Having some fun with fear?!
What madness is this?
Fear! It’s not funny right? Well unless you’re one of those people who enjoy rollercoasters or throwing yourself out of aeroplanes. Not me thanks. I can generate enough imaginary fear of my own without adding outside apparatus.
On a slightly more serious note, I have over the years, at times limited myself and missed out on life opportunities because of my personal fears. My view of fear was always that it was an inevitable part of life and something to either be succumbed to, denied or defeated.
These days I have come to understand that yes, the experiencing of fear is an inevitable part of life but since I am now in a relationship with it rather than against it, it now holds little power to hold me back in life.
I'd like to make it clear as with all my sharings, that the following is just what has helped me. Please feel free to disregard anything you don't find useful or that doesn't resonate with you.
So lets go!
I find I like to avoid things I fear. Things like muggers, aggressive dogs, lions, buffalos oh and, Daddy Long Legs. This seems reasonable to me. But I notice that I'm also subject to fears of things that don’t seem quite so real, or are not actually in front of me.
I sometimes find myself experiencing feelings of fear and anxiety, and when I look around I see there are no muggers, lions or Daddy Long Legs anywhere to be seen, so what’s that all about? And why do I care? Well because this kind of fear often stops me from doing stuff, and that’s not always cool.
For many years I believed unquestioningly that the feeling of fear was always providing me with useful meaningful information about myself, my current situation and how to keep safe in that moment.
Fear was pointing me to possible dangers of which I might not have been previously aware. or giving me information about things I might want to avoid in the future for some reason. It seemed I ought to be grateful for it because without fear what might become of me?
Without fear, I might walk off cliffs, stick my hand in fires, forget to look both ways before I cross the road, walk around in the African bush without an armed guide, or never enjoy a horror movie. But wait. Go back a bit. I pay money to watch horror movies. Actually, I don’t, but I know plenty of people that do. So if we sometimes we pay to experience fear is it fear we are afraid of?
I recognise the emotion of fear by way of the feelings I’m experiencing in my body. Butterflies in my stomach, tightening in my chest, racing in my heart, tingles in my arms, jelly legs occasionally. I don’t usually bother to wonder about it too much it as although unpleasant it seems such a normal part of life and as previously mentioned, a necessity for keeping me safe.
But what I began to notice is that sometimes, not only did these feelings not seem to match my actual current circumstance, but they could drive my life decisions, sometimes despite myself, these feelings could stop me from doing things I really wanted to do, suggest I do things that seemed irrational and sometimes they just made life hard work.
As I looked into it a little further in an attempt to discover 'is this just me? I found there is no shortage of information online, which describes something called Anxiety Disorder. There are all sorts of names and descriptions and I’m sure you could find one that resonated with you. If I was going to have a disorder I could find one that fit me the best here https://www.rethink.org/advice-and-information/about-mental-illness/learn-more-about-conditions/anxiety-disorders
It seems that once our fears are out of control and affecting our ability to live a relatively normal life they are categorised as a disorder that you have. Disorders are possibly outside of my remit but what isn’t, is looking at how I might not get to that point. And wondering if there is something I can notice before I become the owner of my very own disorder.
Taking all of the above into consideration it seemed like a good idea to me to have a closer look at fear, my fears, our fears and see if there wasn’t some light to be shed on it.
So what is fear apart from a scary thing to be avoided that doesn’t feel very nice and stops you from doing shit? How useful is it to us? Does its story of saving us from walking off cliffs or sticking our hand in fires really hold water?
Why does one person pay to experience fear and another person would pay to avoid it?
In coaching, I often hear stories of how things are not possible or don’t feel possible and it’s not uncommon for some flavour or fear story to be behind the reason why. Often a story of ‘what might become of me if I…? I have certainly had plenty of my own over the years.
My strategy when faced with a situation of unavoidable fear was often the ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’, white-knuckling type approach, overriding or thwarting my fear, often accompanied by such mantas as “Don’t be a wimp”, and “Just put your big-girl pants on”.
This did get scary stuff done, but often the thought of the fear and the fact that I might have to do that, often in itself had me avoiding presenting myself with the thing that might require me to have to do that, leading to some sort of 'life avoidance'.
Feeling the fear and ‘forcing’ myself to do it anyway,' which is how I heard it, got things done but it was hard work, it seemed to take a lot out of me and it never made it easier next time.
We all have strategies for dealing with fear because it seems inevitable that it’s just an unpleasant thing we have to face sometimes.and then the options just look like, suffer it, avoid it or ignore it.
But what if there was another option? What if it wasn’t just our lot in life to be a victim of fear and if that was a possibility how might it look?
So I felt an experiment coming on…
I am terrified of spiders, I learned this irrational fear along with many of the rest of the human race at a young age via conditioning. A spider has never done one potentially dangerous thing to me and yet should one appear, especially one of a certain shape and size, my mind finds particularly unacceptable I can be heard screaming as if I were about to be murdered.
I had been reading and doing some research centred around the idea that for fear to exist or come alive in our consciousness it requires several components, interestingly, none of which have anything much to do with our outside circumstances and one of these components was ‘time’.
How so?
Through more research, the first thing I began to understand is that fear is an emotional response generated initially by thought. The lion that’s about to eat me is very real but it’s always the thought of being eaten that causes my feelings of fear.
Once I’m being eaten, I’m not afraid, I’m just experiencing being eaten. If I have fear in that moment it’s because I’m afraid that he will finish eating me and then I’ll 'be' no more.
