The two types of fear
Fear as inverted love
The importance of giving kids a healthy imprint around fear
How to work with intense feelings of fear
One of our greatest allies is fear and yet so many of us run from it. We don’t often know why it’s here or where it originates from, nor are we taught to investigate its significance as a gateway to liberation. Instead, we’re programmed to deny, judge, and suppress fear, normalizing the manipulation of self and others to avoid life’s inherently scary edge.
A good portion of the fear we feel is a mechanism of control that keeps us stuck in a cage so we don’t ever grow outside of that cage. Its design confines us to live within parameters that keep the world going around the way fear wants it to. In a sense, it’s the ultimate terrorist taking a beautiful soul and telling her she cannot follow her religion or speak her truth, sing her song or spread her wings.
There is also the fear that asks us to surrender to death so we can open up to new life. This is the way of our planet. When we avoid or control this life/death cycle we fall out of sync with our natural environment and operate within an artificial mind-made one instead; a temporary state of denial and separation that induces suffering.
The truth is that we’re going to feel fear whether we like it or not. A life without fear is a life without life. We need fear and we do ourselves a great favor by understanding its components. We need to break fear down, take it apart, learn how it works and put it back together again in a way that serves us.
The two types of fear
Fear as a healthy warning system against danger. This is our body’s way of reading the environment and keeping us safe. This type of fear propels us to cross the road as we approach a dodgy group of strangers. We should respect this fear as a direct warning from the universe to back away or back off from an imminent threat. We need this fear to survive.
Fear as a mechanism used to suppress growth: This is an age-old construct rooted in personal, ancestral, cultural, and global trauma traversing generations. This fear is the foundation of our unhealthy ego and is made up of countless unresolved traumatic experiences held in our cellular/genetic memory. Over time these compounding traumas morph into sophisticated belief systems of control that are difficult to see or separate from. Rather than confront and heal these fear-based memories (primarily because we don’t know how), our ego works hard to keep them suppressed by burying them under more trauma. This type of fear we should move toward and transform. We should not make this fear real because it is not a warning system, it is a system of suppression. Resting just beneath this fear is our original state of love and openness that was traumatized into hiding. Such traumatic experiences force us to split from our innocence and live in a constant state of contraction which we have no choice but to numb out with addictive behaviors and substances.
When we find the courage to stop numbing and let our fear come to the surface, we must take action to heal or transform it because we cannot function optimally with heightened levels of fear present for prolonged periods. The intensity of the fear itself will push us to step into a higher level of power in order to transcend it. This is where we free ourselves from ongoing abuse, step away from oppressive institutions, leave toxic relationships and reach for the support we’ve needed for years. In other words, we consciously use the discomfort of our own fear to propel us toward freedom. If we don’t or cannot work with fear in this manner we will have no choice but to bury it again in order to survive. This buried fear then becomes stored in the body, manifesting as physical pain, mental anguish, disease, separation, and interpersonal conflict.
The fundamental dilemma we are dealing with is the inability to discern between healthy and unhealthy fear, often confusing the two. Having inherited so many patterns of disconnection since birth we struggle to hear the universe alerting us to unhealthy situations. This causes us to override the guidance and walk into painful conflicts and backlashes. By contrast, we tend to show great allegiance to the fear that holds us back from our greatness, constantly cowering like a beaten dog to voices and feelings of shame, mistrust, and self-hate.
So how do we tell the difference?
There’s no quick-fix answer to that question but there are some signs, such as: when you move toward trauma-based fear the memory of the trauma begins unlocking. Even though this memory feels threatening to you at the moment, your overall body system is expanding and releasing, not contracting and shutting down. The memory of the fear may be contracting you but the reality of the moment is that you’re expanding, which is a sign that you’re safe and can keep moving toward the trauma to heal it. Unfortunately, it is difficult to sense this overall expansion when you’re the one processing the fear. It takes a lot of training to hold (or witness) your fear and trauma while diligently reading the language of energy to see if it is expanding or contracting. This is why we need the help of a teacher and/or conscious community to discern the energy for us at first. If you have enough awake people around you they will mirror the truth back to you. It took me fifteen years of diligent fear training with my teacher and sangha* to have enough experience, strength, and courage to sense when the universe wanted to push toward fear in order to transform it versus when it wanted to retract and protect against disconnection and separation. It also took those fifteen years to build enough wisdom to know when I still don’t know and therefore need my community to help me.
