Processing Fear

There are three facets to using fear for power.

You need to learn to feel/see the fear itself, and not react to it with another emotion - usually sadness or anger. Then you can get used to it so you can identify it in your life. The more time you spend with it, the more you will get desensitized to it so you feel but don't act on it's advice. Finally you feel compassion for yourself for having been so scared and send the fear Love. In that moment, you will reclaim the power of the fear.

Photo courtesy of Dean Ayers

Does fear of God connect us to God?

This weeks Torah portion contains an interesting and very Jewish way of connecting to God. The background: the Hebrews are wandering in the desert. Miriam has just died and they have run out of water (there are many good midrashim about that connection). The people come to Moshe and Aaron and are complaining bitterly of their thirst.

Numbers 20:6:

ויבא משא ואהרן מפני הקהל אל פתח אהל מועד ויפלו על פניהם וירא כבוד יקוק אלקים: וידבר יקוק אל משה לאמר

Moshe and Aaron came away from in front of the community to the tent of meeting. They fell on their faces and they feared the presence of hashem their God. And God spoke to Moshe saying...

The key phrase here is "feared the presence of hashem their God". There are several ways of understanding this phrase. Either he feared to have the presence of God enter the room, or his fear was the way he connected to God.

Moshe was going through a tough time. His sister had just died. The people he had saved from slavery with miracles and wonders were complaining bitterly that he was now going to let them die in the desert. He did not know what to do. He came to the Tent of Meeting, where he normally would go to talk to God and fell down on his face instead of just walking in. Moshe was fed up and exhausted. He wasn't sure he wanted to talk to God. He was scared of what God might require him to do.

Or maybe he was just scared. He was in the middle of the desert and midrash states that Miriam always dealt with finding water (in corporeal or mystical ways). He was scared that he really had no solution for the people's need for water. And that fear connected him to God even though he was in a place where he felt no connection to God.

God had mercy רחמים on him. He told Moshe to talk to a rock and it would produce water. It was a simple thing to do. But Moshe was so emotionally worked up that when he went to the rock, he struck it with it his staff instead of speaking to it. For this he was prevented from entering the land of Israel. Perhaps God knew that Moshe needed to turn from a crisis leader to a leader of peace, from one who can send plagues to one who can talk for his solutions, but Moshe couldn't make the transition.

When we are emotionally charged, we are full of fear. It can lock us into ourselves and prevent us seeing the world around us. Or we can engage with our fear and use it's energy to grow closer to God.

Photo courtesy of Bootload

Wrestling Fear into Transformation

My hevruta Shmuel Shalom Hacohen teaches experiential Torah. It's often difficult to explain what that means, but our study this past week really made it clear to me. It's when studying Torah is not simply the intellectual process of trying to make sense of the text. It's when studying Torah makes sense of one's life. The process of making sense of the text is the process of making sense of one's own life and self. If that process links directly to one's heart, then the study becomes a healing ritual to connect one to God and break through klipot (barriers) and blockages.

The story we studied was Yaacov's first meeting with Esau after years of separation. Yaacov had a lot of fear about the meeting. He'd been told by God to return to the land of his birth, but that meant seeing his brother Esau.  The last time he saw Esau, Esau was swearing to kill him. In Genesis 32:10, Yaacov prays to God that his meeting will go well and expresses many of his fears. What follows is the wonderful story of his wrestling with an angel all night. A close reading of the text will show that this was a night of transformation for him, allowing him to move beyond his fear, beyond his image of himself, and transform the relationship between himself and Esau.

The story begins with Yaacov leaving his camp, at night, with his wives, handmaids, and children. He crosses over the מעבר יבק which literally translates as the "empty passage" or "the passage of desolation". He helps his family to cross a river, but remains behind alone. He is in the midst of his family, but isolated from them. When fear is in control, it separates us from those we love. His family has moved on in the journey, but he remains stuck in his own desolation.

He then struggles with a man until dawn. Another aspect of a person lost in fear is their anger with the world, especially when the fear is about one's personal safety. It doesn't matter who this man is (Gn 32:30), Yaacov would have found a way to fight with him. Had he not been lost in fear, he might have welcomed the man in to talk, but as is, he struggles and fights with him.

