Craig Hamilton┃The Wisdom in Fear: How Anxiety Can Become a Path to Awakening

He wanted everybody to feel a constant stream of evolutionary tension, which meant wake up, show up, rise up, you know.

What if fear and anxiety aren't always signs that something has gone wrong, but sometimes invitations to become more fully alive? Today I sit down with meditation teacher and spiritual educator Craig Hamilton to explore why the goal of spiritual practice isn't necessarily to eliminate anxiety, but to transform our relationship with it. Craig introduces the idea of sacred anxiety, the awareness that our lives are finite, our choices matter, and we don't want to reach the end having held ourselves back from our deepest potential. We also explore why taking meaningful risks can become a powerful spiritual practice and and how Craig's practices of allowing and not knowing can help us stop controlling, labeling, and resisting our experience and discover a deeper kind of freedom. And I'm really happy to be here today with longtime friend and colleague Craig Hamilton. Welcome, Craig.

Hi, thanks. Great to be here again.

Oh, great to have you. I always look forward to our conversations. So I'm going to share your bio and then we'll jump right in.

Okay.

Craig Hamilton is an educator, renowned meditation practitioner, and spiritual trailblazer who brings enlightenment to practicality, unlocking the codes to our highest human potential. With over 16,000 graduates in 85 countries, his online courses offer up-to-date spiritual tools grounded in a deep understanding of the human condition. Craig's insights stem from decades of research at the forefront of spiritual practice and consciousness exploration. Craig began his journey in Eastern ashrams and monasteries, later contributing to cutting-edge conscious evolution laboratories in the West. With over 17,000 hours of personal meditation, he integrates intensive spiritual practice with expertise gained from his role as senior editor of What Is Enlightenment magazine. He is also a founding member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute and recognized as a teacher of teachers. Hamilton's influence extends to leading spiritual figures, underscoring his role Decoding Our Highest Human Capacities. So, Gregg, you've been doing this work, as I described in your bio, of really integrating East and West, the spiritual technologies, the psychologies, the insights, the wisdom from both Eastern and Western cultures, and really bringing this into kind of cutting-edge human evolution, which is really grounded in Today when we have access, this amazing time when we have kind of access to all the world's spiritual technologies at once. So I'm wondering what kind of core lessons maybe having to do with experiences of fear and anxiety were catalytic in your journey in becoming the teacher you are today and what you're able to offer today of some Maybe sharing some experience that was catalytic in that.

Yeah, absolutely. It's obviously something that, you know, all of us wrestle with and that certainly some people feel really debilitated by and struggle with deeply. And, you know, I do think that enlightenment traditions and just the whole path of spiritual awakening brings a unique lens to the question and ultimately brings Perhaps the most profound kind of liberation we can experience from those things, which isn't making them go away. It's not making fear and anxiety go away, but it's coming to a different relationship to all feelings, including those. But in reflecting, and I'll take this into your question, but just kind of reflecting on this theme a little bit, I was thinking about a quote from Brian Swimme. Mm-hmm. who you may know. He's an author and kind of evolutionary visionary.

Yeah.

But he tells the story of the hawk and the mouse and how the mouse wishes that the hawk would fly slower and not be so fierce so that it wouldn't have to work so hard to escape the hawk. And he says, but if we took that all the way, the mouse would eventually become kind of an inert blob, lose all of its agility. And, and, you know, not reach its potential, whatever a mouse's potential is. And that in some way, the pursuit of the hawk, having the predator, having that fear drives the mouse to be its best. And so he takes a quote from that story, which is something like, we should wish one another as much stress as we can creatively assimilate. As much stress as we can creatively assimilate being the key, because of course too much stress, which— and I'm just using the word stress because that was the term he's using in that quote. We'll take that into what is, in a sense, fear and anxiety responses to stressors. They're responses to the pressures of life and they're a place we go with that. So the reason I'm bringing it up is Because you asked me about my own journey. And as you know, I was a— for 13 years back in my 20s and 30s, I was a student of a spiritual teacher named Andrew Cohen. And he was a teacher who sort of tried to take that idea all the way.

Teacher as hawk.

