Unexpected Freedom

‘… and I know I should let go’once you shave your head and your eyebrows and startgetting around in robes, a lot of your friends, nice as theymight be, tend not to get in touch anymore. You can startfeeling, ‘I’m going to lose all my friends.’ This can bring upthe fear of abandonment, of being left alone. If you becomea novice or a monk and you devote yourself to this training,during which you are not making any money for yourself,the fear can come up of growing old without friends,financial security, without career or home. Most of us havethese sorts of fears lurking just below the threshold of ourawareness, but in lay life we might avoid coming to anunderstanding of these fears by reacting to them andinvesting our energy in ‘protecting’ ourselves with money,friends, status and so on. As strange as it may sound, theenergy that is contained in fear is potentially of great value toour well-being.The Fear of Losing our Sanity.When you get serious enough about practice and remainfocused and energetic in your efforts, some of the old mainstaysof your sense of identity are likely to dissolve. You canstart to have unfamiliar ideas about yourself and about life,even crazy thoughts. The thought may arise, ‘Maybe I’mgoing mad!’ If we have never enquired into that thoughtbefore, as most of us haven’t, it can trigger off a strong fear.One reason for the fear of going mad is holding on to the selfviewthat we’re not mad; grasping at the idea that we’re sane.The truth is we don’t really know who or what we are, wejust hold on to the ideas of who and what we are. As wepractise more and begin to resume our true identity, theseideas become irrelevant and start to fall away.Most of us avoid the fear of going crazy or being mentally177