. And any avoidant behavior can be an opportunity to look deeper, to reclaim some disowned part of ourselves.
The sixth stage is one of committing completely to the truth of our experience. We may find that we have still been operating on the subtle hope that if only we do this work—if only we are kind to our disturbance and so forth—our disturbance will go away. Now we invite the feeling that this pain or fear is a completely valid part of our life, of us, and we commit to living with it until we die. To be clear, all of these practices are about relating to our experiencing, not claims about reality or about the future. We can’t know what our future experience will be. So these are practices that help us relate to
our immediate experience with no withholding, “as if” we will feel them forever. The practice of giving up our fantasy of a life without disturbance—actually committing to a life with disturbance—invites an even deeper level of relaxation and confidence. We are finding less and less to protect and defend. We are addressing our continuing tendency to withhold our full engagement from life until life will conform to our wants and demands.
The seventh stage—which is very powerful but very difficult, especially at first—is to practice actually loving our worst fears. Loving our vulnerability. I mean “loving” experientially, not intellectually. This is more of a heart practice than an awareness practice. If my client is a parent, I can remind him of what it felt like to bring unconditional love to his young infant. Maybe his infant was smelly and crying, and he couldn’t soothe this little being. But he was still practicing unconditional love for that little infant. He held that child; he wasn’t throwing the baby away until it felt better. This is how we begin to relate to our own core fears and vulnerabilities.
As we’re able and willing to practice unconditional love toward our worst fears, we very quickly start to dissolve the fantasy of any division inside of ourselves. We can love all of us, rather than just the parts that feel “good.” This is actually the point where we can stop doing to ourselves what was perhaps done to us. We stop avoiding our fears, because every time we do—every time we dissociate from our immediate embodied experience because it’s too disturbing, every time we go into our interpretations, drama, story, or defenses—we abandon ourselves. We abandon our own vulnerability, just as we were perhaps abandoned when our young, intense experiences were too much for our parents to handle. When we love all of ourselves, we stop attacking ourselves, because we now understand that we’re attacking our own vulnerability. Perhaps our parents attacked us when they felt overwhelmed and powerless, but we don’t need to continue doing this to ourselves now. The self-abandonment and self-aggression are very painful and perpetuate our history. If, on the other hand, we stay with our vulnerabilities, hold them in love, and feel the embodied sensations that arise, we are training ourselves to be present with whatever arises in our immediate experience.
We can practice these seven stages with the understanding that at each stage, we’re actually doing the same practice: we’re doing our best to bring unconditional kindness into our familiar, conditioned experiencing. The different stages reflect the degree of resistance we encounter in our efforts to be kind to ourselves. At first, we usually practice being kind to specific difficult feelings or thoughts. But as our discipline becomes established, we find our practice gradually becomes one of waiting, with an already present attitude of kindness, for whatever may arise. The content of our experience comes and goes—our feelings, thoughts, sensations, fantasies—but the attitude of kindness is always there. At this point, we may experience a significant shift in our sense of self: we may realize that what’s always there is the activity of kindness. Regardless of whether we like or dislike what arises in our experience, we have become most reliably the activity of kindness. When we experience this shift, there’s almost always an increased sense of relaxation, trust in oneself, openheartedness, and presence. We realize how exhausted we have been, feeling divided against ourselves, struggling for self-improvement or enlightenment. What a relief to be unconditionally kind to the messy, confused human that we are.
Each of these steps further dissolves the claim that we are not workable people. We can no longer maintain that there is something wrong; that there’s something dangerous about who we are. As a result, we begin to feel more confident, more embodied, more openhearted, more present, and more engaged. It doesn’t mean our issues go away, and we don’t suddenly just feel happy all the time. But that’s not the point. The point is that we have made significant progress toward dissolving our neurotic avoidant patterns. While these developmental strategies served us well for several decades, now that we’re adults, they have begun to have significant diminishing returns. The price tag is no longer worth whatever benefit we were once getting.
As our attention becomes more relaxed and expansive—as we stop being so absorbed with our claim of being problematic—then a very interesting question may arise: what is it that has been aware of this whole process I’ve been going through? This is the focus of the next chapter—the fruitional view.
2
THE FRUITIONAL VIEW
ANA ARRIVES AT MY OFFICE complaining of a type of low-grade despair. From the outside, her life looks charmed. She’s married to a man she loves, and they have been living in relative harmony for nearly twenty-five years. She has three kids—two sons who have left for college and a daughter who’s a junior in high school. Her husband is a successful software developer, and they’ve never wanted for money. They’ve traveled to Europe many times as a family, and she and her husband just returned from a vacation by themselves in the South Pacific. Ana herself has engaged in quite a variety of spiritual pursuits—meditation retreats and yoga, most prominently. Yet even with all of this bounty, she has a feeling that something vital is missing from her life. She believes there’s some aliveness, some depth of experiencing, some openhearted or passionate connection with the world that is not available to her. She’s had glimpses of all of these things, so she knows they’re possible, but her daily life feels routine and “almost dead.”