As teacher, as hawk. And of course, he's not the first to have done that. We read some of the Buddhist literature, we find stories of Zen masters who took that approach with their students, or in the Tibetan literature, we have some stories of teachers who were incredibly fierce, had their students living in terror in a sense, and saw that as the most potent way to catalyze spiritual awakening and/or higher evolution. And so when you asked about my own experience, you know, because you wrote— you mentioned in an email yesterday that you were going to start with this question and I might want to reflect on it. And I kind of thought initially, I was like, I couldn't think of like a moment of fear, but I kind of thought, but my, you know, much of my early spiritual training was living in a context where, you know, the— yeah, where we were being put under— put to the fire all the time and kind of— and what that means practically, I mean, just boil it down, it means somebody, you know, you're— you have a person in your life, a teacher, or, you know, this could be a spiritual partner or friend or spouse or whatever, but you have a person in your life who is going to hold you to your highest potential in every moment and is going to challenge you anytime you deviate from it, or anytime they perceive you to deviate from it, and is going to push and push for you to always show up From your best self, which to the ego, to the contracted self, the small self, the conditioned self that feels so wedded to its limitations and so defending of all of its kind of weaknesses and challenges, this is the ultimate— it's the ultimate test and challenge. And obviously one that we could go on and on about how fraught it is with potential for a lot of damage and wounding to people who aren't maybe ready for that challenge in a given moment. And so I'm not advocating that approach in my own teaching. I'm very different from all that. But it's interesting because, see, in the traditions, in the Western traditions, we have the idea of fear of God as a deep core kind of thing that's in the monastic tradition, that they wanted their monks to live kind of in fear of God, which means fear of— Of making mistakes on a soul level that would, in that theistic context, you could argue leads to punishment. But in the East, it was kind of that we had an analogy which was fear of karma and fear of the ripple effects of one's errors into other people's lives, but then ultimately into one's own. You know, psyche and life, et cetera. And so these ideas are deep in the spiritual traditions. And I just kind of wanted to anchor our conversation in that for a little bit, because, of course, most of the ways we would tend to talk about fear and anxiety in a spiritual context or a transformational context would be about, well, we can use meditative practice to observe our fears and anxieties and see them as just arising phenomena and that ultimately have no influence over us. And ultimately, therefore, we can gain a kind of deep inner peace that survives the vicissitudes of life, including our emotional ups and downs, and we can reach this place. And that is the goal. So, I mean, I'll probably talk a lot about that today. I'm sure you've been talking a lot about that in your summit, but there's at least a perspective in Things that cause us fear, certain things might be our most potent transformational catalysts. And there's another conversation about fear and anxiety and internal tension. My teacher, Andrew, back then used to call it evolutionary tension. He wanted everybody to feel a constant stream of evolutionary tension, which meant wake up, show up, Rise up, which again is part of the picture. So anyway, maybe I'll pause there and we can dialogue.

Well, I'm actually very glad and grateful you started there, Andrew, because I think that is part of our discussion is fear and anxiety as very much being part of the human condition and catalytic to our growth, to our evolutionary growth. And at the same time, as you acknowledge, can be debilitating for people at times. And so how do we titrate that for ourselves and, and when we're holding spaces for others to be at that place where people have the creative ability in that moment to, to have that serve as a catalyst rather than it be something that's, that's debilitating or, or damaging. Right. And, and in some ways, you know, I kind of lean in a little direction of, of, you know, buyer beware, student beware. I mean, we're all kind of responsible to figure out how to take care of ourselves and meet our lives. And at the same time, for a lot of different reasons, many of them tied to various forms of injustice, a lot of people are in a situation where they're challenged to handle those things. So I think we're always in that tension between what can really serve the challenging wake-up-now message as well as the compassionate, nurturing, supportive message. And I don't think we can land squarely in one or the other. And I'm also very grateful myself. Yeah. My first teacher, my root teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, was renowned as being very fierce. He had this idea of continually being on the spot.

Right.

And whenever you were around him, you were on the spot and you never knew what was going to occur and what you're going to be called to do. But he was also the kindest human being I ever met. So that was a nice balance there. But I think that is very much part of our conversation here. And so Anxiety can show up in different ways for us. We can experience mental anxiety, we can experience emotional anxiety. For some of us, it literally becomes a physical experience. Mm-hmm. And sometimes I think when people are suffering from anxiety in a very debilitating way and people try to tell them, well, it's in your mind or it's psychological or emotional, they're saying, no, this is a physical thing I'm experiencing. You're not getting it. So it can be physical. And then there's also a kind of existential anxiety, which I think is when we, if we find ourselves on a spiritual path and working with contemplative practices and practices of embodiment and awareness, we very often start, even as we relax more and open more, sometimes we get in contact with this ground-level anxiety and fear that's kind of part, it's in our biology, it's part of the human condition. Yeah. And there's this almost existential anxiety that is, we could experience, oh, that's bad, it's uncomfortable, or, oh, that's actually the life force, that's the energy. That's right. Right. And so learning how to, learning how to be with that. And so I think what we're talking about in this summit is very much how to help people heal some of the trauma that may be the root of a lot of more debilitating anxiety. How to work with anxiety overall so it just doesn't become overwhelming. There's a lot of environmental anxiety today in our world because

the

world's so polarized and there's so much things going on. But then also very much how to not demonize fear or anxiety, realize they're human experiences or human emotions are part of our experience, which can be a calling. They could actually be calling us to deeper work. And so— Yeah. I'm wondering if you could talk about You've kind of been pointing at this already, but the whole relationship between human evolution, evolutionary consciousness, as it was described by Andrew and you, and then this ground-level fear that's pretty baked into our biology for good reasons, to keep us alive. I mean, there's intelligence, right?

