Think Like a Monk

In this exercise we try to untangle the knot of pain and/or anger created by conflict. Even if the relationship is not one you want to salvage or have the option of rebuilding, this exercise will help you let go of anger and find peace.

Before you start, visualize yourself in the other person’s shoes. Acknowledge their pain and understand that it is why they are causing you pain.

Then, write a letter of forgiveness.

1 List all the ways you think the other person did you wrong. Forgiving another person honestly and specifically goes a long way toward healing the relationship. Start each item with “I forgive you for…” Keep going until you get everything out. We’re not sending this letter, so you can repeat yourself if the same thing keeps coming to mind. Write everything you wanted to say but never had a chance. You don’t have to feel forgiveness. Yet. When you write it down, what you’re doing is beginning to understand the pain more specifically so that you can slowly let it go.

2 Acknowledge your own shortcomings. What was your role, if any, in the situation or conflict? List the ways you feel you did wrong, starting each with the phrase “Please forgive me for …” Remember you can’t undo the past, but taking responsibility for your role will help you understand and let go of your anger toward yourself and the other person.

3 When you are done with this letter, record yourself reading it. (Most phones can do this.) Play it back, putting yourself in the position of the objective observer. Remember that the pain inflicted on you isn’t yours. It’s the other person’s pain. When you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. When you squeeze someone full of pain, pain comes out. Instead of absorbing it or giving it back, if you forgive, you help diffuse the pain.

FORGIVENESS IS A TWO-WAY STREET

Forgiveness has to flow in both directions. None of us is perfect, and though there will be situations where you are blameless, there are also times when there are missteps on both sides of a conflict. When you cause pain and others cause you pain, it’s as if your hearts get twisted together into an uncomfortable knot. When we forgive, we start to separate our pain from theirs and to heal ourselves emotionally. But when we ask for forgiveness at the same time, we untwist together. This is a bit trickier, because we’re much more comfortable finding fault in other people and then forgiving it. We’re not used to admitting fault and taking responsibility for what we create in our lives.

FORGIVING OURSELVES

Sometimes, when we feel shame or guilt for what we’ve done in the past, it’s because those actions no longer reflect our values. Now, when we look at our former selves, we don’t relate to their decisions. This is actually good news—the reason we’re hurting over our past is because we’ve made progress. We did the best we could then, but we can do better now. What could be better than moving forward? We’re already winning. We’re already crushing it.

When we wrap our heads around the fact that we can’t undo the past, we begin to accept our own imperfections and mistakes, forgive ourselves, and, in doing so, open ourselves up to the emotional healing we all yearn for.

TRY THIS: FORGIVE YOURSELF

The exercise above can also be used to forgive yourself. Starting each line with “I forgive myself for … ,” list the reasons you feel angry at or disappointed in yourself. Then read it out loud or record it and play it for yourself. Bring out the objective observer, and find understanding for yourself, letting go of the pain.

ELEVATE

The pinnacle of forgiveness, true sattva, is to wish the person who caused you pain well.

“I became a Buddhist because I hated my husband.” That’s not something you hear every day, but Buddhist nun and author of When Things Fall Apart Pema Chödrön is only kind of kidding. After her divorce, she went into a negativity spiral where she entertained revenge fantasies because of her husband’s affair. Eventually, she came across the writings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a meditation master who founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. In reading his work, she realized that the relationship had become like a malignant cell—instead of dying off, her anger and blame were causing the negativity of the breakup to spread. Once Chödrön allowed herself to “become more like a river than a rock,” she was able to forgive her husband and move forward. She now refers to her ex-husband as one of her greatest teachers.

If you want the negativity between yourself and another person to dissipate, you have to hope that you both heal. You don’t have to tell them directly, but send the energy of well-wishing out into the air. This is when you feel most free and at peace—because you’re truly able to let go.

Negativity is a natural part of life. We tease and provoke, express vulnerability, connect over shared values and fears. It’s hard to find a comedy show that isn’t based on negative observations. But there is a line between negativity that helps us navigate life and negativity that puts more pain out into the world. You might talk about the problems someone’s child is having with addiction because you are scared that it will happen to your family and hoping to avoid it. But you also might gossip about the same issue to judge the family and feel better about your own. Ellen DeGeneres sees the line clearly—in an interview with Parade magazine she said that she doesn’t think it’s funny to make fun of people. “The world is filled with negativity. I want people to watch me and think, ‘I feel good, and I’m going to make somebody else feel good today.’” This is the spirit in which monks have fun—we are playful and laugh easily. When new monks arrived, they often took themselves too seriously (I know I did), and the senior monks would have a twinkle in their eyes when they said, “Steady now, don’t waste all your energy on your first day.” Whenever the priest brought out the most special sacred food—which was sweeter and tastier than the simple food we ordinarily ate—the younger monks would joke-wrestle to get to it first. And if someone fell asleep and snored during meditation, we would all glance at one another, not even trying to hide our distraction.