Lately, as she’s been helping her youngest look at colleges, she’s begun feeling a deep sense of dread that she might feel this deadness for the rest of her life; that she’s destined to live out her days in this same state of feeling sort of okay but not fully alive. At the same time, some somatic symptoms have started showing up that she thinks might be related: trouble sleeping and intense moments of anxiety that she thinks might be mild panic attacks. At first she thought it might be hormonal changes, but she’s been to the doctor, who found no medical problems.
At this point, I could start in one of two places. I could begin with a more developmental approach—asking her to tell me about her childhood, for example. For many of us, this Western psychotherapeutic approach, as discussed in the previous chapter, is effective in improving the quality of our lives. Once we recognize the survival strategies we created as children, we can begin to dismantle them and get into a more current and realistic engagement with ourselves and with life. Yet although the developmental view helps us see the patterns we’ve been perpetuating, to identify and to feel our vulnerabilities, it does not generally offer tools for how to find a sense of freedom in our lives, just as they are, right now. Another approach—the view of Buddhism—offers tools for how to be with whatever experiences we’re having, regardless of our preferences for or against them. I’ve found that this unconditional approach, which I call “fruitional,” can very quickly invite a sense of freedom and, by extension, a resilient and satisfying state of mind that’s not dependent upon fluctuating circumstances.
So rather than looking at her past, I ask Ana to tell me about something that’s happening right now. Specifically, I ask her about her objections to feeling dead. Perhaps not surprisingly, she doesn’t like that question. Isn’t the answer obvious? And why are we talking about the problem, when what she’s looking for is a solution? But I gently keep the question alive. What exactly is her objection to participating in the truth of her experience? Like it or not, the reality is that she feels dead. So I invite her to try a variation of the worst fear technique that I mentioned in the last chapter. I suggest she try saying out loud, “I give myself permission to feel dead, off and on, for the rest of my life,” and then see what feelings arise. What are the actual sensations in her body when she gives herself permission to feel dead? After a moment of resistance, Ana is able to repeat the sentence and reports feeling a contraction in her gut, some mild nausea, a little panic in her chest, and some constriction in her throat.
So I ask her if, in fact, any of that experience is harming her. Is it damaging? Is it killing her? Is it a probl
em for her to have this energy in her body, right now? She reports that while it feels like it’s harmful, she’s pretty clear that no actual harm is happening in the moment. I then invite her to consider giving herself permission to just feel these sensations, without interpreting them or telling a story about them. These sensations are her present reality—they’re already a part of her life. And in this immediate moment, she’s told me that they aren’t a problem.
Part of this fruitional approach is to keep inviting the client to drop any interpretation at all of the immediate embodied experience. No interpretation, no attribution of cause, no explanation. We’re just investigating what, in fact, is most true in the present moment. Is it true that there is a problem with feeling dead? Or is it more true that the feeling of deadness is a disturbance that does not, upon investigation, prove to be problematic?
In a matter of one or two sessions, Ana begins to report a mixture of deep disappointment that her despair and deadness may prove to be a valid part of her life—as well as a surprising amount of lightness. Like many of my clients, she says it feels like a relief to acknowledge what she’s already experiencing. Her feeling of deadness was already true, and she had been fighting it. In fact, she hadn’t realized until she stepped into an acceptance practice how much energy she’d spent trying to have something true be not true. In a way, it can appear paradoxical. The effect of this fruitional approach—of Ana’s accepting her feelings of deadness without trying to change them—is that she feels lighter and more alive already! Without any changes to her external circumstances, she has begun to feel more free.
A BASIC BUDDHIST VIEW
This fruitional view comes out of a tradition that, for 2,500 years, has actively investigated fundamental questions about our basic human experiencing. Buddhism, like other great wisdom traditions, is incredibly complex, with many differing theories and approaches within it. Basic to all Buddhist views, though, is an assertion that our sense of being an independently existing—and therefore alienated—self is the central source of unnecessary suffering and confusion. Common to most Buddhist schools is the idea that we are only living in the present moment. The past profoundly shapes what arises in this moment, and how we engage in this moment profoundly influences what arises in the future. But our experiencing is only found in each present moment. And in this view, our experience of our current reality is seen as having a more powerful impact on our state of mind than what we are experiencing, important as that may be. By training ourselves to bring first our attention and then our awareness to immediate embodied experiencing, we can most accurately and productively discover for ourselves what is most true. As we become able to consciously participate in increasingly deep, moment-by-moment experiencing, we may find less and less evidence of a continuing significant “self.” The varieties of techniques we use for this investigation are collectively known as meditation. For those interested in a deeper understanding of this tradition, there are now many good books and resources available.