Sure.

I wonder if you could talk about that kind of level.

Yeah. And I mean, you gave a really nice kind of overview of many of the different forms of anxiety, which is great. We're not— let's not pretend we're talking about one thing, right? We're talking about a lot of things. And I think it might be interesting to make a distinction between— because you talked about existential anxiety, and that could kind of refer to a couple of different things potentially. And I might, in that category, let's just say in that existential category of anxiety, which is kind of like The anxiety of living, you know, the anxiety of, wow, I'm a human being alive, I'm vulnerable, I'm in this world that's beyond my control, all these things are happening and, you know, my life is limited and, you know, my opportunities are limited and just this kind of base level anxiety. I think I kind of want to almost talk about 2 different kinds because I feel like There's a kind of existential anxiety that is— I think someone coined the term sacred anxiety for this. It's our— like, if we're all really honest, right? If we're spiritual practitioners or we're people who are somewhat awake to the context of our lives, there's a part of us that if we're healthy, Is kind of like, wow, I, I don't want to blow it with my life. You know, I want my life to, to matter. I want it to mean something. I don't want to look back on my life and feel like I compromised my values, or I didn't reach for my potential, or I didn't take shots that I could have taken, but instead I held back in fear. And, you know, I don't I don't want to realize that I frittered away my time and I didn't devote myself to my spiritual growth and development and I didn't like take the risk to love in the ways my heart wanted to love. You know, there's this kind of anxiety which you were talking about which is a driver of us being serious about the path. And I think at their best moments, the teachers that we've talked about who had that kind of pressure, push, you know, we're trying to be a stand for that. Like, you know, stay awake, be aware. Like, why in the Buddhist precepts, when one is doing all the preparatory practices, do they have so much contemplation on like the state of this world, the shortness of our lives, the potential to create karma, the, you know, all the preciousness of our lives, you know, all the— there's all these contemplations. designed to get us awake to, hey, it matters. Hey, this is serious. Don't treat your spiritual practice as recreation or as just something that might make you feel better. This is about your soul, for lack of a better word. This is about the— and your contribution to this event we're having now, that bodhisattva ideal. All of that. I think we can look at it through that kind of lens as a kind of healthy anxiety, but again, always in that caveat of as much as you can creatively assimilate, right? Because that could overwhelm one and make one fall just, oh, it's all too much. I can't get out of bed. Life's too— one gets too attuned to the fragility and intense sacred context of every move we make and every action we take, every word, you know, and we start to feel that Indra's web ripple of everything I do matters so much, that could be debilitating. So it's again, how much can we creatively assimilate in our growth? And that takes containment in all kinds of ways. But anyway, so I think there's that piece that's really worth acknowledging and looking at. And then There's another kind of existential anxiety, which you could argue is what spirituality is designed to cure, to awaken us out of. And that we could talk about as kind of the— for lack of a better word, it's kind of the ego's anxiety. We have a false constructed idea of self that we've invested a lot of emotion in defending and erecting and beefing up. And yet in some way, we all know, you know, on some visceral level that this is something that's constructed, that it's very shaky, that whatever self we imagine ourselves to be is probably, you know, isn't going to stand the test of time and eternity, you know. And there's like A kind of angst, I would almost call it, an existential angst in being alive, which is kind of just full of kind of self-doubt and doubt, a lack of trust in life and a lack of trust in ourselves and our potential to fully meet the moment. And there's just this kind of ball of angst. That tends to also exist inside us that our spiritual practices are really aiming to unravel and have that fall apart and fall to the ground and be left behind forever. And then that would be a definition or a way of looking at what spiritual liberation would be, as this liberation into this profound life of trust, openness, flow, freedom. resilience, creativity that can all flow when that knot has been released. So, I mean, those are 2 pieces of this. Yeah, maybe I'll pause.

