Fear: we all have it. Mindfulness does not make it go away. It does, however, help us recover from it.
I went to see a children’s story hour with my young daughters. My older daughter was frightened by one of the stories. When she began to react to even very sweet moments of the story as if they were scary I knew that she was struggling with something inside of her, not outside. She was struggling with the trance of fear. I reassured her that it was OK to be scared and it was OK to hear the story. After the whole show was over and we were outside sitting on the grass, she crawled into my lap and said, “I still feel scared”.
I said, “I understand, I get scared sometimes too. Actually,” I explained, “everyone in the whole wide worlds gets scared sometimes, it’s part of life.”
“But I feel really scared”, she said in reply.
“Can you give that scared feeling a hug?” I asked her. Giving our feelings “hugs” is something we do often in our family.
“It’s not working,” said my daughter.
“Can you give your feeling a big hug full of tenderness, and then let it fly away on the breeze?”, which was blowing softly as we sat together.
“No I can’t, it wont go away.” She said
So we sat and cuddled and decided just to feel our hearts and feel our (her) fear…
My daughter is still learning the skill of being with and moving through her fear. She is right where she needs to be—there is no rush, I remind her— and yet I want to help her with this hurdle. Whenever I realize there is something I want to teach my children, I first try to learn, or re-learn it myself.
Sitting on the grass holding my scared child as she recovered reminded me of something one of my teachers once said —Everyone gets frightened, startled, or jarred sometimes, the key to well-being is being able to return from that place of contraction, back to center. —Mindfulness helps us return from our contracted, rejecting state back to our open, receptive state.
By chance, a learning moment about my own fear occurred a week before my trip to the children’s story hour. It always amazes me how life presents lessons before I even realize I’m in need of them. I had put this one in “my pocket” for later use, and here was my opportunity to take it out. Feeling into my own experiences with fear was one way of helping […]