Cultivating Courage by Befriending Fear

[MelMbrsl75]

I found this article online, very helpful to me, I hope you may take one or two things from it.



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 Hitch**** 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 - <A HREF="http://www.diversityworld.com." TARGET=_blank>www.diversityworld.com.</A>" If included in a newsletter or other publication, we would appreciate receiving a copy.)

[Guest]

Denise,

Thank you for posting this- just what I needed to read today. I may print this off to read for future reference. It is right on: We must change our attitude about fear and embrace it. Fear is at the heart of most of our troubles. I think to master the energy we expend on fear is to master our lives. Fear then is not eradicated or absent but just another part of what it means to be human.

[Guest]

I too also appreciated this post. I figure if I can't get rid of the fears and really how realistic is it of me to think I could be totally fearful, I might as well make something positive out of it and learn to deal with it in a healthy way.