Wouldn’t it be wonderful to face challenges more freely, happily? Or at least feel less fear?

 

What can we do when we know we must face something difficult? Or we wish some event, situation, or person wasn’t beating on the doors of our mind? Or when we wish we had a magic wand to make whatever frightens or disturbs us disappear, but we can’t find any such magic for sale in any local store or the internet? Or when a memory or nightmare from a trauma is so hurtful or disturbing, we have no way to even begin facing it?

 

Our body, mind, and perception systems follow a natural process to provide direction on how to respond to a situation. When we experience a stimulus, an “orienting response” arises, and we come awake. We get a message to “pay attention now.” This is followed by appraisals of the stimulus, whether it’s bad or good, wonderful or painful, a threat or a problem. Bodily sensations and feelings are created with an almost unconscious impulse to go either toward, away, or ignore the situation.

 

Then our mind gets even more involved, bringing in memories and judgments. Likes and dislikes and mental labels are created for the situation, or a story to tell ourselves to make sense of what we perceive. And then how we respond, what actions we choose to take depend on how we’ve interpreted the situation we face.

 

We always have such choices about how we interpret a situation and respond. But the behavior modeled by the people we see around us and how we’ve faced such situations in the past greatly reverberates in the present, in the form of the emotional responses this process creates. We can feel fear if we normally turn away, or anger at the mere fact of having to make such a choice. We can feel excitement and run towards it, maybe because we like adrenalin surges, or adrenalin helps us feel alive or helps mitigate the fear. Or maybe we feel engaged and we welcome a challenge. Or maybe the fright tries to wrap the situation in layers of forgetfulness.

 

In Buddhism, there’s a teaching on what’s called the 84^th problem: we all face difficulties, problems. Let’s say there are 83 of them. The 84^th is thinking we shouldn’t have problems. Steve Hagen, a Zen Priest, in his book Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Awake, Right Now, Every Day explains this exceedingly well. We might want reality to be different from what it is. There’s so much hurt in the world right now. Too many of us face so much pain and confusion every day.  But just telling ourselves it should be different doesn’t make it happen. Instead, it can make the sense of something lacking or missing in our lives hurt more and be more difficult to face.

 

A negativity bias can arise from this emotional construction process. This is an inclination or natural push to see the negative first and foremost. This bias, if understood, can help us avoid or lessen any threat to us. But it can also lead us to interpret a situation that could be merely a challenge as a danger.

 

When we push away or retreat from a situation, we might also push away an understanding of ourselves that could assist us in perceiving how to best face it. In the same way, we might think of ourselves as something separate from a situation we live, separate from others and our world. We might wish we were different from who we are. We might get hooked on wanting what we thought we lacked or thought others had; or we might wish we didn’t have what we had. We then feel separate from ourselves, from our body and mind. Our home becomes some distant place we can’t easily get to. It’s difficult to feel at home in our skin if our very skin feels wrong….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.