Conquer fear by nondoing

A practical use of meditation

This morning while meditating through Waking Up’s daily meditation, I caught my body wanting to run away from itself. The usual fear in my longer meditation sits came up.

Has any limb of your body gone completely numb after an extended sit? It terrifies me to sit through this feeling. I want to immediately escape it by "solving" it.

The problem-solving mindset of course is praised in society at large and is very useful in most situations. However, it is not just not useful, but even detrimental when being applied in the wrong contexts.

One such context would be listening to a loved one who is sharing about a struggle for the first time and trying to solve their struggle immediately when their primary need is often to just be heard.

A more tangible context would be when we observe someone struggling and we take action to solve their issue so they don't suffer. Or so we think. On the other side of this apparent suffering was growth, but we robbed them of this opportunity because of a well-intentioned "doing" mindset.

Listening and observing involve more nondoing than doing. Not a passive "doing nothing," but rather actively nondoing. To intentionally do nothing, is an action in itself; a very powerful one if applied in the right contexts.

Doing, as described above, we are in reaction mode. When we react, there is no gap between input and action, therefore the act is not a thoughtful one.

In nondoing, there is no reaction. There is the wisdom of knowing when to let things resolve on their own and knowing when to respond to the situation with thoughtful action.

This is one way to look at what mental muscle we are training when we meditate. Meditation largely consists of listening and observing, which are followed by the act of choosing to do nothing, despite our strongest desires and cravings to either indulge a thought that comes up or to escape unpleasant sensations.

Different from running or taking action to build something, meditation is about confronting the fear head-on, without the option to dismiss it or to enter problem-solving mode.

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It's minute 22 into my meditation sit from this morning. There's a buzzing, tingling sensation that I notice in my right upper leg. The next minute, the numbness got intense. The third minute, I felt it spread all the way down to my ankle.

My breathing is picking up and my palms start sweating. To be honest, I don't know what I'm afraid will happen. I know that technically nothing will happen to me physically, especially after meditating 10 hrs/day for 10 days during the Vipassana course.

The sensation of numbness in each moment at hand is technically bearable. I'm afraid of something else.

My mind combines the two ingredients of 1) the sensation felt in the present moment with 2) my fear, concocting a story that something terrible will happen to my limb if the sensation persists.

It's my reaction to the sensation, not the sensation itself that is making my sit unbearable by minute 25. My fear is a story about what the numbness may lead to, not the numbness itself.

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Meditation is the teacher. These sensations are the teacher. They're trying to teach me two principles that can only be internalized through experience, not through theory:

1. The nature of reality is impermanence. This will pass, just as everything does.

2. Things we fear often get worse when we react to them without conscious thought.

I reached an impasse at minute 26 in my morning meditation: either stop meditating to relieve myself of the unpleasant sensations, or move through the unpleasant sensations.

Through meditation, we train the skill of nondoing. We train our ability to transition from the story of the fear to the root fear.

We're able to see what seemed so terrifying was not confronting the fear one moment at a time. What seemed so overwhelming was that the fear in its entirety would bombard us in one instant. Yet has this ever happened? No, because it's impossible. If fears can only unfold one moment at a time, can we have the capacity to meet a fraction of what we are afraid of in each moment?

The answer is absolutely yes. Each dose of the thing which we are fearful of that we receive in each moment that unfolds in the present is diffused with our intense presence. The accumulation of that which we feared never occurs because we never let it accumulate when we meet it every moment that passes. Without the snowballing of what we feared, it becomes mortal, conquerable, and understandable.

What happens next is the story we created based on unpleasant sensations slowly disappears.

So I kept meditating, simply observing the sensation as it kept inevitably morphing.

In nondoing, the sensation evaporated.

No need to always react. Sometimes there’s nothing to do, and that can be a good thing.

Wisdom is to know when to do, and when to nondo.