Fear & Anger
April 03, 2009
One of the reasons we focus on the breath as the foundation of our meditation is to give us a good place to stand. Lots of different emotions, lots of different ideas, can come washing through the mind, and if you don’t have someplace outside of the mind where you can take your stance, you get washed away. Greed comes in. Anger comes in. Fear comes in. And they can be overwhelming if you don’t have a place to stand outside of them. So we focus on the breath as a way of getting outside of these overwhelming emotions, to realize they don’t have to take over totally. We can have at least one corner of our awareness where they’re not raging and strong.