Was I? I needed a job. I wanted to be an organizer. And Hawaii? Living on the islands should have been as enticing as a swim in a warm ocean at night.

Instead, I felt, deep in my stomach, afraid. “You can’t do this,” a voice screamed inside my head. “You can’t do this.” Even though the job was what I wanted, working so far away was scarier than a hundred horror movies.

Now, when presented with a career opportunity that scares me, I have learned to sleep on the possibility. But my twenty-eight-year-old self only knew fear, and flatly said no. I probably was not breathing.

I know there are millions of women who face the unknown like trapeze artists swing, high above us, from rope to rope. I am not one of them.

The Disguises of Fear

The fear block is huge. But fear is tricky. It will show up in other disguises like:

• Procrastination
• Confusion
• Uncertainty
• Judging yourself and others
• Impatience
• A “Why bother?” attitude
• Playing the victim
• “I’m not worth it anyway” feeling
• Negativity of all sorts and persuasions

And sometimes fear is bold-faced, as it was for me when I was offered the job in Hawaii.

Maybe I was right to turn down that job. Maybe I was not ready to jump away from my support system then. For it is not the decision that I regret, but the takeover. When we are in fear’s grip, we don’t choose; fear decides and speaks for us, and it mostly says no.

Would you like to know a gentle way out?

One Antidote to Fear

Buddhists have a practice called “mindfulness.” It is a method of watching yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Let’s say you are talking on the telephone. If you were practicing mindfulness, most of your attention would be engaged in the conversation. But another tiny sliver would be watching you as you talk. This sliver would notice when you disengage from the conversation and wonder what’s for dinner. Notice when you wish the conversation were over but keep talking for politeness’ sake. Notice when enough is enough and you guide the conversation to a close.

This sliver is the inner self. Mindfulness is a practice of engaging the inner self in our everyday, ordinary life—and not just when we are tuning in. This is important because your inner self has the power to speed transformation and change and to whittle fear down to size.

Not Judging is the Hard Part

Mindfulness is the practice of noticing, but with one catch: noticing is done without judging. (“Sure, right,” you might be thinking. “Without judging? Without criticizing?”) In the above example, you would have no judgment that your mind wandered during the telephone conversation; no judgment that you did not bring the conversation to a close sooner; and no judgment that you ended the conversation when you did, even if the other person wanted to talk more.

We are all challenged to observe without judging, since our childhood judges now live inside of us (which could be why it feels so crowded at times). But the challenge is as rewarding as a luxurious vacation at your dream destination. By noticing—simply noticing—we come to accept who we are, warts and all. And with this acceptance, self-sabotaging behavior quietly falls away.

Fear unfreezes.

(modified from Make Every Day a Friday! The Joy of Connecting Who You Are with What You Do by Marina Spence, copyright 2008)

The first morning, after coffee, I leaned my back against the living room couch and stretched my legs out in front of me. After years of running and not enough stretching, my legs wouldn’t tolerate a cross-legged pose. With an alarm clock at my side, I closed my eyes and expected to plunge into the beautiful silence of my inner self.

All I heard was the cranky and chattering voice of me. For a millisecond I focused on my heart, then thoughts yanked me back to the important: the itch in my knee, what I would eat for breakfast, why I should be good at this, the movie last night….

After hearing at least twenty minutes of this chatter, I started to get up, hoping that it was all right to meditate longer than the suggested fifteen minutes the first time. But I checked the clock just in case. Two minutes!! What!! Only two minutes had gone by!!

I returned to trying to focus. When I finished, I was sure that I was wasting my time with this nonsense. But some part of me, definitely not the top-of-the-iceberg portion, wanted to meditate the next day. And the next. And the next. In a month, I became more accustomed to the rhythm of my mind and began experiencing spaces between the thoughts. These spaces helped me to gradually begin dipping into the deeper part of me.

I still cannot sit cross-legged for very long, but I have been meditating daily for nearly 30 years. Some day the spaces between my thoughts are razor thin and other days, they seem as deep as the ocean.

How true it is: meditation is a practice.

(modified from Make Every Day a Friday! The Joy of Connecting Who You Are with What You Do by Marina Spence, copyright 2008)

Cancer runs in my family.  Both of my parents, my grandmother, and too-many aunts and uncles all died of it.  But the good news, at least for me, is that I’ve been meditating for nigh onto 28 years.

But meditation goes far beyond the health benefits. We all can differ from our conditioning, veer from our heredity, and defy our programming to live creative, passionate, and joy-filled lives.  I believe that meditation is the foundation for this change.

Why? Our minds are like trap doors that lead to everything musty and old: outdated fears, old hurts, and out-of-focus pictures. By working with the mind, by using patient, comfortable awareness, we shine the light inside that trap door. Things shift. Slowly. Subtlety. We move to a new state of mind, then another and another. We become the change we envision, for ourselves and for the planet. Slowly. Subtlety.

And we have fun along the way.

“Fun? But isn’t meditation boring?” people ask me.

“Try it and see,” I usually say to those I teach. For you, here are my top 10 reasons for meditating:
 
10.  You better remember why you walked into a room
 
9.    You smile more and grind your teeth less
 
8.     You see beauty in the most unlikely places—the face of of child with a runny nose, a wrinkled old toothless smile, a heap of grass clippings.
 
7.   You develop a sense of humor, especially about yourself
 
6.   You have the feeling you do after an hour of yoga—but without the exercise
 
5.   Your obnoxious uncle/aunt/cousin doesn’t bother you as much
 
4.   Your intuition becomes your secret advisor
 
3.   Your heart heals, and holds more love
 
2.   You feel stillness as deep as the ocean
 
1.   Ecstasy
 
My advice about meditation, which I learned from a wise one, is simple: don’t leave the house without having done it, since the only bad meditation is the one you didn’t do.

“Boring?” I exclaimed, followed by, “Think nothing? I hate to break it to you, but in your first few meditations you might feel like you’ve never thought so much in your life!”

I explained a phenomenon many first-time meditators report: paying attention to their thoughts makes it seem as if those thoughts have multiplied like rabbits while, in fact, it’s only the awareness of them that has increased.

“If you start meditating,” I predicted, “no matter how much you can’t turn off your mind in the beginning, before long you’ll have space between your thoughts. Then, gradually, you’ll have more space. And that space leads to rushes of joy; of a sense that everything is perfect in the moment, no matter how crappy you felt five minutes before.”

For meditation is a practice, and like any practice, it takes time. It takes time to feel comfortable with not-doing. It takes time to allow yourself time to yourself. And it takes time to accept whatever happens or doesn’t happen and to accept what you feel or don’t feel during the 5, 10, or 15 minute session.

There’s no right or wrong here. You get a break from achieving, from being perfect, and from being the example. You can just be—and in the process, discover—you.

Meditation: an oasis for your heart and mind.