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title: 'Exploring Fear and Worry: A CEB Seminar with [Michael Lobsang Tenpa](https://lobsangtenpa.com/)'

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# Exploring Fear and Worry: A CEB Seminar with [Michael Lobsang Tenpa](https://lobsangtenpa.com/)
Presented February 8, 2023, through [Tibet House US](https://thus.org/)

*Notes respectfully prepared by [Ash Chudgar](mailto:ash@chudgar.com) during the workshop. Any errors below are mine.*

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## Conative practice
We begin with a conative practice: **“Why are you here?”** 
- “Conation” is our mind’s ability to generate intentions and aspirations — to will, to desire, to intend. 
- The bigger our mental apothecary becomes, the more skillfully we can respond. 
- We could say that the one tool we need to master emotional balance and cultivate emotional intelligence is compassion for ourselves and others. All of that can be crystallized into compassion and self-compassion. 
- There are ways to gradually, slowly, tenderly, affectionately retrain the nervous system. 
- We need a lot of training and community support to be beacon of hope for others. 
- We can sign up for a class that’s supposed to help us deal with anxiety, but sometimes we get too anxious even to join the actual class! 
- Simply knowing that there isn’t a person present here — unless a fully enlightened Buddha just popped in to have some fun with us — all of us do have these experiences of fear and panic and anxiety and shyness and feeling self-conscious. All of us have different types of fear rushing through our body fifty billion times a day! They can go from very gentle apprehensiveness up to very, very, very strong experiences of panic triggered by trauma or actual events, like people who are in a war zone right now. 
- At the core of our life as emotional beings, there is also a wonderful set of mental states that make us deeply human and humane. We all have the incredibly powerful propensities available to us associated with love, empathy, and wisdom — basic goodness — and it is this basic goodness that we are trying to access. In relying on that basic goodness, we are better able to serve others and experience more balance ourselves. 

## 1. Exploring emotions in general
### History of CEB
- In 2000, HH the Dalai Lama asked Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace “to create a universally available system of practice for dealing with emotions.” 
- Notes from that meeting were written up as Daniel Goleman’s *Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?* 
- Margaret E. Kemeny et al. published a paper based on an RCT called “Contemplative/emotion training reduces negative emotional behavior and promotes prosocial responses” (2012), [here](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22148989/). There’s been more research since. 
- The curriculum is still evolving based on guidance from HH the Dalai Lama.
	
### What emotion is
- “**Emotion** is a process impacting the body, speech and mind, influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, that occurs whenever something important to our welfare is occurring” — Eve Ekman’s definition, which some Tibetan teachers use now.
	- Emotion is a *process,* something that unfolds over time — usually over the course of up to 90 seconds, according to the consensus. Some emotions are must briefer — surprise can last just a second or two. It arises, it lasts, it dissipates. 
		- It impacts the *body* because we can feel lots of emotions in the body, and the body is affected by things like our heartbeat, electric signals, being out of breath. Our facial expressions change, quite often involuntary — and even if you’re very good at controlling your facial expressions (which I am not), there would still be a tiny twitch in the face. 
		- It impacts *speech* because we might naturally vocalize — screaming when scared, groaning or roaring when angry or frustrated. 
		- It impacts the *mind* because we can see a specific mental tone, a type of mental experience, that is different for different emotions. The experience of joy, and disgust at the sight of rotting meat in the forest, would be quite different in the mind. 
		- What triggers emotions is influenced by our *shared past* (snakes, spiders, volcano eruptions, whatever our ancestors experienced) and our personal past (this thing happened to me when I was 6 years old, so I repeatedly experience fear when I encounter this specific trigger).
		- Our body, speech and mind start experiencing this rush of emotion when our mind notices something important to our survival or our existence — whether the thing that’s happening *is* actually important or not. 
	- I use an analogy, comparing an emotion to a wave that rushes through our system. We notice something that might be important to our welfare, then something rushes through us. It might be anger, whoosh — it rushes through our face, our fists if we start punching people, our fingers if we start typing angry messages. It takes over us and controls us and finds a way to express itself out in the world. 
- We do a brief meditation, feeling around for emotion in our body, speech and mind now, then remembering what joy felt like in our body, speech and mind. 