We needn’t reduce our thoughts and words to 100 percent sunshine and positivity. But we should challenge ourselves to dig to the root of negativity, to understand its origins in ourselves and those around us, and to be mindful and deliberate in how we manage the energy it absorbs. We begin to let go through recognition and forgiveness. We spot, stop, and swap—observe, reflect, and develop new behaviors to replace the negativity in our lives, always striving toward self-discipline and bliss. When you stop feeling so curious about others’ misfortunes and instead take pleasure in their successes, you’re healing.

The less time you fixate on everyone else, the more time you have to focus on yourself.

Negativity, as we’ve discussed, often arises from fear. Next, we will explore fear itself, how it gets in our way, and how we can make it a productive part of life.

THREE

FEAR

Welcome to Hotel Earth

Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.

—Buddha

The epic battle of Mahabharata is about to begin. The air is thick with anticipation: Thousands of warriors finger the hilts of their swords as their horses snort and paw at the ground. But our hero, Arjuna, is terrified. He has family and friends on either side of this battle, and many of them are about to die. Arjuna, among the fiercest fighters of the land, drops his bow.

The Bhagavad Gita opens on a battlefield with a warrior’s terror. Arjuna is the most talented archer in the land, yet fear has caused him to totally lose connection with his abilities. The same thing happens to each of us. We have so much to offer the world, but fear and anxiety disconnect us from our abilities. This is because growing up we were taught, directly or indirectly, that fear is negative. “Don’t be scared,” our parents told us. “Scaredy-cat,” our friends teased. Fear was an embarrassing, humiliating reaction to be ignored or hidden. But fear has a flip side, which Tom Hanks alluded to in his commencement address at Yale University. “Fear,” he told the graduates, “will get the worst of the best of us.”

The truth is, we’ll never live entirely without fear and anxiety. We’ll never be able to fix our economic, social, and political climates to entirely eliminate conflict and uncertainty, not to mention our everyday interpersonal challenges. And that’s okay, because fear isn’t bad; it’s simply a warning flag—your mind saying “This doesn’t look good! Something might go wrong!” It’s what we do with that signal that matters. We can use our fear of the effects of climate change to motivate us to develop solutions, or we can allow it to make us feel overwhelmed and hopeless and do nothing as a result. Sometimes fear is a critical warning to help us survive true danger, but most of the time what we feel is anxiety related to everyday concerns about money, jobs, and relationships. We allow anxiety—everyday fear—to hold us back by blocking us from our true feelings. The longer we hold on to fears, the more they ferment until eventually they become toxic.

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor of a cold basement room in the monastery with twenty or so other monks. I’ve been at the ashram for only a couple months. Gauranga Das has just discussed the scene in the Gita when Arjuna, the hero, is overcome by fear. It turns out that Arjuna’s fear makes him pause instead of charging directly into battle. He’s devastated that so many people he loves will die that day. The fear and anguish lead him to question his actions for the first time. Doing so provokes him into a long conversation about human morals, spirituality, and how life works according to Krishna, who is his charioteer.

When Gauranga Das concludes his lecture, he asks us to close our eyes, then directs us to relive a fear from our past: not just imagine it but feel it in our bodies—all the sights, sounds, and smells of that experience. He tells us that it’s important that we not choose something minor, such as a first day at school or learning to swim (unless those experiences were truly terrifying), but something significant. He wants us to uncover, accept, and create a new relationship with our deepest fears.

We start joking around—someone makes fun of my overreaction to a snakeskin I came across on one of our walks. Gauranga Das acknowledges our antics with a knowing nod. “If you want to do this activity properly,” he says, “you have to push beyond the part of your mind that’s making fun of it. That’s a defense mechanism keeping you from really dealing with the issue, and that’s what we do with fear. We distract ourselves from it,” Gauranga Das says. “You need to go past that place.” The laughter fades, and I can almost feel everyone’s spine straighten along with my own.

