Facing Down Fear - Meb

It has been a difficult month with disasters that have seemed to follow, one right after another. How do we keep life from hardening our hearts, when it seems there is so much wrong with the world? How do we stay openhearted when tragedy, fear, grief, abandonment and tit-for-tat anger seems to be all around us? To stay openhearted in today's world can feel risky and vulnerable, possibly ineffectual, even when we are lucky enough not to be directly touched by disaster. If we open our hearts to others and empathize with their traumatic experiences, we are bound to feel pain, maybe even over-whelmed, as the worlds's hurts are let in.

          I've been looking everywhere for answers to my question of how to stay openhearted in a world full of pain. A part of me want to escape the news, hunker down and focus on protecting an spending time with the ones I love. Putting up a defense to pain seems like a good idea, right? If I stop letting things in, I can stop feeling the hurt. But, in her book, The Places that Scare You, Pema Chodron writes that if we don't dissolve the armor that prevents us from staying openhearted, we will always be held back. We will continue to obstruct our innate capacity to love without an agenda.

          I know a lot of people who say that Halloween is their favorite holiday. It's fun to celebrate the darker side of life, to dress up as the evil enemy, an altered self, or become someone we want to be only for one night a year. It is a celebration of paradox: on this night, for example, parents actually encourage their children to take candy from strangers! It's topsy-turvy and fun, a great release, a night of in-between. We play with the dark and our fear; we play with the idea of mysterious things we cannot control; we play with feeling uncomfortable.

          I am not a Halloween fan because I don't like to be scared or afraid. I think I am making progress with feeling fear. I am getting better at recognizing, without judging myself, when I am closing off to protect myself from feeling discomfort or resisting the uncertainty of what life is bringing forward. The little me continually seeks zones of comfort, while the me that is trying to become who I was put on this earth to be, wants to open myself up even more to the way that life just is. While this can mean letting pain in, because that is just a part of the world we live in, it also means I am better able to let love in.

          Lately, I've had to remind myself that even within traumatic circumstances, one can find moments of beauty to celebrate. These are the places where raw love shines through the darkness. Here are a few of these moments I noticed and wrote down for myself this month:

• Let us remember that people died in each other's arms in the tragedies in Nevada and California.
• Let us remember the hundreds of heroes who chose to be vulnerable and to put themselves in harm's way and their lives at risk to save others.
• Let us remember the generosity of spirit within all those who came from faraway places to feed and clothe and care for those affected by the disasters.