Looking “In the Face of Fear”

Shambhala Sun Senior Editor Barry Boyce shares the backstory about our new book In the Face of Fear: Buddhist Wisdom for Challenging Times, along with some short excerpts sure to perk up your mind and build your confidence when you find yourself in the face of fear. (Follow us on Twitter for even more.)

I’ve been hearing from people who took some of their time off over the year-end holiday period to read In the Face of Fear: Buddhist Wisdom for Difficult Times, the anthology I edited that was published late last year.

It’s been nice to hear that people have been finding it a good read, helpful, and something they could give to friends and family at any level of familiarity with meditation. In the Face of Fear emerged from discussions we’ve been having for a long time about ways of presenting the work of our many Sun contributors in a series of books focused on particular topics, such as relationships, anger, and so forth. Our discussions about a first topic to focus on coincided with the world financial meltdown of late 2008, a time when we started to hear from lots of friends and readers about losses of jobs and savings and difficulties with children getting their lives off the ground.

The book was a labor of love that consumed a lot of my attention and made for many late evenings at the office for more than half a year. To pick out the material, I read several books’ worth of dharma from our extensive library here as well as issues of the magazine going back many years. When you’re getting absorbed in so much material that’s speaking directly to you, it’s tough to figure out what to include and not include, but we needed a book, not an encyclopedia. Some pieces were taken as a whole and some were just t0o big, so they needed to be carefully condensed to retain the thrust of the original. The result is the distilled essence of many fine dharma works.

Since crisis was on the minds of our writers, we also thought it would be helpful to commission some pieces both for the magazine and the book that would be topical, so eight of the selections are original. It also became clear that with more than thirty pieces we would need to give the book some structure, so we started out with basic immediate truths about difficulty and distress and expanded from there to broader topics. Readers seem to like how it turned out. The structure contains all the variety in a way that makes it easier to apprehend.

Another device that’s critical for an anthology of this type is to provide a précis at the beginning of each piece, so someone skimming can decide whether they want to glance something over or dig deeper. Condensing a whole piece into a few lines is a challenge, which coincidentally took me back to my first paid writing job thirty-five years ago: writing abstracts for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In those days, they gave me a piece of paper with ten lines on it and told me to type it to fit into those lines. It was an early precursor to the age of Twitter. In that spirit of condensation, over the holidays I found a pithy outtake from each of the pieces in the anthology. Here are some of them; you’ll find more here on SunSpace in coming days, and also on Twitter. So why not follow us?

“If we wish for greater wisdom and kindness in the world, we could start by inhabiting our own body with some degree of kindness and wisdom, even for one moment just accepting ourselves as we are rather than forcing ourselves to conform to some impossible ideal.” — from Dharma, by Jon Kabat-Zinn

“A strong emotion is like a storm. If you look at a tree in a storm, the top of the tree seems like it might break at any moment and you are afraid the tree might be uprooted. But if you turn your attention to the trunk of the tree, you realize its roots are deeply anchored in the ground, and the tree will hold.” — from Healing Pain and Dressing Wounds, by Thich Nhat Hanh

“We must see the difficult people in our lives as human beings like ourselves. People who act cruelly toward us are actually in adverse circumstances, creating unwholesome karma that will bring about their own future suffering. Seeing that as the universal human condition, rather than cosmic revenge, can become a wellspring of compassion.” — from The Practice of Loving-Kindness for All, by Joseph Goldstein

“Mind is fickle and objects are seductive. When something feels unpleasant, one gets disturbed by it; if it’s pleasant, one gets caught up in it. Mind is unstable, steered by objects, oversensitive, chasing one object after another. Instead of this relentless chasing about, we ought to take a break.” — from Fearless Simplicity, by Tsoknyi Rinpoche

“Preoccupation with money is fixation on something that has no meaning in itself, apart from the forms it takes, forms that we become less and less able to truly appreciate. money is not a thing but a process, an energy that is not really mine or yours. If you understand that it is an empty, socially constructed symbol, you can use it wisely and compassionately to reduce the world’s suffering.” — from Lack of Money, by David R. Loy

“Everything rises and falls, and yet in exactly the same moment things are eternal and aren’t going anywhere at all. We need to see with a kind of binocular vision, one eye aware of how things are coming and going all the time, the other of how they’ve never moved—not as two separate ways of seeing, but as one seamless field of vision.” — from Grounded Improvisation, by Joan Sutherland

Click here for more information or to order In The Face of Fear.