Fear As Inverted Love
I was blessed to have a teacher who ruthlessly pushed me toward my fears. Every day in my twenties and early thirties he would say to me, “Jennifer, fear is your pathway to freedom, make it your best friend. If what you’re feeling is not love then it’s not real so go work with Spirit until you get to the bottom of it and find love.”
My ego would fight him tooth and nail but the message was always the same: “I’m not rescuing you from the fear that will liberate you; don’t expect me to make you a victim in your own fear-based story; now go do the good work and transform that illusion back into love.”
For many of those years, I had no idea how to do this on my own. I would sit in meditation with the universe or lie on my back smothered in terror, shaking from head to toe as I begged Spirit to lift fear out of my body. Only sometimes did it do as I asked. Much of the time I just swam in the purgatorial ocean, failing at the art of suppression whilst awaiting the guidance of my teacher to show me the light again.
When I began the arduous process of moving toward what scared me, which I can assure you was not graceful, I realized that the freedom and love I was seeking existed right in the heart of this feeling. When I took my teacher’s guidance by pursuing the most intense place in my fear while asking Spirit to shine light through it at the same time, something would eventually let go. The light would penetrate through the existential mistrust, blasting the whole construct out in the open. This is when I’d be flooded with tingles as the synapses of the original trauma were released at the cellular level.
In time I came to recognize that most of the fear we run from is actually our highest most liberated self that has been suppressed, controlled, and made wrong by social, religious, and cultural constructs. As Joseph Campbell stated, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Fear is therefore inverted love. It is where the human mind has taken our greatest potential and twisted it into this thing we call fear: a state of being that we’re supposed to resist at all costs. You can look at something that scares you and say, “Oh my god that is the most terrifying thing I could ever do,” and you could look at that very same thing and say, “Oh my god, that is the most empowering and exciting thing I could ever do.” In reality, fear is who we are disguised as a feeling that we want to run away from. It is a clever mechanism steering us away from our already enlightened selves.
The pervasive belief system attached to fear says that it is bad and wrong and that we should do everything to avoid it: to resist and fear the part of us that has already accomplished what we came here to do. Whatever our dreams are we are being taught to run from them and to feel really uncomfortable around our own brilliance. We are also being conditioned to look for the so-called magic wand that makes fear go away (which usually takes the form of alcohol, drugs, food, and sex), but what we don’t realize is that fear itself is the magic wand. It is the catalyst for alchemy and therefore our greatest ally, not our enemy.
As we confront and conquer our fear, we dissolve an ancient spell and rise above the invisible scaffolding that has held us and our ancestors down for lifetimes. This is what I believe we came here to: to realize liberation from a fear-based tapestry that weaves through each one of us. We do this until we’ve transformed our fear back into the love that we really are. And we don’t do this alone, we do it with Spirit’s help. We work in alignment with the greater, creative intelligence of our universe to burn up these deep root balls of terror at the body and soul levels. We learn the art of relating to fear and Spirit at the same time as a potent karma-burning team.
The importance of giving children a healthy imprint around fear & how to work with intense feelings of fear
It must be said that moving toward fear and purposefully developing a healthy relationship with it can feel extremely foreign and out of control. It requires blind faith and trust because we lack the imprint or memory that fear does actually transform into love once we embrace it consciously. Many of us resist and numb fear because we don’t know what will happen if we surrender to it. The standard feeling is that we might die or at worst be trapped in fear forever. Nor do we know how to push through our resistance and work directly with Greater Wisdom Mind to transform it. We don’t realize that the universe is willing to help. We also lack healthy reference points for getting to the other side: the lightness that takes its place; the physical pains that dissipate; the love and expansion that opens up in our body and body of affairs; the new expanded ways of thinking and expressing, and the incredible momentum, growth, freedom, and self-trust that takes over once we cycle through it. This is the inherent gift of fear. It is switching the light on in a dark room.