It becomes clear that they are evenly matched and so the man touches Yaacov's hip and dislocates it. The man then begs to be freed from the struggle as the dawn is approaching. Yaacov asks for a blessing in return. The man asks for his name. Yaacov, he replies. Yaacov יעקב derives from עקב ekev, or heel. He was named that way because when he was born, he was grasping the heel of his twin Esau. עקב ekev also means footstep. Yaacov had been following in his brother's footsteps his whole life.

The man changes his name to Israel, one who struggles because Yaacov struggled with God and with man and was up to the challenge. Israel, ישראל can also be interpreted as ישר אל straight to God. When the sun rises, he names the place Paniel for here was the place where he saw God face to face (Panim פנים).  On this night of struggle, after injuring himself, Yaacov was finally able to connect directly to God and was no longer trying to imitate his brother.

The result? "He raised his eyes and saw, and there was Esau coming with 400 men" (Gn 33:2). Esau was also clearly expecting a fight. But with his fear no longer in control, Yaacov could truly see Esau and understood that he no longer wanted a fight. By changing himself, Yaacov had changed Esau and their relationship. The work done on himself reflected into Esau and both were changed by Yaacov's night of struggle.

So when Yaacov approached him, he sent his wives and children first, not his fighting men. When the two brothers saw each other, they embraced and cried. Yaacov was truly Israel then - no longer following or fearing his brother, but able to stand as equals and truly love Esau.

This interpretation arose during our Hevruta study. When I was going over my notes later on, I suddenly realized that this was me. I am going to be in the states in a few months and will be seeing an old friend with whom I've had some problems over the past few years. I've been worried about the meeting and trying to figure out how we can avoid fighting. I realized I need to find out what I'm afraid of, experience it for myself, and allow that change to shift my relationship with my old friend. It feels as if most of the change has already happened as a result of this study. This is the essense of experiential Torah study.

Photo courtesy of Docman

Standing in Fear

Photo courtesy of Krembo1

The Amidah is a very powerful prayer. As I've written about before, it has become a way for me to check in with my fear every day.

The Amidah begins with three prayers of invocation or supplication where we call the souls of our ancestors. The first is a direct calling of our fore-fathers and fore-mothers (if you choose to do it that way, which I recommend). The next is the prayer for the reviving the dead, which calls in all of our ancestral souls, and the last is a the prayer of holiness to proclaim that we are now in a holy space.

The Amidah continues with what is traditionally called the Bakashot, or requests. I slightly alter my perspective on this section my fears. Each of these requests represents or stems from a fear within each Jew that we wish assuaged. For me, these become reminders of the fears within me that I need to visit everyday. As I read through the Amidah, I pause after each blessing and touch the fear before continuing on to the next.

Some days, certain fears will hold a lot of power and certain fears will feel neutral. I especially look for fears which feel numb to me - these are the ones I need to spend the most time with until I can feel what's going on underneath.

The last section of the Amidah is for thanking God. In this section, I surround myself with love and send it to any lingering fears. This section begins with the avodah, or service, which implores God to accept our prayers instead of a sacrifice. I suspect that this allows us to call some of the spiritual power of a the sacrifices into the power of our prayers, but this will require further meditation.

I suggest the everyone study the prayers themselves and come up with their own understanding of the fear reminders. Each of the prayers speak to every one of us in a different way, so it's important to find yours. What follows is my understanding of them at this point in time

• Binah - Fear of not being smart or clever enough.
• Tsuvah -Fear that I've succomb to my yetzer haRah, my urge to self-destruction.
  
• Slicha - Fear of having done something unforgivable
• Geulah - Fear that things will never get better both personally, nationally, and environmentally
• Refuah - Fear that I'll be sick
• Birkat Hashanim - Fear that I'll be poor and unable to pay the bills or buy food.
• Kibbutz Galuyot - Fear that I won't have a home and I will wander and never feel at home.
• Din - Fear that there will be no justice in the world or in my life
• Birkat Haminim - Fear of betrayal
• Tzaddikim - Fear that the wise in my life will be removed. And that the wise among our nation will be taken from us.
• Binyan Jerusalem - The cossack fear that Jerusalem will again be taken from us as a result of our own actions.
• Malcut Beit David - This is unclear to me. Probably a fear that we will never be worthy of bringing the messiah.
  