I'm very glad you brought that up. I think it's a really great way to position the conversation. I love the term sacred anxiety. Yes, in many ways you could say that the psychological self, the limited self that we create, from really from birth. The minute we have a body, it just, you know, kind of is an inevitable process. We can't go back to the womb. We have to start figuring out how to, you know, and really what probably instinctually our being knows at that point and recognizes is the impermanence and groundlessness of life, the complete fluidity and temporal nature of it. Hmm. And yet at that, at 6 months old, we have no way of being with that, right? So we start creating someplace to live where we can feel safe and feel okay. And everybody else is doing that. So that's, there's this kind of co-navigation going on out of which we create the, the self. And to the extent that our upbringing was, you know, very benevolent, loving, and there was good bonding and attachment, then we'll build a fairly functional self structure, but it's still a creation. Mm-hmm. psychological creation. If our upbringing, our home situation, our childhood was less benevolent, less, you know, then often that self-structure has a lot of kinks and holes and it's not well constructed and we really, really struggle in life. But even for the most high-functioning of us, and this is what we recognize on the spiritual journeys, that separate self, that individualized self, even though it's something that inevitably we have, if we have a body to navigate life with, it is a constructed thing. But in many ways it was constructed to ward off the experience of what you're calling sacred anxiety. And because intelligently that same self structure knows that it's a creation, so there's always a fundamental kind of doubting, right? Right. That we can't really convince ourselves that we exist completely. And so there's, that's surrounded with a kind of egoic anxiety that the ego realizes its own self-created nature, and there's anxiety around that. But the whole thing was created to avoid that deeper level of what you're calling sacred anxiety, which I really like. And I just want to point out 2 things and then ask you to continue. What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This heart-mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience, and expanded awareness. That's why I created the HeartMind All Access Membership and Community, a space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1,000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, You'll learn from world-renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists, and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions, and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing. plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart-centered, connected, and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today. Pema Chödrön, one of the more beloved Buddhist teachers, spiritual teachers in the West, by her own acknowledgement, suffered from anxiety much of her life. And in the Tibetan tradition, we do we have various deity yoga practices where you relate with a meditational deity. It's a feminine or masculine manifestation representation of enlightened energy. In in the Vedic traditions, this could be related somewhat to the idea of the Ishta Devata. In in in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, it's you know it's some kind of representation of. Of your language gets a little different, a higher self or a more authentic connection to beingness. And there are very many. The first one that I worked with in my own tradition was Vajrayogini, which is a feminine deity that you work with in this. So at any rate, long story short, Pema was describing to one of her Tibetan teachers, this anxiety that she felt. And she was kind of describing it with all her years of practice. There was still this kind of anxiety there. And he said, that's Vajrayogini. Yeah.

Meaning that's your higher— that's kind of your higher self that's aware of

the

context.

Yeah, exactly. You're getting in touch with this fundamental energy at a deeper level. And And that's the doorway in. It's not around that or avoiding that. That's the doorway. And also, just another example, I don't know if you're familiar with the teacher Mingyur Rinpoche. He's a beloved kind of second-generation Tibetan teacher. I mean, from given that the first generation that left Tibet, like Trungpa Rinpoche, Maya, and then the next generation of teachers, Mingyur Rinpoche, who's one of the sons of the great Ujin Rinpoche, the great Dzogchen master.

Right.

So Mingyur Rinpoche is a beloved teacher today, many bestselling books, and was renowned for having snuck out of his monastery and spent 4 years homeless in the very dicey areas of Nepal and India and almost died in the process, wrote an incredible book about that. At any rate, he acknowledges that he suffers from anxiety. He suffered from anxiety his whole life. And so his practice is very, Very much. And that's why he's a very accessible teacher to many, because he's obviously a teacher with profound realization. And the example of what he did, leaving the security of his lineage and his well-supported monastery and all the protections to go out and be a wandering Siddha in the wilds of Nepal and India, And at the same time, he acknowledges he's a human being with a body and he experiences anxiety. So I think both, you know, this whole idea of this interplay between, you know, being able to realize the artificial nature of the self-created self, which liberating that, we can then connect with source at a greater level. But part of that pathway is gonna be ultimately to deal with this sacred anxiety you're talking about, that level of fundamental anxiety. There's, and so in some ways,

Yeah.

wherever we are on our path, whether we're in a more therapeutic direction of just trying to get ourselves into a workable place where we have some level of creative ability to assimilate, be with, or whether we're, you know, dropping into the deeper levels of spiritual practice, this whole thing about fear and anxiety And, and having a body, it's, it's an inevitable part of our journey and, and potentially incredibly rich part.

