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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Good morning.

Welcome, welcome. Good day, good afternoon.

It's lovely to practice together. So today I like to continue on this idea that faculties are fearlessness and

while we were meditating I had this idea like, oh yeah, there's another meaning to this word faculty.

So maybe it's a bunch of teachers and professors.

We want fearlessness.

I'm just sharing with you the things that the mind does sometimes, right?

So I want to talk a little bit about fear. I'll start there. Fear can manifest itself in so many different ways. It shows up maybe just as restless nights or feeling moody or not expressing or emotions or thoughts,

you know, really holding back and maybe feeling isolated or you know not wanting to connect with others.

We could even say like the list of the ways that fear shows up in our lives is endless.

And so it depends on the person and the situation, but there's so many different ways and it's kind of unique to all of us.

But, we call... of us. But regardless of how fear shows up in your life, it is a natural part of the

human experience, like humans are vulnerable. Of course we are. We don't like it and we try to

pretend that we're not but we are vulnerable not only to physical harm but to like emotional harm or mental harm or something like this.

But today I really like to emphasize that it's we have fear perfectly normal and we have the resistance to fear like we don't like to feel fear it's uncomfortable and not only is it uncomfortable but we might have this idea like oh I'm doing something wrong because I'm feeling the fear or if I were a different kind of person, I wouldn't be afraid.

Or, you know, especially like social media often like, like to portray, you know, only the best signs of people.

And not everybody watches social media, of of course but there's a way in

which there can be a valorization of this fearlessness and then we start to think

like oh if I have fear somehow I'm a failure.

So we're often conflating this experience of fear and the resistance to that fear.

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