Fear encourages us to stay stuck and not to embrace change. Therefore an important step towards understanding the fears in your life is to begin with your attitude to change and the unexpected. The more you dislike or avoid change, the greater your underlying fears. If the unexpected alarms or disturbs you, then fear is holding you in its grip.
Once you have identified your fears, you are ready to begin the meditation exercise below. Remember, as you do, that all fear comes to an end and that underneath all of these fears is serenity. When you expose the chattering nature of fear to the clear light of serenity, all fear dissolves.
Meditation on Fear
This meditation will safely and peacefully start to loosen all the ties that bind you to fear. While practising the meditation, you will gain insights into each of your fears as you experience the serenity that underpins all of them and waits to emerge as a living force in your life. Begin with the fear that you most strongly identify with, and in time you will be able to work with each of the others. Do not rush; it is important to go forward at a gentle and unhurried pace.
Focusing on the fear that attracts you most, breathe slowly in and out, visualising your breath washing the fear until it is transparent. When this is achieved, see it, in your mind's eye, burst into flames and burn itself out. As it is burning, feel serene energies flow out of your heart into your body, your mind and your daily life. As you practise this meditation, you will feel a great weight slip from your shoulders. You will become a little larger in thought and deed. Your fear will lose its sting. As you become aware of this, breathe slowly but with intent and see yourself covered in a halo of flames, burning away all your obstructions and revealing innocence and purity.
Remember that in transforming your own fear, you play a part in diminishing the fear in the world. If each one of us learns to live without fear, the world will become serene, free from the painful legacies fear has left.
The Serenity Meditation
The Serenity Meditation follows on from the Meditation on Fear. Repeat the meditation on Fear daily for seven days before moving on to the Serenity Meditation. You can return to the Meditation on Fear at any time, but each time you do, repeat it for seven days before performing the Serenity Meditation again.
The Meditation on Fear helps you to release and transform your fears. The Serenity Meditation will then enable you to take the next step, which is to discover serenity.
The energy of serenity lies dormant in all things, waiting to be awakened. All that is needed to awaken it in you is your focus and awareness.
Firstly, close your eyes and breathe gently but normally. Then let your mind feel the environment you are in, sensing the space around you. Now send out a request for serenity to flow to you, bringing its blessings to your heart and life. Serenity seeks to bring abundance through wellbeing and happiness, so allow it to come to you. As you start to feel the serenity flow towards you, quietly sing this Bön chant to seal the connection, so that it will not be lost but will grow in quality and strength:
Ah Zha Var Rar
Zha Lha Zha Lha
Var Rar Zha Ah
Sing each word of the chant just as it is written. It is easy, simple and direct. This chant will activate the pathways to serenity that already exist within you and will allow you to forge new and indestructible connections.
Serenity is everlasting and delights in allowing the individual to come alive and into 'being'. Serenity reveals things as they truly are, in their natural and unadorned state. It needs nothing more and is complete in itself and it calls you to experience this sense of completeness for yourself.
In all your daily activities this meditation will show you how to see past the confusion and problems the day may throw at you, to where serenity may be found. In a stressful situation it is easy to lose the connection with yourself. The serenity chant dissolves the stress, releasing the serene energy that is dormant behind it. The chant can also be used to diminish and transform obstacles that keep recurring in your life. The ideal time to do this meditation is first thing in the morning for at least twenty minutes.
From The Tibetan Art of Serenity, © 2006 by Christopher Hansard, published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton.
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