Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

by Thich Nhat Hanh

The only way to ease our fear and be truly happy is to acknowledge our fear and look deeply at its source. Instead of trying to escape from our fear, we can invite it up to our awareness and look at it clearly and deeply.

Our desire to have a partner is, in part, a continuation of our desire for someone to take care of us.

Similarly, if you like to spend a lot of your time at a café, it may not be because that particular café is so interesting. It may be because you’re afraid of being alone; you feel that you always have to be with other people. When you turn on the television, it may not be because there’s a fascinating program you want to see; it’s because you’re afraid of being alone with yourself.

It reminds us that the present moment is always available to us; we don’t have to live events that happened long ago.

Some of us have depression and continue to suffer even if in the present situation everything looks all right. This is because we have a tendency to dwell in the past. We feel more comfortable making our home there, even if it holds a lot of suffering. That home is deep down in our subconscious, where the films of the past are always projected. Every night you go back and watch those films and suffer. And the future you constantly worry about is nothing other than a projection of fear and desire from the past.

In the first step we accept that birth and death are happening, but in the second step, because we’re in touch with the ultimate dimension, we realize that birth and death come from our own conceptual minds and not from any true reality.

But an emotion is just an emotion. It comes, it stays for a while, and then it goes away.

I believe that the next buddha will no longer be an individual; it will be a sangha, because one buddha is no longer enough. We have to be a sangha.