Well, and yeah, I, I love that story. That's very interesting to hear that both of these, you know, beloved, renowned as teachers, you know, shared their anxieties. I think that is, that is kind of profound and helpful. And because— and the reason obviously it's kind of profound is that most of us on the path are secretly or not so secretly hoping we're going to get to a place as soon as possible where there is no anxiety. And so when you kind of go, oh, oh, well, what would it be to live from a place of consciousness, wisdom, love, etc., even with that current of anxiety running through me? It kind of It can maybe help us reframe our understanding of what the goal might be. Because, I mean, as you know well as a teacher, dealing with our misperceptions of the goal is one of the biggest things we have to keep clearing away because those are taking us in the wrong direction. And if any of us have a paradigm that says, well, I'm on the spiritual path because I want inner peace, and inner peace to me would mean I would never feel fear or anxiety. And then I'm looking for that state that's without it. In many ways, I'm going to do all the wrong things on my path and in my practice because I'm going to try to repress those feelings. I'm going to try to get away from them when they come up. Whereas how much more profound would our meditation be if we knew, oh, actually, the goal here is to come to a transformed relationship to all experience? And to be able to be a big enough container to hold any and all human emotions I might experience without reaction, without falling into reactivity to these feelings, to be able to hold all that, it's something we can then bring into practice. Whereas the other thing, what's the practice? If the practice is try to have inner peace and no anxiety and no fear, then you're just trying to control your feelings, suppress your feelings, hold on to positive feeling. You're doing everything but the awakening practices. So I think that's actually really instructive. The other thing I was feeling like might be good to bring in here to kind of maybe almost bring this down to earth, operationalize it a little bit, is that there's a way of looking at transformational practice, and this would be sort of Most of the time, what I'm saying would be outside of meditation. It can happen in meditation too. But there's a lens on transformational practice, which is that one of the most transformational things we can ever do is take risks. Take risks for the right reasons that are all in alignment with the better angels of our nature. And that idea can also help us reframe our experiences of fear because what are some of the anxieties and fears that are very common? They're like social fears, social anxieties, right? People are almost universally afraid of standing up in front of a crowd and speaking, for instance. And that's probably because somewhere back in our evolutionary history, if you were in front of the group, there was a chance you were going to end up— As dinner or, you know, or, you know, killed or something. So we have this tremendous fear of speaking in front of groups. And many of us also have just social fears around like talking to us, having a meaningful conversation with a stranger, or, or in a— or not in a relationship with a stranger, with a relationship with an intimate, but speaking about something very difficult that feels like it's putting the relationship at risk. Potentially confronting someone. And a lot of people will live in these relationships where they won't say the difficult truths. They won't confront the difficult things because they're afraid, well, maybe that person would withdraw their love from me anyway. There's just all these kinds of social fears and anxieties that we live with. And you could argue on a spiritual path for a conscious person who's, who's doing spiritual practice, meditation, awakening, to go into their day determined to take every good risk. And speak the truths that are really hard. Go ahead and, you know, talk to the stranger and engage them. Go ahead and, you know, step up in front of that group when someone's asked and say something. That all of these things have a tremendously liberating effect on our actual psyche and free us from our actual conditioning. Because those fears and anxieties are like almost the most locked in, the most potent kind of knots that make up our lack of freedom, that make up our unenlightenment. And so, because often we kind of think, well, okay, I want to do meditation because it's— and I mean, and I encourage this too. Meditation is a very safe context to confront one's everything because you're just sitting there. You're not going to hurt anyone. You're not going to create any karma. You're not going to say something you deeply regret because you're just sitting there and there's a way we can open to the entirety of our experience in that safe context. But any given half hour of meditation is not as likely to be as profoundly transformational as the kind of radical acts of risk that I'm talking about that really deconstruct your stuff. Mm-hmm. They really prove to you, oh, There was nothing to fear. Oh, I actually came alive when I took the risk. My whole system came online because I stepped out through that wall of fear. And so there is a kind of spiritual practice that is like, face the fear and do it anyway, is, I think, the cliché. But it runs pretty deep, I guess, is all I'm wanting to say, that kind of approach, if we're doing it in a deep context, meaning we're on a path of awakening, we have those frameworks. works. We're, you know, deconstructing ourselves actively and through contemplation and meditation. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think, yeah, it's really important. And I love this part of our conversation of how, you know, in order to take more risk, we need to cultivate some quality of inner stability. And that can be our own healing and contemplative work that we create a greater resource in ourselves to be able to. Take greater risks and then metabolize what happens there. And then also relationally and in community, there's lots of ways that we access that resilience and strength and stability to be able to take greater risk in that way. And, you know, it's, that's an interesting frame for our entire path because, you know, although when we're born, although I think most of us probably realize and suspect we all come into this life with some imprints already.

Mm-hmm.

Unique from the get-go, as well as, you know, we know a lot about collective trauma and the whole transmission collectively and ancestrally of all that today. But nonetheless, having said that, most infants, you know, when you see them in their early weeks and months, they're pretty fearless and wide open and uninhibited and so forth, right? That's why we have to really keep a close eye on 'em to keep them from harming themselves.

Right. Yeah, that's good.

And, but they're pretty wide open. And then The natural bumps and bruises of life, the ordinary ones, and unfortunately some of the really unnecessary ones through poor parenting or trauma or different situations. But even with, in a relatively, you know, good upbringing, the bumps and bruises of life, you know, we start retracting a bit and, you know, oh, that was embarrassing. I won't do that. Oh, that didn't feel good. I won't do that. And oh, I felt shame around that. I'm not going to do that. And we kind of start shrinking and we develop all these avoidance mechanisms. Then our whole person— the personality part of ourself in some ways becomes this adaptation around how do I stay safe, right?

