"There is Nothing to Fear in this Moment.” Really??

I read a book of that title when I was just starting out in Buddhism in the 1990’s and also working with people who had survived war, genocide, and mass violence. In that context, and for myself as well, I thought it was a stupid idea: the world could explode in this moment; a person could get hit on the head; a bullet could come through a window.

Now, thirty years later and until recently, I have been having the same argument with the statement, especially these days. No one can deny that someone might decide right now to shoot up a Walmart or a parade or a school because they are angry and lonely. Even more now than then, in thousands of places around the world at any given moment, people are in desperate fear for their lives and dying. Even a few miles from here, a child may be afraid. Of course this “nothing to fear” is a stupid idea.

For years I have found the words an example of willful ignorance, but something about them just hasn’t let me go. And while I’ve wrestled with this sentence-worth-strangling for years, I haven’t seen it mentioned or discussed very often, if at all. The book had been strange, and I don’t remember much about it except that it was in California and there might have been a rammed earth house in it somewhere. These two facts made it suspect, anyway.

But when you don’t forget something, particularly if it makes you angry the therapists say, there is something in it for you. I guess that particular worm had kept growing, heading to some far-flung island in my brain. Finally, it arrived a few weeks ago, docking somewhere near the port of sitting still.

Buddhist practice is all about sitting still so your mind can eventually get bored enough with its stories that it will go quiet, and become quite stable and not much will perturb it. This is important in meditation, but also afterwards it can help. After a time of quiet and stillness, when you stand up and head out the door you can recall and return to that stability (try it!). Somehow a shadow of it remains and you can go under it again as needed for shelter. Then you won’t panic when you are ten minutes late somewhere and you won’t drive insanely, or scream at them because your children are fighting over the remote. This is not the only thing that sitting still is about, but it is important because it helps to stabilize the rest of your life.

But to sit still in meditation is not easy. It certainly wasn’t when I started out. For a long time, I could suddenly become agitated and I had to stop, get up, and leave the room. Then and until just recently, I tried to just muscle through, ignore the pain, “become one with it,” “come back to the breath,” and all of that, which is relentlessly taught because the pain and anxiety are relentlessly there. But all that has ever done is make me more anxious, because now I’m not doing that right, either. The only way I have survived a sit has been to move imperceptibly until I can head off to some absorbing question: like where is my mind and mind itself; why did that lady give her book such a dumb title and did she ever repent; what is meant by emptiness? And so on. In the last decades of sitting I have perfected an incredibly analytical mind, which isn’t meditating in some traditions, and in other traditions it really isn’t either. It can help get to meditation, but it also can take it over like an overzealous team captain.

Once this kind of exciting (to me) thinking begins, it’s hard to remember that it is indeed an offshoot of meditation but perhaps better called contemplation. It sets me up for enriched meditations by giving me ideas of what meditation is theoretically doing, but it doesn’t calm my mind so that it can absorb what else is true, or my body so that it can grasp the fullness of the world of which it is an element. In my head, there is no conscious perception of the air on its body, the sounds inside and outside its ears; even the pain fades, which is why I do it anyway. But that is just a short-term solution to the long-term problem of learning to sit still and not just ignore what is happening within you and without you.

So—it can take so ridiculously long to ask the most obvious questions—it began to occur to me about a month ago to ask why I get so wiggly when I sit down, and why the only way to stop is to go away, to dissociate as the therapists call it, or to engage in an absorbing contemplation, and why am I still so angry with that lady?

Wouldn’t you know it: the answer goes right back to her. I am always wiggly because I am always anxious. And why am I anxious? Because, like most people, my body keeps my mind occupied with its own three primary concerns: its fundamental weakness (walking on two legs is not at all safe—ask an older person), the fear which that causes, and the work it takes to engage in defensive planning and actions every moment of every day to surmount that weakness through preparation. The body is the mind’s drill sergeant, and the mind does its best to be at attention at all times.

The mind does this in everyone, but it is more intense about its job when the body has already known assault or some other form of harm. Then the body is more primed to see any event as dangerous. The body wants to keep control of matters, and so it flogs the mind continually to come up with strategies for every moment and into the future. It keeps the mind in line by threatening it; “if anything happens to me, you go too, see?" So if you ask the body, there is always something to fear in this moment, and “the mind’s gotta do its job to keep us safe! No sitting around looking at my belly button!”

But what if something else is true, and the body is sometimes just a wee bit off the mark? It helps to parse the sentence a bit and see how the line might make sense in a Buddhist context, since it was written from a Buddhist perspective.

To go back to “nothing to fear in this moment,” Buddhists are taught that time and all existence are comprised only of infinitesimal moments. In the ancient Sautrantika texts, only the present moment exists, in fact, and it lasts one-sixteenth of a finger snap. Life is a nanosecond by nanosecond self-creation. This is not the way we conceive of “moments” in everyday life, but we do think of them as shorter than hours or even minutes. So in the phrase, we are only asked to believe that there is nothing to fear in this moment, which I think is supposed to mean right here, right now. Nothing is being said about the moment before or the moment after, just this one. Not just a nanosecond, but during a short string of finger snaps together, we can probably keep the body safe. After that, who knows? The sentence makes no promises.

If one is sitting in a quiet room selected to be that, particularly if they are sitting with others or in their home or maybe even in the bathroom (only pets and two year olds seem to want to join one there, so it offers an acceptable meditation place and actually an acceptable zazen pose as well), one is relatively safe. The body will tell you if it thinks where you are is not; but if it is wiggling at its general level of fret and anxiety, it can be calmed with these reminders, “At this moment, we are safe, body. At this moment, we don’t need to be afraid. You can let the mind loosen up and you both can rest.”  

When that doesn’t work—it often didn’t when I first started this little bonus practice only about two months ago—I use my imagination. I send my hypervigilant mind unit, the one that keeps sending messages to headquarters asking what to do next, out to scout the perimeter with binoculars. I imagine two little elves or stick figures out at the wire peering into the distance. It’s like telling the body that another part of the mind is taking guard duty for now, so the rest of us can go get in our bunks, or on our cushions. I use imagination here not as part of my meditation, but to help me prepare for it, to put myself in a place where my conscious self and my protective mind and anxious body can come into synch. It might sound weird, but without saying anything about it to conscious “me,” the mind and body begin to calm each other down.

If I select wisely and feel at least that I can sit down safely for a few minutes, ideally longer, then I can inform my body of the fact. It is switching the usual pattern on its head: instead of the body telling the mind to keep coming up with ideas for safety, the part of the mind over which I have some control can say to the body (nicely, or the body will get scared again); “there, there; we are safe for now. Take a rest. The soldiers have the perimeter covered.” I go down my whole body, head to toes, laying my hands on it and saying “there is nothing to fear in this moment.” I am like a grandmother holding a little one.

That is one way, I think, that the phrase of that long-maligned writer is meant to be used. She probably said it in the book but I was too mad to read it. When I have set up what at least seems (and I can’t do any better than that anyway) a truly safe place to practice, at least in those moments the wiggles begin to slow. Once I help my body get settled, a more relaxed but very responsible part of my mind talks to everyone up there in my head—including myself—to help us settle into quiet. When the bell rings, I have been still for a while.