Practicing with Fear & Anxiety

Part of being human is that we have big emotional responses or have emotional responses. There is nothing wrong with having emotional responses. What often happens is that we are afraid of feeling our emotions. We are afraid of our fear.

Parts-work has one way of languaging this that I have found helpful, buddhism has another way which I also feel is helpful.

In parts-work language: parts of us got the message when we were young that it wasn’t OK to be afraid, or sad, or needy, or ashamed. So the parts that feel these emotions are often quite young and quite shunned in our inner system. Other parts learned how to manage our emotions or protect our system from feeling overwhelmed by these emotions by doing the various things we do to distract ourselves from the present moment, from the embodied emotional experience that is happening.

This can be anything from working hard, to eating, to phone scrolling, to partying, to spacing out, to anger outbursts, to exercise, shopping, etc… even some forms of meditation–take us out for a while. These strategies aren’t bad, and you can see there is a spectrum of skillful - unskillful responses.

So how do we practice with fear and anxiety?

Practice is always about attention / compassion, awareness / love, presence / acceptance. 

First we need to notice what is happening (presence)…

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