Dear Friends and Colleagues,
This month’s theme of cultivating courage by befriending
fear was prompted by a question from a young woman who wrote
in response to last month’s issue on “stretching choices”.
(A link to last month’s issue is at the bottom of this
article.) With her permission, I share an excerpt from that
letter:
“Denise, I love the idea of making the stretching choice
in relation to various crossroads I am at in my life. But I
am so full of fear …fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear
of discrimination for having a disability. Please write to
me and tell me how to rid my life of this suffocating fear
so that I can breathe again and make the kind of choices
that, as you put it, ‘will help my life to blossom in
healthy and beautiful ways’.”
I am deeply grateful for this woman’s courage in writing
this letter, and in response, acknowledged that what her
letter reflected was not a person paralyzed by fear, but a
person inspired by the hope and courage to move past it. The
very writing of the letter and the articulating of the
question was a self-empowering act giving credence to the
fact that while she may have many fears, she is not her
fear.
I know, and I suspect many readers know, of what she
speaks. We have all experienced times in our lives when we
felt suffocated by fear and longed to breathe the deep clear
air of courage again. If there is anyone reading this who
has not yet had this experience, don’t worry, you’ll have
your chance. All it takes is for life to happen in a way
that does not fit our purposes – experiencing a lay-off or
sudden unemployment, the loss of a loved one, the diagnosis
of an illness, the ending of a relationship, or a move to a
new city, state or country. Feel free to fill in the blanks,
as any type of transition will do. For when we find
ourselves in the throes of unwanted change, or in the midst
of our own heart’s yearning to effect a change of our own,
we will hear fear knocking on the door of the innermost
chamber of our hearts. Clearly uninvited, do we let it in?
Do we ignore its presence in hopes it will go away? Or do we
attend to fear with the attention, courtesy and hospitality
it deserves?
This woman’s desire to “rid her life of fear” did not in
any way surprise me because ours is a fear-negating culture.
Fear is a tainted trait, associated with weakness, cowardice
and irrationality. We view fear as an obstacle to love,
reason, creativity, courage and power. We see no use for it.
As children we are taught to put our fears away, along with
our childhood games and toys. (Do you remember the shame of
being thought of as a “scaredy cat”?) By the time we are
adults, the devaluation and shaming of fear has taken root
in us and we have sent a clear message to our hearts: Fear
is not welcome here.
While we treat it as toxic, the truth is that fear is a
primitive, basic emotion built into us so we can survive. It
is a human call to protect that which we love and value in
life, an essential part of the daily kaleidoscope of
emotions we experience in response to being fully alive. In
fact, the more fully engaged we are in life, the more fears
we are likely to have. If we keep to ourselves and relate to
few people, we are not as vulnerable to the host of possible
fears and concerns that are bound to arise in any deep and
meaningful relationship. When we begin to care about a
social cause or issue, we become sensitive to an entire new
sphere of concerns we were immune to before we became
invested. Anyone thinking about becoming a parent should
prepare for a new and never-ending world of fears which
their virgin hearts could never have imagined before
becoming a parent!
To rid our world of fear, we would have to shrink from
life itself. In fact, here’s a great way to avoid fear –
don’t fall in love or care deeply about anyone or the world,
don’t involve your heart in anything outside yourself, don’t
work for anything other than your most base physical needs,
and oh yeah, don’t bother giving a hoot whether you or
anyone else lives or dies. There, that should cover you.
What if we instead befriended fear as a loyal companion?
What if we stopped thinking of fear as a shameful emotion
and recognized it instead as an important messenger, a
devoted informant keeping watch at the lookout tower of our
lives? Whether or not we should agree with the information
presented by fear is another question, as we can always feel
free to disagree and act on faith instead. The least we can
do is respect our fear, acknowledging that it is borne of
our own experience, springing from the same source of life
that brings us joy, grief, wonder, sorrow, surprise,
disbelief and the entire spectrum of human emotion. Here is
a summary of the most important lessons I have ever learned
about befriending our everyday fears and cultivating the
courage to live life wholeheartedly.
1. Give thanks for fear!
M. Scott Peck once suggested, “The absence of fear is not
courage, but some kind of brain damage.” Being free from
fear can be just plain stupid, foolish, or even fatal.
Without fear’s input to our senses, impulses and actions, we
might freely engage in unsafe sex, make capricious and
uncalculated career moves, and trust every Tom, Dick or
Harry who approached us with the newest, no-lose financial
scam. Our everyday rational fears protect us from making
otherwise dangerous choices, and we ignore them at our
peril. But even our more irrational fears, including those
we may deem as “neurotic”, have something of value to teach
us about our limitations, our vulnerabilities, and our need
for healing. Whether it is an ongoing fear of rejection,
abandonment, or possible embarrassment – these fears serve
as a map of where we have been where we do not want to go
again. All fears herald a need for our attention – a message
for which we can be grateful.
It is a truth of the heart that what we resist, persists.