### Types of emotions, in CEB
- Emotional episodes can be labeled **destructive** or **constructive**. 
	- **Destructive emotions** are enacted in regrettable ways that are incompatible with our own and others’ happiness.
	- **Constructive emotions** are enacted in ways that are conductive to our own and others’ happiness, and further our cooperation and collaboration. 
- This logic in CEB can be described as the logic of consequences. What consequences do our emotional episodes lead to? It’s also strongly tied to the concept of *skillfulness* — emotional competencies. How good are we at using our raw emotional experiences to bring some benefit to ourselves and others?
- One clear indicator here is being able to use all, or most, or many of our emotional experiences to deepen the communication between us and our partner. We all get confusion, fear, jealousy and so forth — and even as we have these experiences, we might be able to use some of our “weird” emotions to deepen sincerity, honesty, trust, openness and so forth. 
- The *enactment* makes it constructive or destructive. 
- Fear, according to this logic, can be destructive *or* constructive — the difference is what we do with the fear once it starts running through our system as a wave. 
	- Because I am in Nepal, there’s a lot happening here in regard to insects and snakes, a little bit of biological variety. I could be talking to you and a giant cockroach could land on my head! 
	- Instinctively, on an evolutionary level, a rush of feeling comes through me. Then I could respond destructively, by harming the cockroach. A more constructive response would bring some awareness into the situation, and respond with compassion and humor to the cockroach and myself. Same experience of fear, different outcomes. 
	- Cockroaches in Nepal aren’t deadly, they’re just big and like to hang out with humans, sometimes.
- Emotions can be labeled **pleasant** or **unpleasant**. Some emotions can be pleasant *and* destructive (like *Shadenfreude*), or unpleasant and constructive (as during a horror movie, for some). Almost any emotion can manifest constructively *or* destructively. 
- “Establishing the pervasion” in Buddhist logic: a four-square grid. 
- We might have a long experience of active anxiety that’s much longer than 90 seconds. Every emotional experience — except for surprise, which cannot be re-triggered — can be re-triggered into long sequences. That explains how we might have a protracted emotional experience, like a panic attack that might last much, much longer than 90 seconds, or even five minutes. 

### Emotion-related states and conditions
- **Emotion** is short in duration and has an obvious trigger. There’s a specific emotional episode of anger, for example. Emotions rush through our body, speech and mind in response to a trigger. “Chad said this and did that, and made me angry.” Or, “Oh, I recalled something from the past.” 
- **Mood** is longer-lasting and doesn’t always have a clear trigger. I can wake up and already be somewhat irritable — *irritable* is a mood. It’s like the ambience in the room of my mind. Within that atmosphere, there’s a greater potential for emotions of that same category to arise. If we’re in an anxious *mood,* we’re more likely to have *emotional episodes* of fear. If we’re in an irritable *mood,* we’re more likely to have *emotional episodes* of anger. 
	- How do you know if what you’re experiencing is an emotion or a mood? Well, you look at your experience. Is it like a wave that rushes through me, that keeps getting re-triggered? Or is it like something in the back of my mind that colors my perception, but isn’t as strongly present as a wave? You would have to observe and see. 
- **Traits** are relatively stable — it is possible to cultivate a trait or lose a trait. 
	- It is possible to acquire traits associated with anger, and traits associated with joy. I have experienced so many people who have worked so hard in a meditative tradition that they have established a trait that predisposes them to joyful types of experiences. They can even feel unmotivated joy, that springs from within. It is possible to cultivate a trait like that! 
	- We also say, “He is a generally irritable person” — not that he’s in an irritable mood, but that he’s especially prone to being in such moods. Sometimes we say, “Oh, I’m a chronic worrier,” or “I’m often anxious.” 
- **Disorders** are regularly recurring emotional experiences that interfere with our wellbeing to a large degree. When we get specific types of emotions so often, and with such intensity, that they prevent us from being able to enjoy life, or when they push us to bring harm to ourselves and others, then we might say: “Oh, I have a disorder in the anger family.” We usually talk about anxiety-related disorders, sadness-related disorders, anger-related disorders. 
	- PTSD is a specific order in the fear family. It lies a little outside the realm of our workshop today. With disorders, the hardwiring and the mental aspect of it lies deeper than the initial work than we can do in a three-hour workshop. 
	- This model comes from affective or emotional psychology — decades — Paul Ekman’s research. It is not Buddhist in nature, because Buddhism in itself does not even have the concept of “emotion.” There’s no word in the Tibetan language that corresponds to the concept of emotion. Historically, there’s no full correspondence between Buddhist terms and any of the emotional states we’re talking about. 
	- There are three models within the Indo-Tibetan tradition to conceptualize fear. This is where, over time, we need to cultivate the abilityt to switch between different frameworks. Sometimes it is helpful to user this framework from affective psychology. Sometimes it would be helpful to switch to one of the three Buddhist descriptions of what fear is. Each of those frameworks offers us tools, which is why we need them. That’s why I am a Buddhist translator *and* a CEB teacher. 

