Lama Shenpen advises a student who feels like backing off from their meditation because they feel it threatens their peace of mind.

[Ed: text has been slightly edited ease of reading]

Student: I have been meditating for a few years as well, and have done a bit of studying on Tibetan Buddhism. I have had a long-standing interest which gradually became practical.

My question concerns meditation. After receiving the course materials, I began meditating twice daily, 15-20 minutes each time. I noticed considerable improvement in my mind's clarity. However, I seemed to have gotten to the point where I was becoming too clear, as if my reach were exceeding my grasp.

Continuing to mediate seemed dangerous to my peace of mind, even frightening, so I backed off. I have done this in the past, as well. I wonder, is feeling the need to back off from meditation sometimes natural and normal?

I doubt you would advise forcing oneself to meditate if it doesn't feel right ... but I wonder, what does it say, that sometimes I need to quit for a while?

Lama Shenpen: It is a natural response to feel frightened and to back off. What can happen is that when we connect directly to our experience we find ourselves facing things that we have been avoiding looking at because we didn’t know how to handle them and now here they are.

This can sometimes be at a superficial level such as not wanting to face our self-hatred or lack of self-confidence, but at a deep level  where we get a sudden flash of emptiness or not-self, it can be threatening to our whole existence, and that is scary.

It is scary because it is only a partial experience. We get the flash of insight but immediately our habit to grasp kicks in and tries to escape it.

This may affect us physically and mentally. In fact it can affect us physically without our even noticing that we are affected mentally – in other words we notice the fear reaction in our body and that is scary enough – we haven’t noticed what it was that the body was reacting to because we somehow blanked it out.

Our fundamental ignorance (avidya) or turning away from reality is always there with us and causes us to blank out reality even before we are aware that it might shine through.

This is what makes Awakening so difficult.

Anyway, whatever kind of fear reaction it is, whether it is relatively superficial or as deep as our fundamental avidya, the answer is always the same:

You need to learn to be confident in the fundamental nature of your being. There is no need for fear. nor for fear of fear itself.

Fear arises in the expanse of the spaciousness of your being and if you can trust that nature of your being, the fear is simply a movement that doesn’t disturb you.

You can rest even in fear.

In the meantime, the question is whether to meditate or not to meditate when strong fear arises.

Actually simply to be aware of the fear is to meditate. So even if you do not do any formal sitting or if you just sit for very short periods, you can still turn towards the fear.

You may have to sit a bit in order for the fear to arise and then when it does, turn towards it and sit with it for as long as you reasonably can.

Unreasonable would be if you were getting increasingly tense and worked up. If you just get a bit tense and worked up but can then stick with it and let that go until it comes up again – well that is meditation.

There is nothing else to it.

You just stay with it and gradually you find it fine to do that – that you actually find that liberating.

You don’t need to jump up and run away. Anyway there is nowhere to run to. If we could really turn towards it fully, Reality is pretty good!

It’s Enlightenment – its endless delight.

Taking Refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha will help with this.

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