So from this, we can see that one of the components needed in order to feel fear or for fear to exist is that it requires a thought of 'future'. So it's not that the future gives us fear it's that fear actually requires a future to exist in our mind. What a find! Try it out…
So if fear can’t fully exist without a perceived future and I am only experiencing life in the 'now,' then this puts fear into some question does it not?
(Disclaimer. No spiders were harmed during this experiment but some terrified parts of me WERE dismantled)
So armed with this new insight, I went to find a spider. It didn’t take me long to find one in our very old spider-infested cottage. I didn’t go too large to begin with and soon found a candidate in the bath.
The usual reaction of my mind to such a thing would just be a straight ‘no’ I’m scared, it’s My fear and that’s just the way it is. With possible solutions including
1. Remove spider = remove fear. Easy.
2. Remove self = remove fear. Easy.
But fear is fear despite all its various flavours and that’s what I was there for. What about when this fear is not about avoiding something easy like a spider but instead it’s stopping me doing things in life I would really love to do? Or holding me back from making decisions that could take my life in a whole new direction or making me go back and check if I left the gas on 30 times.
In these instances does it serve me to just assume that fear is always useful as an indicator of what’s good for me?
What if removing things and avoiding things was not the only solution?
So I rolled up my mental sleeves up and forged ahead. I could abort at any time after all.
With a little preparation involving settling my mind into my body and doing my best to bring my focus into the moment where nothing was happening except ‘looking at a spider’, what I began to see was that before I added anything I thought I knew about me or about spiders what I saw was just an innocuous little brown thing with six legs that to be fair looked more scared than I was in that moment.
In that moment I saw something much closer to truth than any stories fear might be telling me and found that in doing so my fear was already being replaced with a kind of compassion for the poor fellow trapped in the bath. My heart rate had already halved.
So far so good.
We often scare ourselves half to death with nothing more than thought, and then as we react based on that 'fear story' we end up bringing our idea of fear into our current reality as if to prove ourselves right.
It began to seem that perhaps there was a possibility that fear might be less of something to conquer or avoid and more of something to be understood and seen for what it is. A thought experienced as a feeling fed by more thought...
Fear doesn’t stop me from walking off a cliff, common sense does. Fear doesn’t stop me from putting my hand in the fire, knowing It will burn me does. This is wisdom not fear.
Fear is generated by a story constructed from the past and projected into the future. There is no fear in the moment. That’s all well and good you might say and I agree, just understanding this is a great start but it’s not going to stop us from experiencing fear. If only it did. But does that matter? What if we could just experience fear for what it was? An emotion generated by thought in the moment.
So back to my spider. I’m on to phase two. I hadn’t expected the first part to be this easy so upping the anti, seemed more doable at this point.
So I thought about touching the spider and observed my mind and found that what I was scared of was what I “thought” it was going to do to me if I touched it. Run up my arm in an unpredictable way perhaps, which would obviously lead to my immediate demise and so on… And up went my heart rate. Meanwhile, the spider just sat there looking at me, or so it seemed.
But what if I could just think about a hand touching a spider and stop there with no added story about what might happen to me? So I gave it a try and low and behold nothing bad happened. Well, not for me anyway. The spider tried to run away and I found myself going after him. What?!
So after years of spider terror and all the physical effects that went with that, I’d gone to almost touching a spider and feeling fine about it and Paul McKenna was nowhere in sight.
Well, now I might as well just touch it. So I did and that was it. I had to call my partner to witness this miracle because he has been the poor human who for years has had to come running to my blood-curdling screams and with a look of withering despair, do the removing. He was as gobsmacked as I was.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t go looking for spiders. Years of conditioning means if I want to interact with them I need some mind prep, but spiders are now no longer the demons of terror they were for so many years and this is very freeing for me and much nicer for spiders.
So if fear is fear no matter all its shapes, sizes and forms and it doesn’t matter what we project it onto, how might this understanding begin to help us overcome its perceived grip on us when it’s holding us back from life?
Could we begin to see fear for what it is? A feeling being generated by a thought that may or may not contain information that’s useful or relevant to this moment.
Could we notice that often fear is protecting nothing more than our idea of ‘self’ and not in fact our physical body?
Could we investigate the idea that what we are avoiding is, in fact, a feeling rather than a thing, because to avoid fear is to avoid life and what a shame that is.
So do we have to force ourselves to feel fear and do 'the thing' anyway? Absolutely not although you can if you like.
What if when the feeling of fear arises, before we run away screaming assuming that death is imminent, we give ourselves a moment to remain in the present moment and recognise it for what it is before we simply fear it and act on that.
What if we can give ourselves a moment to examine the data and look into the truth of the story we’ve attached?
What if we stopped to see that often we are inventing the stories that scare us to death and if there was no future projected story there could be no problem in this moment.
And finally, and this one might be The Hero's Journey. What if we could just sit with the feeling of fear and do nothing but experience it? Add no story of past and future. No story of 'Should be feeling this' 'Shouldn't be feeling this' and simply ask ourself 'What is fear really?' All of that regardless of whether we do the thing or not.
How might any of that change the game?
I'll leave you with this same simple quote again...
"If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience,
That alone would change the world"
~ Sydney Banks ~
Maxine Kemp is a transformative life coach based in East Suffolk UK who is dedicated to simplifying and demystifying the journey to greater peace well-being and empowerment.
"It’s not supposed to be that difficult."
To find out more about how your life can turn around in an instant.
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