### Emotional expressions
- When that emotional wave is rushing through us, it expresses itself in our
	- **Face**, with an expression
	- **Speech**, with a grunt or a noise
	- **Gestures**, like “Don’t hurt me, Mister Cockroach!” 
- When talking about emotions in general, the CEB model identifies certain emotions as “universal” — although there are some that do not agree, and there’s the usual scientific dialogue. According to Paul Ekman’s research
	- fear :fearful: 
	- anger :angry: 
	- joy :joy: 
	- disgust or contempt :confounded: 
	- sadness :pensive: 
- My sad Siberian face would quite likely be recognizable to you as sad, even if you come from a land very far from Siberia. 

### Tool: Emotional timeline
We use joy for this exercise, so we don’t trigger ourself by contemplating fear. We are building a little communication technique for ourselves. We break the episode itself into three building blocks:
1. What **triggered** the experience,
2. What the **experience** was in our body and mind, and 
3. What was our **response**. 

For my joy memory:
1. The trigger was that I saw Sarah’s rescue puppy! 
2. The experience:
	- In my body was warmth, huge eyes and open mouth, a desire to move toward the puppy. 
	- In my mind was a tight focus on the puppy itself, and adorability. 
3. I reacted by
	- cooing and exclaiming in a high voice
	- moving toward the puppy and petting him
	- mentally experiencing the flavor of “I am so happy you exist” 

Now we have a communication tool. 
- So the next time we experience a flavor of fear — panic, anxiety, dread — we can communicate, in community or to ourselves, what triggered it, how we experienced it, and how we chose to respond to it. We can say: “I would like to offer that so there is greater clarity about what I am going through,” to others or for ourselves.
- Every time we build emotional timelines, about fear or any other emotion, we can step back enough to understand our emotions more deeply and share them with others. 
- There is also value in looking at specific emotional habits and groups — like fear. 

## 2. Exploring the emotional family of fear 
### Definition
We begin by listing many kinds of words associated with fear. 
- **Fear** arises at the threat of harm (actual, imagined, anticipated, expected or misperceived). 
- As a chronic worrier myself, I can say that, based on my trauma, based on my conditioning, based on my cognitive imbalances, I can absolutely get panicky about something that is not remotely happening in real life. Then again, I can also get panicky about something that *is* actually happening, but I’m being gaslit into thinking it’s not! Human beings are complex. 
- Generally, for all types of fear, the evolutionary messages we are sending to others with our scared face is: *Help me!* If a cockroach landed on me and made a scared noise, my friends sitting in another room would hear that something scary is happening and rush to my aid. If I want to share my anxiety about something, I would have to use more words, but the expression would be the same: “Please reassure me, please remind me that I am not alone, please remind me that I can deal with this potential threat because I belong to a community and have inner resources.” Invoking help has not become obsolete. 
- The emoji 😨 is based on Paul Ekman’s research. It is also true that we can make ourselves somewhat irritable by making an angry face for a long time. It is a trick that actors use that lets us experiment with our emotions in a relatively safe way. 
	- The head moves backwards,
	- the eyes are very wide open
	- the lips stretch horizontally,
	- and the eyebrows raise and are drawn together. 
- Fear can be constructive or destructive. 

