There is a common misconception about fear that it is something negative, something to be avoided or to be overcome. That, at least, was my perspective for many years. But I learned over time that by facing my fears, I began a profound journey which took me deep inside. Much of what holds us back from living a fulfilling life is fear that we have not explored and integrated. The more we can accept and work through our fears, the more we are able to live our life in the fullest and most rewarding way possible. But on an even deeper level, facing and embracing our fears is a doorway to the divine, to a profound connection to existence. It opens us to our vulnerability.
As I consider the major events of my life, it seems they have revolved around dealing with my fears one way of another – the fears of loss, of punishment, of criticism and judgment, of rejection, loneliness and abandonment, fears of survival, of exposure and humiliation, of success or failure, of intimacy, of confrontation and anger or of losing control. And each time that I have been able to move through a significant fear and relaxed with it, it has marked a new stage of self-discovery and depth.
There are basically two kinds of fear – existential and psychological. Existential fear is knowing that we are vulnerable and mortal beings with an intuitive wisdom that we are essential not in control of the most fundamental events in our life. Psychological fear is the result of countless insults from neglect, intrusions, and invasions early in life. Many of us, perhaps most of us, have been raised in a jungle atmosphere – in an atmosphere of pressure, tension, and comparison, where we were judged, compared to, perhaps even abused, and evaluated based on performance and appearance rather than being. This kind of conditioning is deeply rooted in the societies in which most of us grew up and gets transmitted unknowingly and automatically from one generation to the next. When we have been raised in this kind of environment, we end up carrying a tremendous amount of fear and shame in our minds and bodies. Our sense of self becomes damaged, and we lose an innate sense of trust and openness.
When I remind myself of some of the things I have done (and thought) because of acting out from jungle consciousness, it is hard to forgive myself. I have competed with colleagues and even wished them to fail. I have been impatient with friends, lovers, and clients and sometimes even abused them with my judgments and impatience. I have been dishonest and unaccountable; I have betrayed people with my narcissism and have not been there when they needed me. I have pushed myself mercilessly, held myself to impossible standards and been hard on myself when I didn’t live up to my expectations. This kind of behavior came directly from my “jungle” conditioning. It is not an excuse, but it is an explanation. Jungle conditioning builds a core of fear and from this fear, without loving awareness; we naturally act out with all kinds of destructive behaviors – to ourselves and to others.
I realized years ago, through self-work and working with others, that the root of dysfunction, sabotage, and all the behaviors that I mentioned above, is fear. Fear is a core issue, perhaps the core issue that we all need to deal with in our lives. We can begin to understand our fear by learning what we may be afraid of – such as invasion, insensitivity, abuse, humiliation, abandonment, rejection, loneliness, isolation, or annihilation. But on a deeper level, we get to know our fear by what it feels like in the body and by feeling how it drives our thoughts and our actions.
When it is denied and unacknowledged, it gets shoved into the basement of our consciousness from where it exerts a powerful and often crippling effect on our lives. Even though we may try to cover it up with all sorts of compensations and addictions, if it remains a hidden force, it can cause chronic anxiety, sabotage our creativity, and make us rigid, suspicious, and obsessed with security. Worst of all, it can destroy our efforts to find love. It is fear that keeps us living in the jungle and out of the garden. It is our fears, which prevent us from recognizing our essential gifts, and opening to what life has to offer.
Somewhere along the way of my own exploration, I discovered how deep my fears were, how deep they have always been. I knew I had many fears, but my attitude was that fear was something I needed to overcome, or it would limit my life and make me a coward. For as long as I can remember, I made the decision that I would not let my fears “get” to me. I used my determination and my will power to push through them. I even remember years ago while learning to climb rocks that halfway up a 350’ ascent, I said out loud, “Fuck you mountain, you are not going to beat me.”
None of this was helping me become any more intimate with myself. I was running from my fears. And this avoidance was splitting me from my own vulnerability and my depth. That split showed itself in my relationships. My lovers were carrying the projection of my vulnerability and I faulted them for it one way or another for being too “needy” or too fear ridden. I developed a lifestyle which was built on a creative compensation for all my fears. I worked hard in school, I kept myself busy doing things, I challenged myself with risky, and I avoided intimacy. I pushed and pushed, I rushed from one thing to another, I accomplished, I pleased, and I looked for approval and recognition, all to avoid feeling the fears and emptiness inside.
Of course, I didn’t know that I was on a treadmill to avoid fear. I just thought that living this way was how life was. I didn’t recognize another way of living until much later. As long as I was trapped in all this fear compensation, I couldn’t see that it was a way of living that was deeply engraved in Western culture – so deeply imbedded in the culture that it seemed almost unthinkable to break out of it. It took me many years of soul searching before I discovered how deeply trapped I was – that I was in an unconscious “coping trance”, the trance of running away from fear all the time to cover up a little boy inside who was terrified of failure and of rejection. Even my habitual spacing out and withdrawing was a cover for fear – the fears of a child who was in shock much of the time. When I sat before Osho while being initiated into sannyas, he said to me, “You stop looking for God. He will find you. Meanwhile, you relax and enjoy life.” But it took me quite some time to get it because if I stopped running, I needed to feel all the fear I was avoiding.
Now, I know that there is another way to approach fear. I have learned and am still learning about trauma and the affects it has on one’s nervous system. I am taking the time to track the fear sensations in the body when they get provoked and notice how fear affects my thoughts and behavior. This approach involves learning to accept and understand my fear both in the ways it shows itself in my life today and how it developed because of childhood experiences. It includes developing the ability to feel how my fear presents itself in the body and learning to notice how and when it drives my thinking process.
Another aspect of my process of working with fear involved learning how to develop energy in the body so that I could retrieve the life energy that I lost because of trauma and negative conditioning. This included learning to build strength and confidence in the body and incorporate a quality of risk into my life. It helped me to build confidence, self-trust, and self-esteem. The areas of risk have varied, but the two biggest have been opening deeper to vulnerability and love as well as risking to put myself out as a seminar leader while at the same time not overwhelming myself with feelings of failure and helplessness. The issues that I have dealt with are probably issues that affect all of us deeply and even though we all have individual differences, we also share common themes. And perhaps deep down, we are all looking for the same thing – an ability to accept and love ourselves and to share that love with another person.
When I started my training in psychiatry, on one of the first days at the hospital, I noticed a woman crawling on the floor of the ward. I knew her name from her chart and went up to her and asked, “Mary, what are you doing?” She looked up at me and quite sincerely and honestly answered, “I’m doing the best I can.” I had nothing else to say but Mary taught me a great lesson that day. All we can do in the end, is follow Mary’s advice. Do the very best we can.