Don't—

Yes. Don't leave me. Don't hit me. Love me. Don't leave me. Don't hit me. You know, we all these adaptations and, and we shrink and we shrink and we shrink. And, and I love Dan, um, Dan Siegel's, Dr. Dan Siegel's framework of, of the window of tolerance. Some call it the zone of resilience, that bandwidth of life, not the comfort zone, but that bandwidth of life. And hopefully even the more challenging parts of life that we're able to handle in a very relational way, to have our social engagement system online, our best self online. The problem is it shrinks throughout life. Now, intense traumas like PTSD, combat veterans, others, it can really shrink to the point of agoraphobia, which is too triggering to even leave our homes, right? But we're all somewhere in there, right?

Yes.

We're all somewhere in there. By the time we reach adulthood, we've developed our own set of avoidance mechanisms, To feel safe, right? And so the path you're talking about is we're beginning to deconstruct those, to heal those, to understand them, develop insight. And there's some people that are into super high performance, right? That suggest, well, you should do something that terrifies you every day. Ah, that's the type of risk-taking you're talking about. Now that may be a little extreme for many.

As much as you can creatively assimilate.

Yeah. At least do something that makes you a little bit uncomfortable every day, right? Yeah. Because then we're growing and we're learning because I think most people realize by nature learning happens mostly outside our comfort zone. Again, we have to be able to titrate it, that which we can creatively assimilate and work with. Right. But I think it's an interesting understanding here that fear and anxiety is not some isolated problem or experience that somehow got landed on us. Right. That it's really part of the spectrum of our whole life journey of how we work with Our learned tendencies to avoid and to constrict versus our innate longing to open and to experience.

Right. And as you said earlier, it's information. The problem with these things is if they become, as we've said, debilitating or they're not tied to reality, they're tied to Some program that we developed early on, some adaptive strategy we developed early on, et cetera. But if we were to just say, okay, but if we were no longer in a pathological relationship to our fear and anxiety, we're an awake person, we're not just playing out these conditioned patterns, we're not just in reactivity, we're actually One definition of awakening or enlightenment is radical sensitivity. We become a highly sensitive, attuned instrument the more we wake up out of all of that conditioning. And that means we're feeling things more deeply, we're feeling things more accurately, and our anxiety when we feel it might be a sign there's something that we should be afraid of. We feel anxious around a certain person. Well, maybe we're tuning into the fact that their motives aren't so great. Or we feel fear around taking a certain action. And it's probably a good— I'm taking fear around someone's telling us, hey, I've got this great investment thing and you should take all your money out of your retirement and put it in my thing because it's going to go 10x. And a lot of people have fallen for these kinds of things over and over because of the is so great and they'll believe it. But they might have had some very strong feeling about it that was sort of like, this feels dangerous, this feels risky, but they didn't listen to it because they didn't know what to listen to because they had so much— so much kind of greed was getting welled up that they kind of listened to that. But I'm saying, as we become a more conscious, present, attuned instrument, let's just acknowledge that our fears and anxieties would then theoretically just be better sources of information for us about the world we're in and the objective risks that we don't want to take for good reasons, etc. So I think, again, to your point about how this— if we can relate to these things as just part of our natural parts of our humanity, not aberrations that we're trying to overcome so we can live that fearless, anxiety-free life.

I'd like to bring it to a path quality, if you will. This ability to lean into discomfort or lean into fear and anxiety at whatever level, jumping into the fire if we feel confident in our capacity, or just leaning in a little bit if that feels— Yeah.

Right.

