Fear is a Guide
Image: Fear by Anahata Giri
“I wrap my fear around me like a blanket. I sail my ship of safety ’til I sank it. I’m crawling on your shores.” - Indigo Girls
“We are irrevocably altered by walking ceremonially toward what we most fear.”
- Bill Plotkin
The emotion of fear has always been my most difficult, slippery emotion to experience. In my twenties, I began a slow reclaiming of my emotional life. With a background experience of childhood violence, there were a lot of emotions to reclaim. However, I would consistently get stuck when it came to fear. How does one feel and express fear?? It has taken me a long time to understand fear. Thirty years later, fear has finally become a trusted guide. Culturally, we assume fear is a warning for us to move away from something - but frequently fear lights up in us as a messenger to move us towards something, even though it is scary. It was no surprise when Fear erupted into my soul quest as I describe below. I welcome fear now as an enlivening and potent messenger in my life. Fear helps us connect to inner resources of embodied intelligence, instinct and intuition.
In exploring the gifts of fear, I want to make clear the difference between fear and conditioned reactivity to fear. Modern culture blurs the two and tends to devalue fear, seeing it as an obstacle, not a guide. Reacting from fear or is very different to responding from fear. Moving through conditioned reactivity and reclaiming our relationship with fear is empowering and liberating.
Fear is bound to arise for any wanderer on the soul path. Fear lights up when we are in danger or when there is a threat of some kind. The brink of transformation, of change, of moving from the known to the unknown, can be experienced by the small self as a threat. Fear is designed to alert out attention so we can be responsive to the situation and make attuned decisions. When we allow it to move through us, here in this moment, we can hear fear's guidance.
Reactivity to fear, can keep us stuck in habitual patterns, including behaviours of avoiding, suppressing, rationalising, fleeing from the fear, fighting the fear, dissociating or freezing in fear. When we slowly, over time, work through out habitual - and often trauma-related - reactions to fear, we can then increase our capacity to turn to fear itself, to feel fear’s sensations and allow fear to be a powerful guide.
Perhaps you can see in this account of my wrestle with fear, both my reactivity to fear and then finally my surrender to simply being with fear itself.
It is the first night of my three day solo soul quest in the bush. I have already fasted for a day. Hunger and fear gnaws away in my stomach. I try to ignore the fear but when I realise that the string inside one of my tent poles has lost its elasticity, fear is let loose. I think of worst (exaggerated) scenarios of the storm coming early, the tent collapsing. My inner critic starts to rant. I make do, stick the pole into the ground, then crawl into my tent.
My tent feels claustrophobic. My mind is spinning. There is a double fear about my quest: that either nothing much will happen or that something big will happen. I feel scared of the dark. Part of me sees how fear sets the mind off in a spiral of reactivity. How do I get to the fear itself?
I feel the fear. I feel the chest tightening, solar plexus gripping, butterflies in my belly. I am curious. I breathe into the sensations. I see the difference between the mind-spinning reactivity and the embodied experience of fear. I feel scared and mute. An Indigo Girls song comes to me: “I wrap my fear around me like a blanket. I sail my ship of safety til I sank it. I am crawling on your shores.” Singing this silently in my mind, helps me hold space for fear. I am wrapped in fear and I begin to trust it, like trusting a blanket. I trust that fear is helping me to cross from the restriction of one life, to the shores of another.
The fear intensifies. There is memory of childhood dread. I feel a sickening terror. A word Jung uses fits: torment. I am in my tent of torment. My habits of avoidance or rationalising are gone, vanished like a ship that is wrecked. I stay afloat, though the fear is everywhere inside me, around me. The fear of fear, that left me feeling so stuck, evaporates. Sometimes I shake a little, to help keep the fear moving. Feeling the fear itself feels more scary than the fear of fear, yet I have faith that I am becoming unstuck. As I sit with the waves of fear, for a lot of the night, I see that my deepest conditioned response to fear is self-doubt. Fear as a child, not fully witnessed, meant that I doubted myself. Ah, what a gift to see that! Now, I feel strengthened as I witness and hold my own fear.
Just before dawn I get up. I feel dazed, like I have been through a tunnel and I do not know where I have arrived. Before going to my sit circle, I visit the river. Walking back I ponder that my claustrophobic tent is like a cocoon. I feel amazed: I surrendered to fear! I see that Fear is the Cocoon that will Transform me. At the precise moment I think that, a fat, very hairy, brown and black striped caterpillar undulates quickly across my path. I give thanks.
When we follow the soul path, the deep intuitive voice inside is bound to suggest, at some point, that we enter a place that we cannot fathom ourselves entering. Fear arises as a healthy response to our soulful becoming at the edges of our growth. If we are afraid of fear, then we may turn away from it. My own conditioned reaction to fear is to fear it, to avoid and suppress fear and this leaves me tense, contracted and stuck. This contraction is not fear itself, it is a conditioned reaction to fear, common in our culture where violence and trauma are widespread. Protracted states of flight, fight and freeze mean we have lost our connection with fear itself. In this case, trauma-informed and embodied approaches that help regulate the nervous system are useful. Somatic modalities can help us move through habituated fear responses, and slowly strengthen our ability to feel and listen to fear. When we can truly listen to fear, then fear gives us intelligent, intuitive or instinctual guidance.
Modern culture tends to shut down fear. I no longer heed the advice: choose from love not fear. Whilst we do not want to choose from a protracted state of flight, fight or freeze, if we can unfreeze and melt our conditioned reaction to fear and simply feel the fear itself: fear will help us access profound inner wisdom. Michael Meade says it beautifully:
“Fear has two things to say: ‘You better not go there’ or ‘You better go there’….Fear itself is what we need to know in order to make those two decisions…Fear is a guide and fear has both instinctive and intuitive knowledge in it. The hidden purpose of fear involves bringing us closer to natural instincts for survival, but also for awakening inner resources and sharpening our intelligence when faced with true danger and the basic need to change.”
Michael Meade
Or as soul guide Bill Plotkin puts it: “We are irrevocably altered by walking ceremonially toward what we most fear.” My night of fear was a profound gateway. Fear cracked egoic defences and attuned me to the depth of my longing and vulnerability. Sitting in vulnerability and fear melted egoic barriers and this enabled me to receive a powerful vision of my soul-self. Since my quest, I notice I am no longer afraid of the dark, I have much more connection with my own fear and I feel more courageous. Ironically, facing fear means I am less afraid…and if fear shows up I listen!
Writing our Fears: Embodied stream of consciousness writing practice
A way to warm up our connection with fear is to embody fear and use a stream of consciousness writing practice to explore fear. Consider that fear is a friend that you want to get to know better. You will need to be anchored in your ability to hold space for yourself as you face fear. If you feel unanchored or overwhelmed as you face fear, you may need the support of a good listener.
Begin in any comfortable position and welcoming fear in. Notice where the sensations of fear are in your body. Breathe into your felt sense of fear. You might like to move your fear: moving freely any way your fear guides you. This might include shaking, trembling, rolling, rocking. You might also vocalise your fear, letting any expressive fear sound come through.
Now turn to your journal and write without stopping or reflecting for a timed period of 5-30 minutes. Experiment with writing from your felt sense and from your heart. You could begin with any of the following questions and see where your writing takes you. You might also draw your fear.
How does fear feel for you?
What is your relationship with fear like?
How do you avoid or suppress fear?
How do you react from fear?
How can you welcome fear in?
What is like for you to allow fear to be here?
What are your greatest fears?
What does fear show you?
What does fear show you not to do?
What does fear show you to do?
What message is your fear giving you?
Anahata Giri
April 2024
www.soulriver.com.au