I close my eyes and my mind quiets down, but I still don’t expect much. I’m not scared of anything. Not really, I think. Then, as I drop further and further into meditation, past the noise and chatter of my brain, I ask myself, What am I really scared of? Flickers of truth begin to appear. I see my fear of exams as a kid. I know—that probably sounds trivial. No one likes exams, right? But exams were some of my greatest anxieties growing up. Sitting in meditation, I allow myself to explore what was behind that fear. What am I really scared of? I ask myself again. Gradually, I recognize that my fear focused on what my parents and my friends would think of my scores, and of me as a result. About what my extended family would say, and how I’d be compared to my cousins and pretty much everyone else around me. I don’t just see this fear in my mind’s eye, I feel it in my body—the tightness in my chest, the tension in my jaw, as if I am right back there. What am I really scared of? Then I start to delve into fear around the times when I’d gotten in trouble at school. I was so worried that I would be suspended or expelled. How would my parents react? What would my teachers think? I invite myself to go even deeper. What am I really scared of? I see this fear around my parents—of them not getting along and of me, at a young age, trying to mediate their marriage. Of thinking, How can I please both of them? How can I manage them and make sure they’re happy? That’s when I find the root of my fear. What am I really scared of? I am afraid that I can’t make my parents happy. As soon as I hit that revelation, I know I’ve reached the true fear beneath all of the other fears. It is a full-body aha moment, like I sank deeper and deeper under water, pressure mounting against my chest, increasingly desperate to breathe, and when that realization hit me, my head popped up, and I gasped for air.

Half an hour earlier I’d been so sure I wasn’t scared of anything, and suddenly I was uncovering my deepest fears and anxieties, which I’d managed to hide completely from myself for years. By gently, but consistently, asking myself what I was scared of, I refused to let my mind dodge the question. Our brains are really good at keeping us from entering uncomfortable spaces. But by repeating a question rather than rephrasing it, we essentially corner our brain. Now, it’s not about being aggressive with ourselves—this isn’t an interrogation, it’s an interview. You want to ask yourself the question with sincerity, not force.

Being scared of exam results was what I call a branch. As you develop your relationship with your fear, you’ll have to distinguish between branches—the immediate fears that come up during your self-interview—and the root. Tracking my fear of exam results and the other “branch” fears that appeared led me to the root: fearing I couldn’t make my parents happy.

THE FEAR OF FEAR

During my three years as a monk, I learned to let go of my fear of fear. Fear of punishment, humiliation, or failure—and their accompanying negative attitudes—no longer propel my misguided attempts at self-protection. I can recognize the opportunities that fear signals. Fear can help us identify and address patterns of thinking and behavior that don’t serve us.

We let our fear drive us, but fear itself is not our real problem. Our real problem is that we fear the wrong things: What we should really fear is that we will miss the opportunities that fear offers. Gavin de Becker, one of the world’s leading security experts, in The Gift of Fear calls it “a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations.” Often, we notice fear’s warning but ignore its guidance. If we learn how to recognize what fear can teach us about ourselves and what we value, then we can use it as a tool to obtain greater meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in our lives. We can use fear to get to the best of us.

A few decades ago, scientists conducted an experiment in the Arizona desert where they built “Biosphere 2”—a huge steel-and-glass enclosure with air that had been purified, clean water, nutrient-rich soil, and lots of natural light. It was meant to provide ideal living conditions for the flora and fauna within. And while it was successful in some ways, in one it was an absolute failure. Over and over, when trees inside the Biosphere grew to a certain height, they would simply fall over. At first, the phenomenon confused scientists. Finally, they realized that the Biosphere lacked a key element necessary to the trees’ health: wind. In a natural environment, trees are buffeted by wind. They respond to that pressure and agitation by growing stronger bark and deeper roots to increase their stability.

We waste a lot of time and energy trying to stay in the comfortable bubble of our self-made Biospheres. We fear the stresses and challenges of change, but those stresses and challenges are the wind that makes us stronger. In 2017, Alex Honnold stunned the world when he became the first person ever to climb Freerider—a nearly three-thousand-foot ascent up Yosemite National Park’s legendary El Capitan—entirely without ropes. Honnold’s unbelievable accomplishment was the subject of the award-winning documentary Free Solo. In the film Honnold is asked about how he deals with knowing that when he free climbs, the options are perfection or death. “People talk about trying to suppress your fear,” he responded. “I try to look at it a different way—I try to expand my comfort zone by practicing the moves over and over again. I work through the fear until it’s just not scary anymore.” Honnold’s fear prompts him to put in extensive amounts of focused work before he attempts a monumental free solo. Making his fear productive is a critical component of his training, and it’s propelled Honnold to the top of his climbing game and to the top of mountains. If we can stop viewing stress and the fear that often accompanies it as negative and instead see the potential benefits, we’re on our way to changing our relationship with fear.

THE STRESS RESPONSE

The first thing we need to realize about stress is that it doesn’t do a good job of classifying problems. Recently I had the chance to test a virtual reality device. In the virtual world, I was climbing a mountain. As I stepped out on a ledge, I felt as scared as if I were actually eight thousand feet in the air. When your brain shouts “Fear!” your body can’t differentiate between whether the threat is real or imagined—whether your survival is in jeopardy, or you’re thinking about your taxes. As soon as that fear signal goes off, our bodies prepare us to fight or flee, or sometimes to freeze. If we launch into this high-alert fear state too often, all of those stress hormones start to send us downhill, affecting our immune systems, our sleep, and our ability to heal.

