A. Yes, there will be fear as part of the experience because you are no longer trying to control the experience in the way that you used to. Polishing awareness will encourage you to create that pause, and in the space you bring the experience, and you bring your habitual reaction. Contain all of this in a spirit of openness, and with the aid of the positive precepts continue to function in a normal and skilful way. This is the middle way. You are neither suppressing nor being carried away by the event. Finding this middle way (entering pure awareness practice) comes through familiarity. To come back time after time to that precious space of neither doing nor not-doing is the middle way.

By practising in this way you will inevitably experience dukkha as fear, because you are not in the familiar reactive state that reinforces the self. And you will experience dukkha because that wheel of becoming and the world that it creates is going into change, and to change the course of your karma inevitably brings negative forces within you to the surface. To me, this is the most profound act anyone can engage with because eventually it will take you beyond suffering and becoming. In my view that makes all the dukkha experienced worthwhile, especially since you will experience dukkha anyway, even if you have no practice at all. The point at which you realise this for yourself will be a part of your voyage of discovery on this wonderful path.