PNTV: Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh (#204)

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, Fear Essential Wisdom for Getting through the Storm Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh. We've done a couple of other notes on Thich Nhat Hanh's work. The guy is a living saint, as I mentioned in the other episodes. Vietnamese Buddhist, Zen master, just an extraordinary teacher. His writing is incredibly clear, concise, inspiring, etc. This book is no exception. Philosopher's Note Bunch of big ideas. Most of my book is underlined, but let's look at these five big ideas on how we can navigate the fear in our lives. The first one is breathing. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here, but as always, every great teacher tells us if we want to deal with our fear, with our anxiety as it arises, we need to slow down our breathing, become more mindful of our breathing. Thich Nhat Hanh has a great phrase. He says breathing in. I am aware that I am breathing in, breathing out. I am aware that I am breathing out and actually feeling the air coming in as you say that, and then feel the air going out as you say. The phrase on the exhale is an extraordinary way to connect your mind and your body and dissipate all of the high energy of fear and stress. So remember to breathe often, always throughout your day, but often, particularly when you're feeling stressed, in the little moments that you have the capacity to deal with the bigger ones. That's our first big idea. The second one, Inter Being. It's one of my favorite ideas in any book that I've explored. Inter being. Nhat Hanh challenges us to look at anything in the world and to look deeply at it and to see that it's connected to basically everything. So in the note, I talk about an example of just a simple piece of lettuce. Imagine one leaf of romaine lettuce that you buy at your local grocery store. One leaf of lettuce. Now, if you look deeply into that leaf of lettuce, what you see is not just one piece of lettuce. You see the seed, you see the earth and the minerals in which it grew. You see the sun, you see the rain. You see how all of those things went into creating that leaf of lettuce. And of course, there's a ton of other things that go into it just from a natural perspective. Then if you look deeply, you can see the farmers who grew that and who picked that and the merchants who sold that and people who connected the two, the roads that they drove on, the trucks that they had, who built the roads, who built the trucks that they drove, who built the parts that became part of the trucks. Again, when we look deeply, we see the inter being. And what Nhat Hanh says is the only thing you don't see when you look that deeply is a separate self. You don't see anything that's completely separate from everything else. It's an extraordinary practice. And I mentioned in the note that Ryan, Patricia, Ryan Madsen talks about that same process and says, we are given silent gifts. We want to thank those people. So throughout your day, whenever you're finding yourself, maybe it's at the grocery store or on the freeway, whatever, see if you can connect all the things that are connected to whatever one thing you're using in that moment. It's an extraordinary way to experience the beauty of inter being. And when we do that, our stress and our fear goes down. We're going to be most fearful when life is all about us. When we're narrowly contracted into our own state of being is when we're going to feel the most anxiety. One way to dissipate that is to take the focus off of ourselves. One way to do that is to think about the interconnectedness, the inner being. What a beautiful word. Third Big Idea. Bring it on. So we talk about in the Tools the fact that our infinite potential exists on the other side of our fear, and that rather than recoil when we experience fear, we want to lean into it. Nhad Hahn talks about that. And that big part of our problem is that we're trying to avoid the things that make us feel uncomfortable. If we can acknowledge our fear, breathe into it, see it, feel the pain rather than try to avoid it, then we can do something constructive about it. I didn't put it up here on the board, but he talks about how TV and distraction and movies and constant entertainment is really a way to avoid our fear. Oftentimes we have an addiction to distraction because we're unwilling to sit with our fear and then to change our relationship to it such that we see that fear is actually what catalyzes our growth. We can think of bringing it on. As we talked about in the Tools episode. Fourth Big Idea is an idea of a blue sky. He says, even when it's a cloudy day or super foggy, we know that there's a blue sky behind those clouds or above the fog. It's the same thing with our lives. When we're Feeling anxious or fearful or regret about the past or whatever other things angry might be clouding our good mood, our happiness. We need to remember that the blue sky is always there. The tools, guys, to go back to them. Say, the way to get out of your funk in that ick cloud is to have grateful flow, to burst through the little cloud of despair. Here you are, here's the sun and the blue sky. And if you want to get out of this ick cloud, one way to burst through it is to have grateful flow is to do the little inner being practice and to think about all the things you're grateful for in your life and all the people who brought that into your life. It's a big practice. That's our fourth one, the fifth big idea here is six words. So when I read a book, I like to underline the positive words. So when I'm reading all these different books, different authors come back to the same phrase or often the same word again and again and again. I like to underline them, right? So as I do that with any book, I can see the themes and the intentionality behind the author's choice of words. Well, this book, there are six words that Nhat Hahnh comes back to again and again and again. Those words are. There's really three primary words, but let's call them six. The energy. That's a word I underlined. A ton of mindfulness. Underlined. And concentration. The energy of mindfulness and concentration. I don't know how many times Nhat Hahn used that phrase. The energy of mindfulness and concentration. The energy of mindfulness and concentration. The energy of mindfulness and concentration. Tons. Dozens and dozens of times. And he uses it throughout the book in different contexts. But one beautiful example he uses is the lotus flower. The lotus flower in the morning is closed. The sun rises and the energy from the sun penetrates the lotus flower and opens it. And he says, it's the same thing with our consciousness. The energy of mindfulness and concentration needs to penetrate our fear and our anxiety in our lower sense of self consciousness, such that we can unfold and open to our highest potential, the energy of mindfulness and concentration. Beautiful idea. And it's not a once in a while thing. It's a consistent practice to maintain concentration and the truth of what we know and refresh that truth consistently day in and day out and throughout our days, such that we can open up to our highest potential. Beautiful idea. Remember our blue sky? It's always there behind the clouds, behind the fog. I didn't share the story that I intended to around fog. Remember the story we talked about with Earl Nightingale, the Essence of Success? Earl Nightingale said fog that's seven blocks wide and 100ft deep, right, is created by water that if you captured it, you can fit into a single glass of water. A tiny, tiny bit of water dissipated, creates that fog. He says. It's the same thing with our worries. You, your fog of worry can blanket your entire life, but if you actually boiled it down to the handful of things you're stressed out about, it would fit into a little glass. That's part of the idea of bringing it on and getting through that fog and through the clouds that might be shielding us from this sense of joy and happiness we want to experience inner being. What a beautiful idea. Think about the interconnectedness and then breathing fear 101 as Fritz Perl says, fear is excitement without the breath. Feeling anxious? Your breath got shallow. Breathe deeply, see a positive outcome and you can transfer your fear into excitement via your breath. Hope you enjoyed this quick look at a great book and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hi, this is Brian.

Hope you enjoyed that quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.