• Kabbalat Tefillah -Fear that we can't connect to God. Fear is one of the main blocks that prevents a person from connecting to God, so this sums up the others fears.
  

Amidah - Blessing for the year

Following up to my thoughts on using the Amidah as a tool to feel fear. Tonight, the fear came up during the prayer for a good year. The fear I had was one of poverty. It gave me an opportunity to focus on the fears I have for my business and if I was going to earn enough to support my family. My fear during this prayer was all about livelihood. I'd be interested what other people feel during this part of the Amidah. Let me know.

Amidah as reminders

It always surprises me that there is no mention of fear in the Amidah. From a shamanic point of view, it's essential to check in with your fear everyday and be aware of it at all times. In Judaism, fear of God is the first step towards wisdom and is important for a number of reasons. I discussed one aspect of it in a prior post.

Tonight, while I was davening, I got to the prayer for healing and the fear overwhelmed me. I paused, felt it thoroughly, and then sent it love. Then I continued onward with the prayer. I am a healer, and I periodically go through fears related to healing (which is happening now), so it made perfect sense to feel the fear at the point.

Each of the 18 blessings links to a different things. The first three are praise, the next 12 are requests, and the last three are thanks. Perhaps we can use the middle blessings as reminders of where to check for our fear. Or to use them as reminders to check for how we are feeling on the different aspects of ourselves. It's worth studying in more depth.

Feeling Joy without arrogance

I finished a treatment last week and smiled. It was a good treatment: there was a lot of power in the room, I had felt a very clear disharmony in the patient's cranial rhythms and was able to return it to proper functioning, and the client was one who I had a personal stake in the treatment's success. It was a patient who is well connected in the local community and I knew that if I was able to give him a successful treatment, it could directly benefit my business.

When the patient left the room, I pumped my fist and smiled a broad smile and said "I did it!" Then I paused and checked in on myself. I hadn't done it. God had done it. The power, the clear vision, the healing the patient felt happened as a result of God working through me, and working directly on the patient. But here I was taking credit for it.

I'm a person who has long struggled with arrogance. In my youth, I think it was a defense mechanism: if I was better than everyone else, then I didn't need to work hard or measure myself by their measures. So if I failed at something, it wouldn't matter to me. Like most things, I think it was generated out of fear. In particular, a fear of not being the best - of not succeeding. So rather than trying and failing, I found a way to convince myself that I didn't need to try. And then, if I failed, I could always say that I failed because I didn't try, but if I had tried, I could have succeeded. I know now that it did matter a great deal to me, but back then I didn't have the tools to succeed, so I fashioned an attitude which allowed me to fail and not feel bad about it. It was neat little knot I had tied myself in.

These days, I'm always worried that the arrogance will come back. So when I find myself taking too much credit for a good treatment, I feel the need to do some introspection. The first place I look is at my fears. I knew there was a small fear that my business wouldn't succeed, but that's always there. I think that I need that fear of business failure needed to keep me motivated to keep working on my business.

There was also the fear that I am not a good practitioner. Again, the fear of not being proficient is necessary to keep me growing. But what I saw was that alongside this fear was my Yetzer haRah (urge to self-destruction). The fear opened a small place inside me when the Yetzer HaRah started telling me to beat myself up over taking joy in a good treatment.

It was an interesting energetic thing - I was not criticizing myself for the quality of my treatment, I was going after myself for my reaction to the treatment. The patient received a good treatment. His symptoms were lessened, and he was in a much better place when he left then when he came.

My feeling on how to overcome the Yetzer HaRah is to be aware of it. I haven't found a lot of traditional sources for ways to deal with it energetically. Most places simply talk about suppressing it or overcoming it, but not much on how to actually do that. I treat it much the same as fear: know when it's present and be aware of it. Then you can decided to listen or not to listen to it, but it no longer has any power over you.

