Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

by Thich Nhat Hanh

The practice of the five remembrances helps us accept many of our deepest fears—such as old age, sickness, and death—as realities, facts we cannot escape. When we practice accepting these truths, we can realize peace and have the capacity to live conscious, healthy, and compassionate lives, no longer causing suffering to ourselves and others. Invite your fear into consciousness, and smile through it; every time you smile through your fear, it will lose some of its strength. If you try to run away from your pain, there is no way out. Only by looking deeply into the nature of your fear can you find the way out. Contemplating the five remembrances, we bring mindfulness to the seed of fear in us. The seed of fear is there in us, and if we don’t practice embracing it with mindfulness, then every time these truths show themselves, we will feel very uncomfortable. Like ostriches that see a lion, we stick our heads in the sand. Using diversions like television, computer games, alcohol, and drugs, we try to ignore the realities of aging, illness, death, and the impermanence of the things we cherish. If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by our fears, we will suffer, and the seed of fear in us will grow stronger. But when we are mindful, we use the energy of mindfulness to embrace our fear. Every time fear is embraced by mindfulness, the energy of fear decreases before going back down to the depths of our consciousness as a seed.