Fear

This has been scary for me to write. All week I have been wrestling with my fears as I write about fear. I have a great many fears and those fears have been preventing me from writing about fear. I have the fear of no one reading this. I have the fear of it being shit. I have the fear of it being shit and everyone reading it. But mostly I have the fear of an impostor worried that I will be found out for the fraud that I am. Who am I to write about fear? I am just as scared as everyone else.

Life is scary! Living life every day is scary. It sometimes feels like going through a day is just a game of navigating a series of calculated risks. It’s like driving through rush hour traffic in a densely populated city. Having to stop and go with the ever-changing rhythm of the cars around you is a delicate dance. Mess up the dance and you’re in a fender bender or worse. So, too, with fear. Fear is like a red light green light of signals instructing you how to live your life. It signals green zones, green actions, green places, people and things and red zones, red actions, red places, people, and things. Follow the rhythm of your fear to stay safe. Fear wants you to believe that if you do not follow its signals then the result will be severe harm to you or to someone you care about.              

But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Fear is not negative, though it feels negative. Fear is actually an information system, a biological information feedback system. A survival mechanism. Fear exists so a person can react to potential threats and decide the safest course of action quickly. When a human being has a fear reaction their brain becomes hyperalert, the pupils dilate, the bronchi dilate, breathing accelerates, heart rate rises, blood pressure rises, blow flow increases, and the stream of glucose to the skeletal muscles increases. At the same time all non-vital organs, organs that do not help in the survival mechanism shut down. All this happens within seconds of being frightened. The body is incredibly efficient and enables a person to make an instant decision for their safety based on their fear response.

Putting it another way, fear is a messenger. When fear rises up, it is trying to tell you something. It is trying to tell you go this far and no further. It is saying on the other side of this wall I’m building is something that can do you harm.

Which feels all kinds of intense and unpleasant but is actually great! Imagine if we listened to this system to make decisions! What if we used our fear feedback messenger system to make decisions. Not only could fear tell me the risks associated with writing this article, but I could use fear to decide whether to write it or not.

Now whether the thing on the other side of the wall is actually a threat varies. The fear can be legitimate like for example don’t dance on the edge of a cliff. But the fear can also be absurd like don’t dance ever because people will see you. Being seen dancing isn’t life threatening; dancing on the edge of a cliff is. In a similar vein, writing this feels life threatening. What if I write this and it is shit and everyone sees it and my reputation is ruined and I can never show my face in public or on the internet ever again as long as I live. Obviously, that is not the case. Part of the trick here is making fear your ally. Helping your fear calibrate appropriately to react with the relevant intensity for the associated risk.

How on Earth does one do that?

Well, it begins with understanding where our fears come from. One of my favorite facts of life is that children, infants, have two fears when they are born. That’s it. Only two. You would think that we are born with much more than two fears. Especially with how much we fear as adults and later in childhood. But the truth is that we are born with only two fears – the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. The rest of the fears we have are learned. They are learned from negative experiences, and they are learned by watching the behavior of those around us, particularly our caregivers. When our caregivers fear something, avoid something, that is a very strong signal to avoid that which they fear.

This means that if a fear is learned, it can be unlearned! Our caregivers are not villains. They have their own histories that taught them the fears they have that they conveyed onto their children. Moreover, their goal as caregivers is to keep the child in their care safe. We are all taught our caregivers’ fears. We are also taught fear by experience – a painful, shameful, or unpleasant experience of any kind teaches us fear. Unpleasant experiences create aversions which blossom into fear.

So how can we unravel these learned fears. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe it starts with recognizing what we fear. So much of fear is unconscious. You walk around a hole on a familiar path enough times and it becomes unconsciously the way. From there, even if the hole is filled, it is difficult not to walk around it anyway. Being aware of your body and noticing fear reactions is the first step to unraveling fear. Notice when your body activates the fear feedback mechanism. Notice what triggers that mechanism. Then take the time to evaluate if the fear is yours or something you were taught. Evaluate if the fear is protecting you from something that is actually life threatening or just perceived to be life threatening. Little by little you can shift the boundaries of your fears and create a new reality.

Working with fear and making it an ally gives way to an entirely new way of life, an entirely new type of life. Imaging living a life that feels both completely safe and is authentic to you. A life where you don’t allow the fear other people have taught you to keep you from doing what you know is true for you. A life where risks are taken with the help of fear rather than in spite of fear. A life of healthy fear.

“I am free from fear, the fear that keeps me stuck.”

— Source unknown

Radical Self Trust

‘Mother knows best.’