In this case, it was trying to lead me down an old path so that I get caught up in myself and stop moving forward. There is no fault in taking joy in a job well done as long as I realize my role in the treatment and don't take credit for the parts in which I had no part. The tricky part is that this moment can lead me down two opposite bad directions: either getting arrogant and taking all the credit for the treatment, or taking no credit at all and beating myself up for feeling joy. The delicate middle path is where I ended up, but I had to sort out where the energies and inclinations were coming from.

My next post will be about the role of the healer in the healing which was also a result of the same moment as this post.

Knowing when to Heal

I heard a wonderful story last night told in the name of R. Shlomo Carlibach.

A barren couple went to a famous rabbi in a neighboring village who was known as a great tzaddik. They asked the rabbi for a blessing to enable them to have children. After they had received the blessing, the rabbi's gabbai (assistant), with great confidence, told the couple that in a year they would be back to visit with a new baby.

Sure enough, a year later, word came to the rabbi that the couple had just given birth to a baby boy and requesting that the rabbi please come for the great honor of being the Sandak during the bris (the person who holds the baby while it is being circumcized).

On the day of the Bris, the rabbi and his gabbai set out for the bris. As they were traveling through a field, a storm came upon them suddenly. The rain came down in buckets and the wind was blowing fiercely, so much so that they needed to stop and take shelter. The Gabbai grew worried that they would not be able to reach the bris in time and the rabbi would not be able to fulfill this honor. So he began to pray that the rain would stop and the wind would cease.

Sure enough, soon after the gabbai started to pray, the storm stopped just as suddenly as it had come, and they were able to continue to the Bris. The Gabbai was amazed and impressed that his prayers had been answered so quickly, but the rabbi did not even acknowledge them. For the whole celebration, and on the way home, the rabbi remained stern and did not acknowledge or thank the Gabbai for what he had done.

As they arrived back in their own village, the Gabbai could bear it no longer and spoke to the rabbi, "Didn't you see what I did? Why don't you thank me for stopping the rain and wind so that we could make it to the bris?"

The rabbi looked at the Gabbai sadly and said, "Do you know why it was raining? So that the village would have enough water to grow their crops and quench their thirst. It's been a very dry year. Do you know why the wind blew so hard? There is a swarm of locusts heading this way, but the wind would have prevented them from coming and eating all the crops. Now that you stopped the rain and the wind, you have caused immeasurable harm to the village."

The story was told to me with the moral that if one doesn't understand why things are happening, then it's best not to interfere with them. This is a common theme among Jewish folktales, that something that appears bad is actually for the good, and it's just our lack of perspective that makes it appear bad. The story was told to me in the context of a discussion on healing, and knowing when to heal and when not to.

I see the gabbai's mistake as threefold: he wanted the rain to stop for the benefit of the rabbi, not the benefit of God, he did it partly to stoke his own ego (and demonstrated by his disappointment that his deed went unnoticed), and he failed to see the benefit of the rain. So what does this teach us about healing?

Always check one's motivation. What is the involvement of the healer's ego in the healing? Sometimes I find that I have a patient, who, for whatever reason, I want to impress. It could be that I hold the person in respect. It could be that I view that patient as a potential source of referrals and I know that a good treatment will benefit my business. It could be that I'm having a bad day and want to show myself what a great healer I am by making this person feel immensely better.

In those times, I try to force the situation and the flow of energy, and invariably, it's a terrible treatment. Not only am I assured of making the person feel worse, but I am assured of not getting the referrals, respect or self-flattery I was looking for. If I had been aware that I was making the treatment about my own ego and not about the patient, I would have been able to look inside myself and see that my fears had caused me to attach so strongly to the results of the treatment.

I have fears: that I'm a bad healer, that my business won't succeed, or that I will lose the respect of the patient. When I am able to change my relationship to those fears, then I am able to let go of the results and provide a good treatment.

