HOW TO OVERCOME FEAR🔗

When you are faced with fear, don’t try to resist it or suppress it. Just look at the fear, note the fear and accept it. Acceptance of the fear dissolves the fear. Allow the fear to shake you. If your body trembles, let it tremble. If your eyes water, let the tears come. Just be like a blade of grass in the wind – bending without resistance.

A small story:

On a dark night, a man was walking on a narrow path. Suddenly, his foot hit a rock and he stumbled and slipped down. He managed to catch hold of a branch hanging over the rock. It was completely dark. The man tightly held onto the branch. He shouted for help but the only response was his voice echoing back. Hearing the echo, the man was terrified that he might be at the mouth of a huge abyss.

The night seemed endless and the man was desperately holding on, hoping he could get some help. Finally dawn arrived. The man looked down to see how deep the abyss was, but there was no abyss, just two feet down was a big rock!

Your fears are exactly like his. You think it is an abyss but it is actually just a few feet. If you can face your fears, you see they have no depth. Because you magnify the fears, you imagine them to be an abyss. It is your choice, to let go of the branch, the fear, or to keep clinging onto it and torturing yourself.

Acceptance is the only way to conquer inevitable things. When you accept, suddenly you see the fear disappear. The moment you accept, fear loses its

You can sit by yourself and visualize the situation that causes fear. Feel clearly the fear coming up in you; face the fear with deep awareness. If you suffer, if your body feels uncomfortable, it is fine. Don't suppress the fear, just allow it to happen. When you experience something completely, you drop it.

This is a very powerful technique that can be used twenty-four hours a day. Whenever you are attacked by fear, just sit back and relax.

Put your awareness only on your exhaling breath. Repeat the word 'sah' silently as you exhale; that is, with the outgoing breath. Exhaling is like relaxing and letting go anything that can die. While inhaling you will be constantly trying to hold on to something. Exhaling is like letting go. Focus on exhaling without bothering about inhaling. When you inhale, repeat 'ham' silently.

Place more awareness and energy on the exhalation. Help yourself exhale deeper. Let the inhalation happen automatically through the body. Place your energy, attention and effort only on exhaling.

It is a silent intonation of 'ham … sah…, ham … sah'. Silent intonation of this hamsa mantra will suddenly take you into the awareness, the relaxation that never dies. Whatever can die will leave your system, your inner space.

This technique can also be practiced at other times when you are not faced by fear – while you are sitting, talking, walking, eating,even while you are sleeping. It is a very powerful technique. Constantly, all twenty-

four hours, place your attention on exhaling and just intone the hamsa mantra silently – 'hamsah', 'hamsah', 'hamsah'. When you inhale, intone 'ham' and when you exhale, intone 'sah'.

Understand, when constantly intoning this mantra, it will become ajapa japa – chanting without effort. Chanting with effort is called japa. Chanting without effort is ajapa. It means that which goes on automatically in you. You just need to intone, that's all. Fall in tune, that's all. The whole day it will be resounding within you.

Whatever can die will leave your system, and you will realize whatever can die can never be part of you. If you are identifying yourself with something that can die, that identification will be disconnected and you will be unclutched. Whatever can never die, you will feel connected to that. Whatever cannot die is your very being.

Try this technique for just three days. You will suddenly see that the fear of losing your wealth, parts of your body or your health, or your near and dear ones, or the fear of unknown – all the fears will disappear. When you put your awareness on exhaling, whatever is occupying your inner space as a part of you that can die, will simply leave your inner space. You will be liberated.

Whether physical or emotional pain, an important thing you need to under-stand is that pain is always born from resistance to the present moment.

If a painful incident happens in one's life – the loss of a child, the husband or wife leaving the spouse, the breakup of a close friendship – one suffers, but slowly accepts it over time. One may cry and brood many days and nights, but then one comes to accept what happened. Time heals. It is a common saying. Understand that time is needed for healing only because you were not ready to face the pain and suffering in a conscious and aware manner at the time the incident happened.

If you can just look at the pain, if you can witness the emotion with aware-ness and see the play of the mind while experiencing pain, then the understanding dawns and instant healing happens. Time is needed because you are not ready to have the understanding. So you suffer a great deal. Over time, after some weeks, months, or even years, the incident fades and becomes a distant memory.