### Fear-related moods
We start by naming a whole bunch of things that are scary, from skeletons to holes to the unknown. 
- Anxious mood can pervade our day, making it easier to experience individual emotional episodes of fear. 
- This can be related to something in our personal experience, or be brought about by external factors. Those who have been in abusive relationships know they can be in an anxious mood for years; those who live in violent neighborhoods, or work in racist organizations, know that anxiety can always be there in the background. 
- Anxiety describes a specific type of fear; but in addition to that, there’s an anxious mood, like the ambience in the mood. When anxiety is an *emotion,* it can last about 90 seconds, but it can feel as though it lasts much longer, because it gets re-triggered and re-griggered. 
Lobsang shows us the [Atlas of Emotions](http://atlasofemotions.org/) entry for fear states, from least to most intense:
- Nervousness, “anticipation about the possibility of danger.” 
- Trepidation
- **Anxiety**, which is “fear of an anticipated or actual threat and uncertainty about one’s ability to cope with it.”
- Dread
- Desperation
- Panic
- Horror
- Terror

Lobsang says: Mastering our emotions is the biggest job we have in this life. Mastering the wild energy of emotions, that’s the big task. 
- From experience, for me personally, transforming these fear-related states has been the most challenging thing in my practice. I’m not naturally an angry person; but for a naturally anxious person who has experienced a lot of trauma, this is hard for me. 
- When observing my experience, 

### Fear-related disorders
- An accumulation of multiple factors warps our entire system in a way where we acquire disorders. Sometimes, there’s a traumatization happening; but in some cases, our natural propensities (from being born, or from genes, or from our past lives) predisposed us to a specific disorder. But *why* is less important than *What do I do now?*
- When we think about community mental health, we do need to ask the question of “why,” so we can make sure that conditions do not trigger disorders in people! 
- But in terms of me individually — let’s say I do have PTSD (and I do have some PTSD-related problems). What do I do with it? What I need to do — what I’m trying to do — is identify tools that will help me first, just notice; then, self-regulate effectively; then, over time, I run that very very gently out of my system. It is too easy to use “healing” as marketing bait! “Oh, come to our magical CEB retreat and leave healed!” No, I would never say that. But I would say that we can learn tools and, over time, get less triggered, and experience ourselves as more balanced. 
- The Buddha has quite famously said that it is more important to remove the poisonous arrow than it is to figure out where the arrow came from! 

### Evolutionary responses
- Historically, fear triggered primary responses:
- **Flight**, so blood flows to the large muscles in the legs to run from the tiger.
- **Freeze**. There’s a lizard living in my kitchen, and when I come in it stays completely motionless.
- **Fight**, which triggers anger in very fast alteration. When we are afraid, we don’t experience empathy; fear-based anger, fear-based viciousness, fear-based selfishness, are things we might recognize in ourselves and others.

### Assessing our responses
- These questions are always helpful: 
	- **What am I doing to deal with the potential threat** that the fear is related to?
	- **What am I doing to deal with the feeling** of fear (worry, anxiety, panic) itself?
- These are two different questions! This idea was famously expressed by Shantideva, and is quoted frequently by HH the Dalai Lama: “If there is something that you can do, why worry? Do it. And if there isn’t anything that you can do, why worry? There’s nothing to be done.” 
- A lot of things that people do that later transform into addictions are not done to numb ourselves with regard to anger; they have to do with our attempts to regulate sadness or, more often, anxiety. It’s the low-level anxiety burning in the body that is so troublesome that we try to self-medicate. 
- Fear that we can do something about lessens physical pain, in some situations, and gets replaced with clarity and cohesion. Some people who’ve experienced mortal danger report just clarity and focus. But with a threat that’s further away, that we cannot do anything about, we are likely to experience greater physical pain.
- For those who are experiencing the fear of death, if we feel there’s nothing we can do about death itself, we need to reassess our whole perception of the situation so that we can have some level of agency. So we might say, “I have some control over how I approach death, and how I act towards others when I am dying.” That gives agency. It’s the illusion of not having control that makexs the fear more toxic.

## 3. Exploring strategies for dealing with fear, worry, anxiety, and anxious moods

### A journaling and reflection exercise
- The exercise”
	- What are the triggers of fear for you?
	- What does it feel like in your body when you are feeling the emotion of fear?
	- How do you support yourself when feeling fear, worry, and anxiety *already*? 
- Reviewing these questions frequently is part of what the Dalai Lama calls *emotional hygiene*. We need a large list of practices.
- We also need what I call an emotional spellbook — attending workshops like this one, reading books — so we have tools for speific emotional states, our particular disorders, so we have them at the tips of our fingers and practice them.