I can't emphasize how much fear damages the connection to God. When people talk about annulment of ego, my feeling is that if one works on one's fears, then the ego loses power and slowly disappears on it's own. Trying to suppress the ego on it's own has always been a fruitless exercise for me, but after I changed my relationship to fear, the ego issues quieted on their own.

Another lesson is is to remember God's place in the healing. I am not a seer, so by the rabbi in the story's words, I should stop healing. I often have no idea why a person is sick or how that sickness fits into the world. But I know that if a client has ended up in my office, then it's my responsibility to do everything I can for them. My assumption is that if God caused our two paths to intersect, then I am supposed to work on them, but I know that I can't force things. I connect to the client and I connect to God and I see what happens. Sometimes that means interacting with, and forcing energy to change, sometimes it means creating a healing space for the client to do their work in which I have no role other than to sit there and watch. Sometimes it means that nothing happens (though that is rare at this point). But if I am connected to God then I can feel what is the best way for healing. If I'm not connected, then I risk harm.

My ultimate barometer of the treatment is how the client feels at the end. I know that there are times when he/she won't feel better or even feel a difference, but I can feel changes in them: their pulse is stronger, there energy is more present, or they are more connected to themselves. And when they come back the next week, I'll hear about the results of the treatment because the client's often take a few days to fully process the treatment.

In acupuncture school we were taught to look at barriers to healing, meaning reasons why the patient themselves does not want to heal. One of the big ones was that the patient was receiving some kind of benefit from the sickness: sympathy, lack of certain responsibilities, someone to care for them, or something similar. This has its own feel when I encounter it in the office. The patient actively resists my energy and the connection that I create between the two of us. Or they try to take control of the treatment and don't let themselves be nourished by the treatment. At this point, my response is to back off my energy as far as possible. And then just wait. When they see that I am not trying to interfere, but just to connect, their energy will reach out to me and we can connect. Or we don't.

I once had a patient with whom I tried to force a connection and force the healing while she was actively resisting it. She felt wonderful immediately after the treatment and I felt like I had really accomplished something. She left the treatment room, tripped on the stairs on her way out of the building, and called me three days later to cancel her next appointment because her ankle was really badly sprained. I didn't hear from her again.

I think that the Gabbai should have just prayed to God. His fear wanted the rain to stop, so that's what he prayed for. But a better way would have been to connect to God and then pray that they get to the bris. He gave his fear of missing the bris power, and as such, missed out on the connection to God. When his fear's prayer was answered, his ego took hold and gave him pride in what he had done. If he had felt the fear, not given it power, and then prayed for what he really wanted, he would have clearly realized that he didn't stop the rain, God did. Or he would have known that it wasn't God's will to stop the rain, and hopefully have found another way to the Bris. Or maybe he wasn't supposed to get to the Bris at all.

If one knows him or herself, and doesn't give one's fears power, then one can maintain a connection to God. Then one can know when one is truly healing.

Preparation for Prayer

I've been to several Jewish Meditation groups where the meditation was a 15-20 minute silent meditation followed by regular prayers. My understanding is that the source for this (I'll try to find the actual source) is in the Talmud where it describes the first rabbi's taking an hour to prepare for praying.

This has never sat well with me, though I don't know why. It makes sense that someone wants to get in the right frame of mind to pray, but doing mindfulness meditation or just focusing on the breath didn't feel right for me.

Tonight, before devening evening prayers, I felt overwhelmed with fear. It's a fear I've been interacting with over the past few days, and it felt like I needed to sit with it for awhile before I prayed. I sat for awhile and then had particularly powerful davening, lots of energy, lots of souls.

And then it hit me, the line is "the first step in wisdom is fear of God", but I could never find any particular place in the liturgy that would give us a moment to feel our fear. So maybe this is what it's referring to: sit and feel your fear first, and then interact with God. Use that time at the beginning to be with your fear and that will open the way to use the prayers to talk to God.

I'm going to have to sit with this awhile longer and play around with it, but something feels right about it.