It's all relative to where we are and what we're experiencing and so forth. But in terms of overall path quality, we're developing a certain stability, an inner stability, a kind of capacity to lean further. In very simple terms, you could think of it that way. So I wonder in terms of the— and there are many body-mind disciplines and life experiences that we can make use of in our spiritual journey in that way. But in terms of meditation in particular, as a stabilizing, resilience-building, resourcing kind of practice, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, because I know in your teaching you often talk about some of I mean, you mentioned a minute ago some of the misconceptions about the goal that can get in the way, but there's other kind of classic misconceptions about practice or mistakes that are common when we start practicing meditation approaches that might get in the way of it actually being something that is deepening our stability, that is deepening our resilience, that's increasing our capacity to lean into the challenges of life. I wonder if you could talk about that in terms of some of the maybe common misconceptions about meditation that might get in the way of it really. And if we have a better understanding of the practice, how that could accelerate this process of deepening and stabilizing and resilience building that will then allow us to lean into the challenges of life in ways that can be evolution, can support conscious evolution. And even in our moments of when we're— Yes. when we feel like we're pulling back or withdrawing or constricting, at least to have awareness around that, not beat ourselves up, but have even have that awareness be transformational in some way.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, as we both know, meditation refers to thousands of different practices that one can do. So I think for me to kind of comment on common mistakes, I think maybe what I would say is I'll talk— I'll speak about it kind of in the context of the approach I take to meditation. Which is, as you know, a very direct approach, a nondual approach. I call it the practice of direct awakening. The idea is that we're sitting in meditation practicing kind of the natural inner postures of awakened consciousness. As awakened consciousness shows up for any of us, we take the position that, well, I'm going to practice those gestures in my meditation directly. So we're not I'm not teaching mantra practice of repeating a phrase to develop concentration or breath practice for concentration or any of that. But this is much more of a kind of direct approach. So if we take this whole idea or this whole theme of fear and anxiety and look at what are some kind of profound meditation practices in relation to fear and anxiety. So one of the most essential kind of meditation movements, or kind of inner— I call them inner postures. They're kind of like yoga asanas, but they're asanas with your psyche. So one of these postures is, and this isn't unique to me, you find this in All the kind of advanced traditions. But one of the postures we will be taught, we will be encouraged to take up, is a posture of allowing, of allowing our experience to be however it is without any attempt to manipulate or contrive or construct or control anything. So it's this very radical— it sounds very simple, but it's a very radical practice to sit Say we could all today say, go sit for half an hour, and no matter what your experience is from one moment to the next, don't lift a finger to try to change it. Don't try. And we step into this kind of a posture and we pretty quickly notice, well, yeah, but I'm doing all this so that I can feel really good and peaceful. So then we start trying to steer our practice toward feelings of peacefulness, and we start trying to— we feel tension or discomfort. Or anxiety or fear. And we— oh, I'm trying to kind of gently steer away from those under the idea that that's what allowing is. But that's not what allowing— allowing is allowing all of it to just be as it is. And if we can really do this, even for a few minutes, there's this discovery of a kind of immense liberation because we suddenly— oh, none of these things are a problem. None. No experience I could ever have. Would be an obstacle to my natural awakened state. It's all just phenomenal experience arising. I'm not trying to detach from it. I'm not trying to get away from it. I'm literally just allowing it all, letting it be. So when we can take that relationship up to— and so then often I'll say to people, well, Because someone will say, okay, but I'm doing the practice, but then I feel all this fear like I'm losing control. This fear wells up. Who am I if I'm just letting it all be? I'm no longer the one controlling my reality and I feel a loss of self. And I'll encourage people. I'll say, look, though, it's not that we want to wish those moments upon ourselves, but if you have a moment of tremendous fear in meditation, kind of exit that That fear of letting go, that fear of the unknown, that's your most potent meditation you'll ever have if you can hold to the practice. If you can stay just with the simplicity of, oh, I'm just letting this be, even though I feel like I'm going to die, I'm letting it be and I'm not making a problem out of it. I'm not trying to change it. I'm not trying to control it or push it away. I can just be even with this. Even this, then the catalytic liberation in our psyche, because the thing that we feared the most or the thing that seemed the most, like the greatest obstacle we could ever encounter, has suddenly been revealed to be no obstacle at all. So that's, say, one practice. Another one that kind of runs Side by side with that would be the— I might call it the practice of innocence or the practice of not knowing. And it's a practice, again, because what are we doing all the time? We're labeling our experience, we're trying to interpret our experience, we're evaluating everything as good or bad. It's like, what is it? What does it mean? And is it good or bad? And we're doing this all the time. And this not knowing practice is the practice of just Sort of setting that down, saying, well, for this half hour, I'm not going to label anything. I'm not going to try to interpret my experience. I'm not going to evaluate anything as good or bad. And again, you can feel how it runs parallel to that allowing practice, but it's a little more kind of cognitive in nature. But in a sense, again, what if you have a really strong fear? When we have some fear come up or some anxiety come up in our meditation, Very often we're going to label it and we're going to try to figure out why we're having it. We're like, uh-oh, I'm feeling very tense. What does it mean? Maybe, oh, I didn't deal with that thing at work, or, oh, maybe it means that I'm not meditating properly, or maybe it means I'm afraid of letting go. I'm too attached to the ego in this world. We're interpreting. We're trying to make sense of it. What if you didn't? What if you sat there for that half hour and you didn't make any meaning out of any content and you just, again, had it all there, it would all come up, but you just— it's a radical renunciation of the interpretive meaning-making framework of our psyche and we just say, no, I don't know. No matter what it is, I don't know. And I refuse to label, interpret, evaluate anything. And again, it sounds kind of like, oh, well, is this just some mental exercise? Try it for half an hour. Try to know nothing for half an hour and not make any meaning out of any experience you're having and really just be with your experience. Then you might experience all kinds of anxiety and fear. But if you don't know what it is or why it's there or where it's going, and you don't know that it's a problem, then guess what? You might experience it in a whole new way. You might experience, oh, God, I've always related to fear and anxiety as something wrong. But what if— well, I don't know what it is. And now then the energy transmutes into something else, into some kind of power and strength. Who knows? So anyway, there's a couple kind of examples of maybe kind of ways we can practice in relation to this and ways where we tend to, you know, maybe as you said, errors in practice that go the other way.