What we avoid makes us frightened, hard, and inflexible. It
is an equal truth that what we embrace becomes transformed;
especially in the case of fear. A playful statement made by
Ralph Waldo Emerson makes the point well: “When a dog is
chasing after you, whistle for him.” When fear knocks on the
door, open the door and invite it to tea, sit at its feet,
and learn what it is there to teach you.
2. Identify what is at the core of the fear.
In the face of fear, we need to ask ourselves, “What it
is I am really afraid of?” This is a liberating question. In
his book, Anam Cara, John O’Donohue describes fear as a kind
of fog that tends to spread everywhere and falsify the shape
of everything until it is pinned down and asked, “What are
you?” He suggests that when we identify the root of fear, it
shrinks to a proportion that we are able to engage – a size
that we can deal with. When we know what is frightening us,
when we can name and frame it, we take back its power.
In order to find the particular brand of courage needed
to meet our fear, we need to know what we are up against!
What if we replaced the quest to become fearless with the
much more reasonable quest of becoming fear-conscious? What
if we asked questions like: What is my fear saying to me?
What is the useful message in this feeling? Am I taking a
realistic risk in quitting my job or buying this house, or
am I putting myself too much in jeopardy? What is at the
heart of this fear – a future event, a person, a difficult
situation, a diagnosed or undiagnosed illness, a challenge
at work, possible relapse into an addiction? Rainer Marie
Rilke advised us that “Our deepest fears are like dragons
guarding our deepest treasure.” What a great question: What
treasure is this fear here to guard – my sense of security,
my need to feel loved, my desire to hold on and not let go
of this part of my life?
3. Make good use of fear; discern what it is asking you
to do. Alfred Hitchcock made great use of his fears by
transforming them into art! He once said, “The only way I
get rid of my fears is to make films about them.” (And of
course we have him to thank for making us completely
neurotic about taking showers when we are home alone or
seeing one too many birds sitting on a telephone line.) But
really, we can learn to put our fears to constructive use.
Fear of falling back into a depression can lead us to attend
support group meetings. Fear of a heart attack can motivate
us to lower salt and fat intake, exercise and relax. Fear of
poverty in our later years can lead us to put money away for
our future. Fear of never experiencing deep intimacy can
lead us to expressing our love in more concrete ways.
Then again, we need not confront and conquer everything
we’re afraid of. For example, I don’t feel particularly
compelled to overcome my fear of riding roller coasters
because I don’t feel my life adversely affected by not
getting on them. However, I would like to overcome my fear
of riding on small airplanes because I am often tempted to
turn down work in remote areas of the country. When fear
stifles our sense of adventure, stopping us from acting from
our deepest values, urging us to stay quiet when we need to
speak up, undermining our ability to use our gifts and
talents, we need to push through the fear, albeit with
wobbly knees, a pounding heart, or a quivering voice. We
need to discern which fears need to be met with caution and
which need to be met with courage.
4. Notice the difference between “having fear” and “being
fearful”.
I love the motto of Outward Bound Program – “The goal is
not to rid our stomachs of butterflies, but to get them to
fly in formation!” What this means to me is that we if can
increase our tolerance of fear and find a way of living with
it peacefully, we can have fear without having to live
fearfully! It’s not so much our fear that gets us into
trouble, but our avoiding what triggers it. We might have a
fear of public speaking, but that’s only a problem if we
never do it. We can fear rejection, but go to the interview
anyway. We can fear abandonment, but commit our hearts to
another person anyway. It is only in avoiding what we are
afraid of that fear becomes a problem for us.
We will always have fears, but we need not be our fears,
for we have other places within ourselves from which to
speak and act and choose. At times when we feel dizzy with
fear, it is easy to forget that we have solid ground upon
which to stand and make choices. Becoming tolerant of fear
does not mean acquiescing to what scares us, giving in,
becoming passive, or becoming cowardly. It means accepting
the butterflies in our stomach but getting them to fly in
formation.
In the bigger scheme of things, life may not be asking us
to “do” something as much as it is urging us to “be”
something. In light of our fears, we need to discern what
our courage is asking us to be - humble, patient, generous,
grateful, hopeful?
5. Notice the nuances of fear and call it by its real
name.
The word fear is global and undiscriminating, like love.
It would probably help us if we paid attention to the
nuanced distinctions of our fear. For example, in any given
situation we might ask ourselves, “What is it that I am
really feeling here – uneasy, nervous, panicked,
apprehensive, fretful, tense, or truly frightened? Depending
on which word best defines our feeling, we gain perspective
in relation to our fear. Fretting about making a good
impression in a job interview is that not the same as
fearing for your spouse who has gone for a second round of
tests due to a suspicious tumor.
Some kinds of fear we can soothe with deep breathing or
talking ourselves through them while other fears are
alerting us to take direct action of some kind. When we fail
to notice these distinctions, we treat all fear equally and
may find ourselves overreacting. I’ll never forget the
person who approached me while in the throes of what felt
like terror, just before delivering a keynote speech to my
largest audience ever. She said, “Denise, nervousness is
just excitement without breath. Breathe!” In fact, I found
that she was right. I wasn’t terrified - I was shaking with
a mixture of anticipation, excitement, and a healthy dose of
humility!
