The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello and welcome to this talk, second talk on the topic of attitudes.

And as I'm spending this week on this topic, I'm pairing up an attitude which is not very helpful for us with an

attitude which is And by attitude here, I'm more focused on not so much an attitude of the

moment, a particular circumstance where we might have an attitude we don't like it or we're impatient or we feel frustrated with something

and it's kind of an attitude than we have while we're present for that particular activity.

But rather something that's more pervasive in our life.

And today the topic is fear, and one of the advantages, and maybe sometimes the challenges of doing mindfulness practice

meditation especially going on retreat where we practice bringing attention

all day and because we're there all day kind of really being mindful,

we start seeing how often we get caught and then we see the patterns of what our mind is thinking or our emotions are feeling.

And not a few people discover that there's a pervasive level of fear or anxiety through their life much more than they realized and it's kind of

in the background or underneath all the other kind of concerns we have and And sometimes being pervasive, it casts its influence on the way we think,

the way we behave, the way we even physically look at the world. We can be looking at the world through the eyes of anxiety, of fear,

apprehension. And so there's a lot of wisdom and a lot of for bringing attention and care, maybe even love, to our fear.

And one of the things I like to teach is that one of the roles of mindfulness, really being

present for anxiety, is to help our anxiety feel safe.

So we don't spin out even more by we touch into our fear,

but we allow our fear to be there so that we it can kind of begin to relax. I think of

fear is always a secondary unless there's a something imminent danger like in the moment. I think of a lot of chronic anxiety to be

secondary to something and more deeply that needs us, attention and the avenue to it in

classically in mindfulness meditation is to learn how to be present for fear

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