### Working with fear / worry / anxiety
1. **Notice and correctly label them (in our mind and in our body).** This is where we can use that emotional timeline thing in conversation with others and ourselves. 
2. **Apply first aid: calm down sufficiently to go back from a state of over-activation** (such as a panic attack). If you are like me and have panic attacks occasionally, you need some first-aid techniques. Some techniques include:
	1. Returning to the sensory domain (rubbing our feet, putting your hand into a bag of dry beans; biting on a lemon; enjoying the smell of your favorite essential oil, etc.). This draws our emotional attention from the story of the emotion into sensory experience. 
	2. Invoking community support (talking to a trusted friend and asking them to hold your hand or breathe with you). “Hey, I’m having a panic attack. Can I hold your hand and talk about your day?” This draws us away from the experience of overactivation. 
3. **Simply *be* with the fear** and fear-related states. This is where we practice mindfulness meditation: we’re aware, we’re watching it with curiosity, we concentrate the mind on the mind itself (*shamatha*) to practice attentional skills. 
	1. Simply begin with the “handshake practice”: watch fear in the spirit of friendliness and curiosity, without fully merging with it, but also without trying to change it in any radical way. (N.B. Very much like unblending in IFS.)
4. **Apply reappraisal strategies.** This means interpreting the situation in a new or different way. Here are some strategies: 
	1. “Real but not true” — this means we acknowledge the existence of fear or anxiety or worry, but we realize that the experience is not describing reality absolutely correctly. “It’s true that I’m experiencing fear, but it’s a very distorted view of reality — not out of malice, but just because of how it’s organized. 
	2. Remembering we have resources. Our friend can remind us: “Hey, you have skills, you have friends.” Oh, I’m not at alone! I’m not going to starve to death! I have inner skills to rely on! 
	3. Feeling safety. It can be secular or spiritual. “Imagine yourself in a safe space,” et cetera. Or taking refuge, or entrusting yourself to a God or higher power. There’s a higher sense of safety present. In the Indo-Tibetan tradition, there’s the idea of turning suffering into the Path: we take scary experiences and turn them into a way to tap into our own essential goodness. 
	4. Empathy, compassion and love. Because fear can take us away from empathy, if we consciously do a compassion exercise or a lovingkindness meditation, we would naturally see ourselves returning from a state of fear. That’s why the Buddha taught compassion meditation as a remedy for fear’s negative perception of reality. Instead of experiencing the world as a scary place, we experience it as a filled with compassion and love. And when we direct compassion to ourselves as a being, just because we notice we are afraid, that disarms the emotional experience of fear and establishes the feeling of clarity. 

To seal the deal: let us do a mental dedication. May all of these ripen in our minds, so with that level of extra grace, we can master our fear.

# Resources from Lobsang
Here are additional materials from Lobsang, provided by Tibet House US: 

- [Slides for the session (as a PDF)](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6q0tgq1nl16dhea/CEB%20Fear%20and%20Worry.pdf?dl=0)
- [General information about CEB]( )https://cultivating-emotional-balance.org)
- [CEB Newsletter](https://cultivating-emotional-balance.org/ceb-mailing-list/)
- [CEB Practices on InsightTimer](https://insighttimer.com/cebtraining)
- [Atlas of Emotions](http://atlasofemotions.org)
- Keep up with Lobsang using [his newsletter](http://eepurl.com/hYE_tP)
- [Other events with Lobsang](https://lobsangtenpa.com/events)
- Book on “handshake practice”: Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Daniel Goleman, [*Why We Meditate*](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Meditate/Daniel-Goleman/9781982178451)
- For some additional pointers on anxiety- and stress-management, see this article (and the associated book): ["Seven Ways to Have a Healthier Relationship with Stress](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/seven_ways_to_have_a_healthier_relationship_with_stress)
- For reference: ["How Anxiety Reduces Empathy"](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_anxiety_reduces_empathy)

### Journaling Questions
- What are the triggers of fear for you personally?
- What does it feel like in your body when you are feeling the emotion of fear? 
- How do you support yourself when feeling fear, worry, and anxiety?

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