Run at fear

My family raised beef cattle. Hundreds of cattle roamed the pastures of the 400-acre farm. When I was twelve my older brother was away in the army and my mother depended on me to look after the cattle. One fall day my mother noticed that a young heifer had just given birth to her first calf in a small yard next to the barn. Concerned about coyotes getting the calf, my mother asked me to herd the cow and calf into the barn for safety.
As I began to herd the cow she turned on me and all 1500 pounds of her began to charge. I was still near enough to the fence to easily retreat to safety. I was stunned. I had grown up with cows and had always been safe a ro u n d them. To be charged at, like that by a cow was a first.
The foll ow i n g spring my brother had re t u r n e d home and as the weather warmed I began my f avo u r i t e pastime of roaming the open fields of the farm. One day I was crossing the wide-open pasture behind the farm buildings. Roaming safely among the herd was something I had done all my life. So it was a shock to suddenly notice that one cow on the other side of the herd had begun to charge towards me. I was frozen in fear. It was the same cow that had charged at me in the barnyard the previous fall.
This time there was no fence close by, only open pasture in every direction. In the distance I heard the screen door of the farmhouse slam. Then my brother’s far away voice, yelling in the distance, ‘‘run at her, run at her!’’ My mind was a still impenetrable siren, but my thin little legs heard the message and began pounding on the new wet grass, carrying me directly at the cow. Suddenly she veered away and settled calmly into grazing again. I retreated as calmly as I could with a pounding heart and amazed to be physically in tact.
That summer and the following year, I continued roaming in open pastures and she continued charging at me. I also continued to respond by running at her with decreasing fear. Each time the distance between us diminished before she veered off to resume grazing. Until it just didn’t happen anymore.
That incident has stayed with me all my life. I continue to be amazed at my brother’s response to fear. ‘‘Run at her!’’ It was an act of intent to not be frightened by her. Running from her would have been sure defeat. She could have easily out run me and with something to chase she would have been
spurred on to over come me. In that experience my body-mind learned a profound lesson about how to meet fear.
What actually happened that day, that summer? What is fear? A feeling? An emotion? One of the things I have come to understand is that feeling is perception. Feeling is the perception of our energy ‘the energy’ that is the Creative Source of what is happening momentarily in our life and in life around us. That energy in any given moment has a particular quality. The nature of energy is to move, to transform. I perceive the quality of the energy in the moment by feeling it, by meeting it, by running at it.
An emotion is a particular feeling or perception of charged energy. The charge is caused by the energy not being able to move. A thought or a belief has become attached to the energy, holding it stuck unable to move or transform.
Thought and belief by their nature are always of the future or the past. It is hardly possible to be fully present now and think at the same time. Thoughts and beliefs are particularly active when emotion is present. Normally we tend to run away from emotion by simultaneous thinking, rerunning habituated thoughts and beliefs as strategies not to feel the emotion. This is like running from the cow. The emotion always continues to over take us for quite a while.
When we run at it, when we fully attend to the feeling, leaving no room to be aware of thoughts, beliefs, stories of the past, the future, then the energy of life is allowed to return to its natural flow towards transformation. Only full awareness feeling, free of thought can perceive the present, the quality of life energy and allow transformation.
This is the inner skill that was demonstrated to me back those many years in the pasture in my meeting with the cow. In that situation the outer events were a clear mirror or direct result of the inner reality. When I was running at the cow, there was no thought, only full awareness of feeling. Since I was fully focused on the feeling, the energy wasn’t held by thought or eventually even by belief. I was simply present. The energy was free to transform. Fear transformed to presence and finally to calmness.
Let go of the story and just feel. Give your whole being to perceiving the quality and intensity of the emotion. Be fully and completely present to it with full feeling. Give yourself a little time and silence to get accustomed to the feeling. Now that you are there fully embracing the feeling can you feel it begin to shift? Stay with the feeling as it moves, go deeper into the quality of it. You don’t need to put words to it just be present to it. Yet if you did name it, would it be more like still? Calm? Peace? Gentle? Emptiness? Love? Or not? Just allow whatever it is to be. Have you noticed that your cow has stopped charging?

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