Fear is a mover

One of the big movers is Fear. The question is still how to create change in the physical world by making changes in the spiritual one, and how the shaman is able to do that intentionally and directly. Often, in myself and my clients, fear is often a big factor in influences the events around us. Fear is one of our basic emotions and cornerstones of human existence. As such, there is no way for us to get rid of it or push it aside, but it always remains with us. So we need to learn how to have a good relationship with fear. I think about it as a power based relationship - either fear has power and dominance over us or we have power over our fear and can use it for our benefit.

When I think about it, talking about fear in this sense is more about not letting fear influence one's life, so more of a preventative. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people planning big events, about which they have a great fear, only to have numerous things go wrong at the last moment.

In my practice, I often see fear clearly in expectant mothers, though this is more about how our fear effects us personally than how it moves the world around us, but I think it's informative. I worked with a woman who was a trained nurse had worked in obstetrics in the past. She understood the birthing process very well, and had seen in numerous times before, but she also knew everything that could go wrong. And it scared her so much that she was preventing herself from going into labor. When she actually got to me, she was already post due date, though we had made several appointments prior to when she actually came in. She'd had to change and cancel the appointments as things kept coming up for her.

I was never sure if those things were under her control, but my sense was that there were things she was doing and things happening around her that kept her from taking care of herself. In the end, nothing I did could help her as the fear was too great and she ended up having a c-section. My personal fear was that her fear would cause something to go wrong with the baby, but was happy that her fears were about the delivery, not about the health of the baby.

Fear is an important emotion, it tells us when to think about something, and when to run for our lives. But if we fear something, and the fear has power over us, it can cause an internal result, of our own actions causing the fear to come true, or an external reaction, of causing the world around us to help the fear come about.

So how do we deal with fear? In Chinese medicine, fear is controlled by thinking (Water controlled by Earth). So one way of dealing with fear is knowledge. We can name our fear, we can learn a lot about it, we can study it, or we can do anything that helps our minds to understand it. The image is of a child who is scared of the cloths hung over a chair because they think it is a monster, but when you turn the light on, the fear goes away because the child knows what she is dealing with. So if you know what you are scared of, and can name the fear, then the fear is weakened.

But there is also the emotional component that needs to be dealt with. My approach to this is exemplified in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. He discusses police officers "desensitizing" themselves to the fear of being shot, which allows them to enter dangerous situations and still exercise good judgment. Once the fear has been named, it's important to spend time with it, so that one is aware of when it is present, one is used to it's presence, and one can decide whether or not to act on it.

In regards to the main discussion, I think fear and other strong emotions influence the world around us, and to gain control over one's ability to move things spiritually, one needs to have control over one's fear.

A fear of Cossacks

I was walking up to my Tai Chi class tonight when I realized I had walked down a familiar line of thought. I imagine some disaster that suddenly, God forbid, takes my family away. I imagine my reactions and how it would destroy my life. Usually, when I catch myself thinking these thoughts, I thank God for what I have, and try to feel the fear of loss more intensely so that I can put it back in its appropriate place and not let it control my actions.

Tonight, however, I suddenly felt the fear as part of something much, much larger. It almost felt as if the whole city was a part of the intensity of this fear. I had to stop walking several times and just let the fear run on past me. It almost felt like the ancestral flow. That's when I realized I was probably feeling the Jewish fear that no matter how good it gets, someone will come and destroy it all and take it away from us. I call this the Cossack fear, though it should probably be called the Tisha B'Av fear (that's the date of the destruction of the second temple).

It's the fear that we are going to be sitting in our village, and then, for no reason we can see, a bunch of cossacks come running through town destroying everything. How many times has this been repeated in our history: the expulsion from Spain, the holocaust, and now, the fear that Israel will fall. Does it happen because we don't know how to deal with this fear, and we remember all the times we were almost destroyed (or were destroyed) without knowing how to respond to the fear that comes with it? Or is it just a part of who we are?

Another possibility is that this is my personal ancestral fear, as my forebearers certainly had life hard. I'll have to interact with it a little more to get a clear read on it.

What I am really interested in is how to change this fear, or if that is even possible. It was so powerful, so strong, that I'm not even sure it can be done. In that case, I'll have to learn how to live with it without giving it any power over me.