Yet studies show that being able to successfully deal with intermittent stressors—such as managing that big work project or moving to a new house—to approach them head-on, like those trees standing up to the wind, contributes to better health, along with greater feelings of accomplishment and well-being.

When you deal with fear and hardship, you realize that you’re capable of dealing with fear and hardship. This gives you a new perspective: the confidence that when bad things happen, you will find ways to handle them. With that increased objectivity, you become better able to differentiate what’s actually worth being afraid of and what’s not.

From the fear meditation I described above, I came away with the idea that we have four different emotional reactions to fear: We panic, we freeze, we run away, or we bury it, as I had buried my anxiety about my parents. The first two are shorter-term strategies, while the second two are longer-term, but all of them distract us from the situation and prevent us from using our fear productively.

In order to change our relationship with fear, we have to change our perception of it. Once we can see the value that fear offers, we can change how we respond. An essential step in this reprogramming is learning to recognize our reaction pattern to fear.

WORK WITH FEAR

I’ve mentioned that monks begin the growth process with awareness. Just as we do when facing negativity, we want to externalize our fear and take a step back from it, becoming objective observers.

The process of learning to work with fear isn’t just about doing a few exercises that solve everything, it’s about changing your attitude toward fear, understanding that it has something to offer, then committing to doing the work of identifying and trying to shift out of your pattern of distraction every time it appears. Each of the four distractions from fear—panicking, freezing, running away, and burying—is a different version of a single action, or rather, a single inaction: refusing to accept our fear. So the first step in transforming our fear from a negative to a positive is doing just that.

ACCEPT YOUR FEAR

To close the gap with our fear, we must acknowledge its presence. As my teacher told us, “You’ve got to recognize your pain.” We were still seated, and he told us to take a deep breath and silently say, “I see you,” to our pain. That was our first acknowledgment of our relationship with fear, to breathe in and repeat, “I see you, my pain. I see you, my fear,” and as we breathed out, we said, “I see you and I’m here with you. I see you and I am here for you.” Pain makes us pay attention. Or it should. When we say “I see you,” we are giving it the attention it is asking for. Just like a crying baby needs to be heard and held.

Breathing steadily while we acknowledged our fear helped us calm our mental and physical responses in its presence. Walk toward your fear. Become familiar with it. In this way we bring ourselves into full presence with fear. When you wake up to that smoke alarm going off, you would acknowledge what is happening in the moment, and then you would get out of the house. Later, in a calmer state, you would reflect on how the fire started or where it came from. You would call the insurance company. You would take control of the narrative. That is recognizing and staying in present time with fear.

TRY THIS: RATE YOUR FEAR

Draw a line with zero at one end and ten at the other. What’s the worst thing you can imagine? Maybe it’s a paralyzing injury or losing a loved one. Make that a ten on the line. Now rate your current fear in relation to that one. Just doing this helps give some perspective. When you feel fear crop up, rate it. Where does it fall next to something that’s truly scary?

FIND FEAR PATTERNS

Along with accepting our fear, we must get personal with it. This means recognizing the situations in which it regularly appears. A powerful question to ask your fear (again, with kindness and sincerity, as many times as necessary) is “When do I feel you?” After my initial work with fear at the monastery, I continued to identify all of the spaces and situations in which my fear emerged. I consistently saw that when I was worried about my exams, when I was worried about my parents, or about my performance at school or getting in trouble, the fear always led me to the same concern: how I was perceived by others. What would they think of me? My root fear influences my decision-making. That awareness now prompts me when I reach a decisive moment to take a closer look and ask myself, “Is this decision influenced by how others will perceive me?” In this way, I can use my awareness of my fear as a tool to help me make decisions that are truly in line with my values and purpose.

Sometimes we can trace our fears through the actions we take, and sometimes it’s the actions we’re reluctant to take. One of my clients was a successful attorney, but she was tired of practicing law and wanted to do something new. She came to me because she was letting her fear stop her. “What if I jump and there’s nothing on the other side?” she asked me. That sounded like a branch question, so I kept probing. “What are you really scared of?” I asked her, then gently kept asking until eventually she sighed and said, “I’ve spent so much effort and energy building this career. What if I’m just throwing it all away?” I asked again and finally we got to the root: She was afraid of failure and of being seen as less than an intelligent, capable person by others and by herself. Once she learned and acknowledged the true nature of her fear, she was on her way to recasting its role in her life, but first she needed to develop some real intimacy with it. She needed to walk into her fear.