Reinterpreting Fear

Although it is hard to acknowledge, fear accompanies us throughout our lives.  We may not be aware of the fear, may try to numb it with addictions, consumptions, deflections, to escaped it with more money, lovers, and chocolate cake. Fear won't be pacified for long by these things.  I am not talking here about fear that is tied to disaster, violence, or illness, fear from actual threat to a life or livelihood.  The fear I am writing about is the kind that runs like static through us even when everything is going as well as we would hope, when we are not in any real danger.  This fear may weave thicker through some more than others especially if there was trauma and loss in childhood.  Regardless, we all vibrate at some frequency with an anxiety that is at its root existential, intimately intertwined with the uncertain nature of our lives and our eventual death. 

 

Advertisers knows this better than we do.  They find ways to heighten our fear in order to sell us solutions.   The NYT recently reported that Americans own a collective 400 million guns.  Much of the gun advertising in the last twenty years has targeted our anxiety successfully convincing people that guns will make them safer, more powerful, freer from fear.  Unfortunately, guns like any other thing cannot resolve existential fear.  No amount of gun power, make-up, alcohol, vacations, or nice furniture can dissolve this fear of uncertainty and death. Spiritual practice is not the solution to fear either. Contrary to what is often claimed, the point of spiritual arts is not to relieve us from fear but to deepen our presence and being in the world.  This means opening up to more not less fear, not trying to push it away or rise above it. When we learn to allow ourselves to fully feel the fear, then can we have the capacity to live with the fear and not from it.  Fear fully realized no longer controls our actions.  We become more free because we are no longer afraid of feeling afraid.

 

Through many years of sustained yoga practice, I am finding a bridge into ease in the midst of the unease, faith in the midst of uncertainty, openness in the middle of fear.  Rather than seeking a stillpoint in life where fears dissolve into an oceans of peace, I am beginning to see how my spiritual practices are helping me to reimagine and live with fear rather wishing it would go away.  Sometimes when I feel fear, I imagine it to be a door opening up inside of me to a new place, a new place for self-understanding, a purging of old pain.  I am learning that without fear it might mean that I am playing it a bit too safe.  In all the places I have lived, there has always been a neighbor who hardly ever leaves the house.  That is playing it too safe.  I have also played it safe over much of my life not doing things I longed to do because I was afraid, doing whatever I could to avoid pain and find comfort and ease and missing out on chances to take risks.  I needed to play it safe at the time to restore faith in myself.  But now playing it safe keeps my world too small.  Now I want to live along the cutting edge of what is unfolding, the unknown.  It can feel dangerous.  But this is preferable to being controlled by fear and  living too small.