Yeah, I love that allowing and not knowing. And, you know, it is even, you know, once we land in a body, we're going to be experiencing fear and anxiety. And The other thing is this constant storytelling, constant narrative making, constant labeling. That meaning-making thing is just so baked into us that boycotting that on any level—

Boycotting it, right.

It's gonna be transformative, right?

And

that's the practice of not knowing, which was very much emphasized by my Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman. And I think allowing is so important, whether one's a beginning practitioner. We sit down, you could do a movement practice as well, but we'll take take conventional sitting practice as an example, you sit down and you're there with your experience. And that's a beautiful guideline to begin with. Just let it be as it is. And if you notice yourself doing anything other than that, just relax, let that go, and come back to just allowing. That's good for a beginning practitioner. And even for the most advanced practitioners in various formless meditation practices, you know, even when you really think you're at some level of samadhi or stability, the practice is always Look closer. Is there still subtle clinging, subtle fabrication, subtle manipulation going on? And if you, if you,

if

you're sitting there thinking there's not, there probably is, right? That wishful thinking. Right. Yeah. Oh, it's having that—

I don't see any. They

really wanna see that next layer of fabrication, clinging, manipulation, right? You have that third step. And for me, that brings in, uh, another was allowing and not knowing, boycotting that tendency to constant meaning-making and labeling. And then also for me, another core thing is kind of a profound curiosity, which is not an egoic curiosity, but it's almost consciousness, the natural longing of consciousness to know itself, which could be how we're all here in the first place.

Yes.

Right? But there's that deep longing to to relax into direct experience, direct knowing, that deep longing for consciousness to return to realize itself, to know itself, right? And in simple terms, to begin with, it might just really be a curiosity. Like, I'd really like to know and understand myself at a deeper level. And then it becomes more refined as this natural energy of consciousness, the longing to know itself. So to me, those aspects really

could—

It's a core from the very beginning, brand new practitioner, all the way to a very evolved practitioner, if you will.

Beautiful. I love that you're bringing in interest, curiosity and interest, because in many ways you could argue that's the pure driver of the whole path. And then we do these practices in that context. Do the practices of not knowing in the context of profound interest in the unknown, and that will fuel your willingness to let go of certainties and et cetera. So yeah, that's a nice— Since we kind of already planted a couple seeds of practice here, why don't we take those up a little bit together? So I just want to invite everyone now to— and the great thing about these practices, you can do them for just a few minutes and get the entire result. You don't need to do them I mean, it's great to do them for hours and weeks and months and years, but it's also great to do it for 5 minutes. So I would just invite you now to just settle into a relaxed, comfortable meditation posture. Your eyes can be open or closed. And just let's begin with this very simple Inner posture of letting everything be as it is in this moment. Your experience right now is what it is. Whatever thoughts are present, whatever feelings are present, whatever sensations moving through your body, This is your experience. Allow it to simply be exactly as it is, with no need to change it in any way. You're not trying to get to a better state of consciousness than the one you're in. There is no better state of consciousness than this one. So just allow it, allow it to be, and allow it to change from one moment to the next. And as we continue to let things be, let's also invite in this inner posture of not knowing. Which means simply that we're not trying to understand what's happening right now. We're not trying to put a label on it. We're not trying to make meaning out of it. We're not trying to figure out if it's good or bad or where it is on that spectrum. We just don't know. Give yourself the freedom Of not needing to know anything at all. No idea. No need to have any idea. Just allowing this moment to unfold exactly as it is unfolding. No need to control anything. And now allow yourself to gently let go of the meditation. And just allow the meditation, as brief as it was, to just ripple into your life in whatever way it does naturally. See what happens.

Thank you. Thank you. Beautiful. Absolutely wonderful. Thank you. So how can people find out more about your work and your meditation programs and courses that you offer?

My website's craighamiltonglobal.com, and there are a lot of free resources. I encourage you, if you're a podcast listener, I have a podcast called Meditation Changes Everything that you can find on any podcast app. Meditation Changes Everything, which has a lot of meditation discussion like this and also a lot of guided meditations and resources. If you would like to kind of do a little more in-depth dive, go to freemeditationworkshop.com, freemeditationworkshop.com, and there you can download a 90-minute meditation workshop that I really go into this whole approach in a lot of depth and detail.

That's a very generous offering, that 90-minute free meditation course. That's incredible generous offering. So really encourage everyone to take advantage of that and to check out Craig's work because it really goes to the heart of how meditation can be really transformative and how we can bring that transformational posture, if you will, off the cushion and into our daily life in moment-to-moment direct experience. So I really encourage people to check out your work further. And thank you so much.

Thank you, Fleet. It's always a pleasure to participate in these. Thanks for all the hard work you're doing to bring all this work to the world.

Thank you.

Blessings. Thanks. Take care.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Until next time, stay grounded. Stay present and stay true to yourself. Take care. Take care.