However, the pain is not completely gone from your system. If you come across a person who even distantly reminds you of your lost child or husband, it comes up. For example, if the person has a similar style of talking, walking, or laughing, the wound reopens. It hurts because you carry the memory of the past. Because of this, you feel life is too heavy a burden to bear. You choose to hold onto your entire past: when you were a child, when you were a teenager, when you first went to work. You hold onto all the stages of life with all the experiences, pains, and mistakes. That burden and load of your emotions associated with the past, is what causes you pain every time you experience it. If you decide to drop the past and look at every situation with a fresh perspective, then you will not have so much pain. You will heal instantly. You will not need so much time.

A small story:

Once a disciple went to his master and said, ‘Master, I am not able to meditate. My legs ache. I feel distracted.’ The master just said, ‘It will pass.’

After two weeks, the disciple went back to the master, this time saying, ‘I am able to meditate beautifully. I feel so aware and blissful.’

The master again replied, ‘It will pass.’

The root of pain and pleasure are the same. It is the same sensation with two names. It is like this: two people receive a body massage from the same person. One concludes that it was a beautiful rejuvenating process while the other decided that it hurt! The same massage will appear like pain or pleasure depending on the person receiving it.

Life has both of these opposites – pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are from the mind. The mind always moves from one extreme to the other. It rarely falls into the middle path. From pleasure you move to pain, from pain you move to pleasure. As we saw earlier, pleasure and pain are completely dependent on the person feeling the pleasure or pain. Something may seem like pleasure to you while the same experience may be painful to someone else.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the great scripture that teaches the various paths to Self-realization, the enlightened master Krishna says beautifully, 'He who regards alike pleasure and pain, and looks on a lump of earth, a stone, and a piece of gold with an equal eye, who is wise and holds praise and blame to be the same, who is unchanged in honor and dishonor, and who treats friend and foe alike, is said to have gone beyond the modes of nature. Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is ready for enlightenment.'

Buddha, an enlightened master, says, 'Free yourself from both pleasure and pain.' Craving for pleasure and nursing pain are both different aspects of the same experience. Both are chains. Pain may look like an ugly chain and pleasure a beautiful chain. Just as the day follows night and night follows day, pain and pleasure will always follow each other.

When you understand that pleasure and pain are both creations of the mind, you will realize that they are both temporary, they come and go like soap bubbles. Nobody is needed to take away your pleasure, because your mind by its very nature will move like a pendulum to the other extreme called pain!

The only way is to go beyond both pleasure and pain. This doesn't mean suppressing pleasure or forgetting about pain. It is an awareness that transforms pain to bliss – the energy that exists no matter what the external situation may be. Bliss is your very nature and cannot be lost. Just because of your resistance to what is happening, you feel pain and your natural bliss is forgotten.

Pain, whether physical, mental, or emotional, has only a negative existence like darkness. Darkness exists only in the absence of light. As such, it has no

I was amazed. The very idea that women should have pain at the time of delivery did not exist in their society! Not only that, nobody suffered from gynecological issues like menopause problems either.

I started enquiring about their lifestyle. I understood that in their tradition, they respect women a lot. The moment a girl becomes physically mature, she is acknowledged with respect that she is now qualified to become a mother. People fall at her feet and she touches and heals them! Just because of this different conditioning, the women don't suffer the usual pains that women in other cultures do.

There have been recorded instances of 'phantom pain' which is pain in a part of the body that does not exist. Once in the Second World War, a soldier's leg had to be amputated because it was badly damaged. The strange thing was that when he became conscious again he was still complaining about the pain in the leg. He was covered with a blanket so he had no idea that the leg had been removed. The blanket was removed and he was shown that his leg was not there anymore. He was shocked!

Further research then showed that each part of the body is related to a certain part of the brain. When a certain part of the body feels pain, the corre-sponding brain center shows activity. In this case, the related brain center was still vibrating in the same way it was vibrating when the leg was a part of the body. There are many such instances of people who feel pain in the empty space where their limbs were amputated. This is called 'phantom pain'.