6. Cultivate courage by deepening our coping skills.
Susan Jeffers, in her brilliant book, “Feel the Fear and
Do It Anyway”, suggests that at the heart of every one of
our fears is simply the fear that we won’t be able to handle
whatever life may bring. She says it is not events (like
illness, bankruptcy, poverty or divorce) that scare us so
much, nor the emotions they bring (like loneliness,
humiliation, pain or despair). What terrifies is the fear
that in light of these events and emotions, we will not be
able to cope. We can take heart with this way of
understanding seeing things because one way, then, of
dealing with our fear, is to ask ourselves how we can gain a
sense of control in the situation. By increasing our sense
of confidence in our own ability to cope with any given
situation, we can eclipse our fear.
When we lose a sense of control in relation to fears,
they go from being challenges to major stresses that can
cause us to become totally exhausted, more vulnerable to
illness and burnout. Another great question in relation to
any fear is, “In a worse case scenario, how will I somehow
manage? What control do I have over preventing this scenario
and what control do I continue to have even in the event
that it happens?”
7. Remember that worry is not preparation.
Andre Dubus wisely reminds us, “It is not hard to live
though a day of you can live through a moment. What creates
despair is the imagination, which insists on conjuring up
visions of the future and predicting millions of moments,
thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live in
the present moment.” What he is talking about here is the
profound effect that worry has in our lives as we attempt to
predict the future.
The mind will either use the color of hope or the color
of fear in imagining the future, and the crayon that gets
the most use is that of fear! Wayne Dyer says that worry is
no more and no less than the complete misuse of our own
imaginations! I don’t know about you, but I am often the
willing victim of my own overactive and melodramatic
imagination as it conjures up pictures and scenarios that
far outdo anything that real life is apt to cook up.
Worrying about a situation is not the same as preparing for
it. We can, in fact, make better use of the powerful gift of
the imagination by envisioning more realistic, controllable
and manageable circumstances.
8. Practice Moment-to-Moment Courage
All courage starts out as fear. We transform fear into
courage by making day-to-day, even minute-by-minute,
decisions to keep climbing while accepting inevitable stalls
and setbacks. To dare to take the just the next step up is
to embrace life and, at times, to feel an incredible peace
within that has nothing at all to do with external
circumstances. Have you ever had it happen that when you
mustered the courage to face what you feared most, a
reservoir of strength and power arose from within you? This
is not only common, it’s typical. I believe this is true, in
part, because of what New Zealand Mountaineer, Sir Edmund
Hillary, suggested: “It’s not the mountain that we conquer,
but ourselves.” Through courageous action, even in small
steps, we find our faith.
There is comfort in the words of Krishnamurti: “The only
courage that matters is the kind that will get you from
moment to moment.” I love knowing that while I may never
find the courage that gets me from month to month nor from
year to year, I can always muster enough to get me from
moment to moment. And even when we don’t feel particularly
courageous, we can learn to “do” courage, even if just for a
day. Courage can’t be gotten once and for all. Each time we
face a challenge, we have to make a courageous decision
based on that circumstance.
It helps, however, to remember times in the past when we
were courageous and to remind ourselves that we can be
courageous once again. But what worked last year, even last
month, may not work now. Only by giving careful attention to
what’s happening right now can we make one more courageous
decision. Many small courageous decisions accumulate to form
the habit of courage. Each seemingly insignificant choice
made on the side of your faith and confidence adds up.
Little by little, one choice at a time, we face fear and
muster courage.
What fear tells us is that we are human, that we are
vulnerable, and that we are interconnected with others in
the fabric of life. We can let ourselves feel fear, breathe
through it, and uses its energy. What courage tells us is
that we have the force of the human spirit within us. We who
are not threatened by the immediate, in-your-face fears that
plague millions of people on earth – fears of starvation,
war, homelessness, disease, pervasive violence – have the
tremendous privilege of learning to live life mindful of the
less urgent fears that disturb our otherwise peaceful lives.
What if we used our fear by channeling it through
constructive acts of compassion and service? In our fear of
illness, let’s attend to someone who is ill. In our fear of
loneliness, let’s befriend elders in the local nursing home.
In our fear of death, let’s be with people at a hospice! In
the words of Pericles, “Those who can most truly be
accounted brave are those who best know the meaning of what
is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then go out,
undeterred, to meet what is to come.”
Wishing you the courage to befriend your fear and to live
with the spirit that brings light to the dark,
~ Denise
© Denise Bissonnette, March 2005 (If not used for
commercial purposes, this article may be reproduced, all or
in part, providing it is credited to "Denise Bissonnette,
Diversity World - www.diversityworld.com." If included in a
newsletter or other publication, we would appreciate
receiving a copy.)
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