Fear vs Home

It's pretty intense to have a whole series of events in a single day press the same button! Even then, our powerful reactivity often hides the exact nature of the actual button. We basically do not want to look at that button directly.

Instead, all sorts of strong energies such as anger, irritation, blame, and other forms of distraction arise. These energies can easily propel us to all sorts of rash behavior. This gives us a (false) sense of agency (pseudo-control). We rationalize our (mis)behavior: we're right, others are wrong, stupid, against us, or downright evil. It's "me, myself & I" against the world.

Of course our headache, churning stomach, racing heart, and elevated blood pressure all insist that we're far from grounded in truth. We start to realize that most of our reactive doings were useless or even painfully regrettable as our fight-and-flight reaction settles down, and our siege mentality abates.

So what's the underlying "button" that's pushed? It's fear. And fear makes us feel like a vulnerable baby in a harsh, uncaring world. We fear feeling this primal fear.

But to the extent we can counter-intuitively "lean into" this (and variations of this) very challenging transient fearful energy, with curiosity and open heart-minded awareness, we can remain surprisingly equanimous and truly rational in our thinking, speech and behavior. And the more often we're able to navigate this process with clear awareness, the more resilient we become to truly serious threats to our imagined (ego), and even actual (physical) survival.

We need to repeatedly keep checking-in: do I feel open, at peace, humble and kind - OR - tightly shut-down with self-concern?

When self-concern dominates, we're way out on a limb: we don't perceive clearly and thus experience serious difficulty with thinking, speech and behavior. So unless we feel open, at peace, humble and kind, we need to very cautiously guide ourselves back. This is, in my experience, a key practical aspect of discovering our own holding environment and learning how to intentionally keep finding our way back home to it ("return to center").

Joanna Macy's take on this: http://www.johnlovas.com/2016/09/centering-first-before-doing.html