The mind has tremendous influence over the body. Even the perception of physical pain can be changed by the mind. In science they call it the 'placebo effect' when a simple sugar pill gives the same effect as a painkiller, just because the person is made to believe that the sugar pill is a painkiller!

I have read about research done at the University of Michigan in the USA that appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research was done on a group of young men who agreed to let researchers inject their jaw muscles with a concentrated saline solution, causing pain. The brain's response to the pain was studied using PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that showed the activity of the body's natural painkillers, called endorphins.

In one scan, the men were told they were being given a painkiller but actu-ally what was given was just a placebo – a substance that had no painkilling properties. Then they were asked to rate the intensity of the pain they felt on a scale of 0 to 100. Also, the PET scan would indicate the brain activity related aware of it, there is no question of getting rid of it. It remains with you. The pain is a pain because it exists in your unconscious, not in your awareness. Your fear of facing the pain allows it to exist and grow more and more like a tumor. A master will simply remove this tumor through his master surgery! When it leaves you, you transform into a new person. Once a devotee asked me, 'Swamiji, I understand that the surgery is needed for my inner space to be cleansed. But can the master use some pain-killer while doing the 'master surgery'?'

What is the attitude needed to deal with the painful 'surgeries' of the master? Sometimes, just the awareness itself will dissolve the pain. Many times, I will just point at the pain, nothing else. It will simply disappear and it will evaporate.

Now, what is the correct attitude to deal with these painful 'surgeries'? It is having complete trust that whatever 'pain' the master causes, is only for your good and nothing else. The 'surgery' itself is because of his boundless love and compassion for you. If this is clearly understood, then even if it hurts, you will go through it with deep gratitude for what the master is doing to you. I can say that the painkiller from the master's side is the love and compassion the master showers with just a look.

One more thing is that the pain is also because you start thinking it is a pain and labeling it so. The master can teach in just two or three seconds what will ordinarily take a lifetime or a few hundred years or a few births. The master is intense life. He will simply remove the 'tumor' and throw it away. So, even if it is intense, it is better to go with the master than with life because it is a very quick process. Also, if you understand what the master is doing to you, you can enjoy it as the ultimate happening in your life.

One more thing: the pain you will experience continuing life with the 'tumors' will be much worse than the pain you experience when the master removes them. Removing a 'tumor' will take hardly a few minutes; the master just removes it, over.

Once you understand this process, you will no longer label the transforma-tion as pain. Instead you will welcome it. You will not only welcome it, you will feel thankful that what was lurking deep down in your unconscious has been brought up and removed.

You can use this as a technique for dissolving physical pain in any part of your body.

When you are faced with physical pain, just witness the feeling of pain in that part of your body in a relaxed way. You will see that first, there might be a surge of pain, but soon the pain reduces to a spot and disappears. What happens is that the moment you get hurt physically, energy supplied by your own body intelligence rushes to that part to heal it. The energy rush is what you label 'pain'. If you witness the energy rushing and healing in a relaxed way, the pain disappears and healing happens. If we just understand this, we will not resist and suffer the pain, we will cooperate with the natural healing energy of the body.

I can say this from my own personal experience. Once somebody closed the door of the car on my finger. People around me got agitated and ran around to get first aid. I simply told them not to bother.

As my finger swelled, I just watched clearly what was happening inside my body. I could feel the energy rushing from my navel center to my finger. I could clearly see the body intelligence responding to the emergency on its own. It healed on its own.

Your own inner ambulance system is what you call pain!

The witnessing focus that you give the pain will make you realize that you are more than a mere body. You will touch your energy base and realize that you are more than the body-mind.

Watch the pain intensely but without attaching the word 'pain' and the meaning 'suffering' to it. For a brief moment the pain may seem to intensify, but soon it will dissolve.

Actually, the body is intelligent enough to allow energy to flow to the part of the body that is asking for energy. But you resist that energy flow by labeling it as 'pain'. Just allow the energy to flow by infusing full awareness into that part of the body. Just look at the energy flow with curiosity. Be a complete outsider; do not participate in the process. Just let the energy flow to that area and work on it. You will see it heal.

When our desires are our own true desires, when they reflect our real needs, when they express themselves in our inner energy, we don't feel any desperation about trying to achieve them. The realization comes that, as a matter of natural course of events, these desires will be fulfilled.