A MEDITATION ESSAY BY JACK BRAGEN

MINDFULNESS AND THE RELEASE OF FEAR

Jack Bragen

Sometimes, I am in my living room, I am meditating as I do, and when I release painful or fearful energy, the dog inexplicably starts barking.  Perhaps the energy is fleeing from my aura and going to the dog.  At other times, she barks when I am forgetting to "take it lightly," perhaps because there is upset energy in the room. Sweetpea is often a good barometer of tension among humans.  She is also a challenge since she is one of life's spontaneous events.  
     As a man with a mental illness that includes problems with anxiety and tension, bouts with depression, and a thought disorder that must be kept under control, I have more emotions to deal with than does a typical human being. 
     There is definitely a role for mindfulness in my life—that of making difficult situations more manageable.  However, my mindfulness practices also require a lot of effort and a lot of focus. 
     I am with my wife in Wal-Mart and she is shopping while I feel anxiety and dread.  I try to remind myself to use my cognitive tools.  I am following my wife around as she tries on garments and I am reminding myself that I am actually okay. 
     One of my cognitive tools is to use the mere idea that I am okay.  Doing this potentially nullifies the effects of suffering. Suffering relies on blocking out the insight that I have nothing to worry about, and  must maintain a monopoly over my mind, keeping me ignorant.  
     Even with this knowledge, I am still struggling.  I am a man of many fears as well as many aspirations.
     Due to the fact that my cars have broken down and I have had mishaps with public transportation, I have been stranded a number of times. Thus, I am phobic about travel. I have a great deal of fear concerning the government; this is because I was incarcerated briefly at a young age.  Furthermore, I was threatened and held hostage by armed robbers in a supermarket where I worked at age nineteen, and because of the fear invoked by that history, sometimes I have a problem with retail stores. 
     My phobias are based on exaggerations of what could happen.  Meditation helps with them some of the time, but I am also working with a "hardware" defect in my brain. 
     Sometimes anxiety takes over my mind, immobilizes me, and limits my every action.  I become unconscious and I lack an avenue that could allow insight to find its way in.  My emotions have a tendency for blocking out the consciousness that could potentially bring resolution. 
      I often think that if I could master all of my fear, I would become an immensely powerful being.  I would not have to restrict my activities due to the invisible cage of fear in which I find myself.  I would be able to generate wealth, be a master of relationships; I might even be able to travel. 
     I was diagnosed thirty years ago as being paranoid schizophrenic.  If the diagnosis was accurate, and I believe so, I am doing very well considering what I am up against.  
     When I practice mindfulness, it includes methods that I have reinvented for myself.  I have a "system" in which I reinterpret the experience of suffering to make suffering into a neutral event.  When I succeed in doing that, generally my body feels better and I obtain relief. 
     The meditation I do would not resemble Zen to an outside observer.  Often, on an as needed basis, I have learned how to obtain relief from excessive painful emotions. My practices involve pinpointing are reinterpreting painful emotions. 
     When I do suffer emotionally, something I can not absolutely avoid, I take the suffering less seriously, and it is relegated to experiencing a lot of discomfort rather than the experience that life is hopeless. 
     Sometimes this entails a lot of concentration.  Sometimes I perform the meditation in advance to deal with an anticipated difficult situation, while sometimes I can do these practices while I am in the middle of such a situation.  The latter is a more advanced mode. 
     It is a release if I can let go of being wrapped up in my fate.
     Fearlessness is apparently a quality worth having.  It does not mean that you are immune to harm or to negative consequences.  It simply means that you are not generating that emotion. 
      It would not be accurate to scoff that the need for psychiatric medication is contrary to being able to meditate. Despite the fact that I utilize mindfulness, I take anti anxiety medication in addition to other psychiatric medications.  My mentally ill brain produces a lot more problems than does the gray matter of other meditation practitioners. Medication gets my brain into the "ballpark" of viable mental functioning. 
     It seems that I have some kind of "spark" that allows me to function as a "sane" person despite having a psychotic condition that by all rights should have me utterly lost. 
     My ability to focus my mind, as well as intelligently direct myself, to me indicates that I am using a resource that goes deeper than my physical brain. This resource has allowed me to identify and negate a lot of my delusional thoughts, and to pierce the illusion that incorrectly says emotional level suffering is such a horrible thing. 
     Hopefully in practicing mindfulness, I can transcend more and more of my suffering.  But these biological creations that we inhabit will periodically produce at least some amount of suffering, even if we are not mentally involved in it.  Giving up on the idea of not suffering reduces suffering.  Deciding that it is okay to be afraid reduces fear.