‘Listen to your father.’

‘Respect your elders.’

These are the phrases we hear growing up.

And yes, to some extent, they are true. Our parents, our caregivers, have greater experience and know more than we do. They can show us the pitfalls they have plummeted into, how to avoid them. Where the rocks and steppingstones in the river of life are in order to safely traverse difficult terrain. I do not discount in any way the wisdom of our elders. Their songs. Their stories. How their words can guide us through life.

But also.

I believe each individual is born with an inherent wisdom. A personal inner wisdom. A wisdom that makes one person a great artist and another a great athlete. Skills and talents that a person is inherently coded with in their DNA. As a child develops, they show natural inclinations, they are drawn to certain toys more than others. They are drawn to certain stories, certain topics in school, more than others. This is their personal wisdom that shows where their talents lie.

But caregivers, parents, teachers, the world at large do not always encourage these talents. For one reason or another they do not notice, do not tend to, or ignore altogether the talents of the child in their care. There is the idea of creating a ‘well rounded’ child instead of tending to a child’s unique abilities. I have always found this strange. People generally are not well rounded. They are lopsided. It is rare to be equally gifted in sciences and languages and math. A personally generally leans to one area. It is unnatural to force their focus in a circle to be equal in all topics when they have a natural proclivity to one or two, not six or eight. By making someone well rounded they become mediocre in all topics rather than strong in their natural one.

There are also parents who want their children to fulfil a goal they never achieved or got to pursue. This superimposes a parent’s inner knowing overtop of their child’s. A child wanting to please their parent, to receive their love and praise, erases their inner knowing to try to accept their parent’s knowing for them.

Organized religion also instructs us to not trust our own inner knowing. Instead, adherents to a religion are taught to follow the leader of their congregation, the rules in a book, their parents, and for women they should follow their spouse. One religion that is quite popular in the United States instructs women to ‘die to yourself’ and supersede what is natural to them with their spouse’s instructions, their church’s teachings. A guru will do the same thing. He will instruct you in the ways of the spiritual tradition he follows and will tell you that he is a channel for wisdom. That you as a novice cannot possibly know. That a novice cannot possibly receive the wisdom of the deity or know what is best for them. The guru also supersedes their will overtop of their followers’.

Quite quickly, a person’s individual inner knowing is lost due to their socialization as a child and the instructions they receive as an adult.

As a result, every choice in life requires a group consensus. We’ve all been there. We ask friends, ‘What do you think?’. We scour the internet for advice. We listen to podcasts. Sometimes in desperation we ask perfect strangers. We are so used to asking everyone around us instead of looking inward and asking ourselves. It feels impossible to decide, especially the important decisions, without first asking everyone you know.

Should I stay with my boyfriend? Should I dump my girlfriend? Which job should I take? Where should I live?

All of this becomes impossible to decide.

We’ve been conditioned, especially women, not to trust ourselves. So the act of trusting our decision without consulting anyone else - that is a radical act.

One of the keys to these decisions is the illusion of a choice being something that needs to be chosen logically. Instead of looking inward and using the wisdom that we have from childhood and knowing. There is a difference between a decision and following one’s inner knowing.

This powerful knowing is similar to how our cells work. Cells don’t need to be told their function. They are created knowing their function. A cell inherently knows it is a blood cell or a liver cell or a brain cell. It does its function. It replicates itself. It repairs itself. Damaged cells are discarded to be replaced by new cells. Our cells are constantly working to repair and fix. Our cells want us to be healthier and better. Our cells know what is best for us. Our cells don’t make choices, they know.

Children know how to do this. If you ever have seen a child grabbing what it wants, it does so decisively. They don’t do it by committee. They don’t ask for a group consensus if this is right or not. If this is the next right step. They fling themselves forward with the hope and trust that their feet or their parent will catch them and grab exactly what they want. Children follow their inner knowing inherently. Children know their function just as their cells inside them know their functions. It is only later that children forget.

So what is Radical Self Trust? Radical Self Trust is returning to the inner wisdom and knowing that we are all born with. It is accepting that you know your truth, your wisdom, your path better than anyone else. It is the practice of looking inwards for an answer before looking anywhere else. It is the process of abandoning living by group consensus. This is not easy. We have been conditioned and socialized to accept others’ words, plans, ideas as true for us. So returning to our own truth requires a great deal of work. But, personally, I believe the work is worth it.

Instead of living a mediocre life of consensus to what everyone else thinks is right for you, you can live a fulfilling life of what is right for you.