Let me share an abridged dialogue with a client who is afraid of flying:
Client:
“I am absolutely terrified of flying!! The only way I can survive a flight is to drink as many gin and tonics as possible. This is not an ideal solution because I still feel so much fear but it’s effective enough to get me through. Only here’s the thing; me and my husband and our three-year-old twins are going on holiday next week and this will be the first time we fly together, so I simply cannot drink. There’s no way I can get drunk around my twins. And yet there’s also no way I can survive a plane ride without alcohol. I thought about canceling the vacation or me staying home while they go, but neither of these options feels right. What should I do?”
Me:
“First of all, it’s great that you cannot drink your gin and tonics on this upcoming flight because you’re ready to face this fear now. You have perfectly cornered yourself into working with it consciously rather than unconsciously. And secondly, every living creature has fear. If you don’t experience fear, you’re dead, so it’s completely natural to be having this experience.
I’d like you to try thinking this way: “This is not just a trip to sunny Ibiza for a holiday, I am going on this flight to transform old fear and trauma. Dear Jonathon, dear kids, Mummy is going to be facing some fear on this flight. I may need some space and ask you to be with Daddy. You may see me shaking and breathing deeply and it’s because I’m feeling fear. For some reason, I feel afraid when I’m flying. I don’t know why this is but I think it’s really great because I like facing fear. Even though I look really scared I want you to know there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just fear and I need to give it space and feel it fully in order to move through it properly. So if you both need something please ask Daddy because I may be too busy feeling my fear to be present with you, ok?”
It is really important that you do not hide your fear from your kids. It’s better to model how to deal with it in a healthy way rather than hiding it from them as you’re hiding it from yourself. Because if they see Mummy scared—and kids are no fools, they sense our fear—and they observe you drinking alcohol, then they learn, “Oh when Mummy is scared she drinks alcohol, so when I am scared I drink alcohol.”
By working with your fear consciously your kids receive the healthy imprint of how you work with fear: you embrace it; you move toward it; you take charge; you delegate; you take the necessary space to process it; you seek help when needed; you communicate what’s going on in a positive manner, and you own, “I need to face this fear because it’s healthy for me to do so”. You make this a conscious practice within your everyday life by welcoming fear as a natural and healthy part of existence.
If there’s anything you want to imprint on your children it’s that as out of control and terrified as you are, ‘this is positive’. That’ll be one of the biggest gifts of abundance and health you can give them. You are changing the message that we all grow up with that says fear is bad and there’s something wrong with me because I’m feeling vulnerable and out of control. We all grow up with “fear is bad”, and that’s why most of the world consumes drugs and alcohol, but my healing came from doing the opposite. I found a teacher who pushed me into my fears every day. I was always on my edge and flying was one of four or five major areas of fear-facing in my life and I viewed them all as classrooms. They were opportunities to learn about emotion, spirit, transformation, the psyche, the soul, the world, fear itself, etc. It was an alchemical treasure chest. Thankfully, I’m not processing anywhere near as much fear when I fly now as I did back then and I certainly don’t do this ‘fear-facing’ thing perfectly all of the time, but I aim to transmit the same message to my girls: “Hang in there through the fear, it’s a gift, not a curse and what you’re looking for is at the other side so don’t give up.”
“Here is what I suggest you do when you board the airplane. I want you to set the intention to become even more conscious, as if your life depends on it, by literally sitting on your chair as if in seated meditation: spine straight, legs uncrossed, and head upright. Then BREATHE! As the fear begins to kick in focus on long, deep, full breaths. This is what I did for years. I couldn’t use alcohol because it didn’t work anymore, the fear was too strong, so I had no choice but to confront the fear if I wanted to keep traveling.
For the longest time, I couldn’t think of Spirit when flying because I was too busy keeping the plane in the air! I would help the pilots by tightening in terror during take-off, turbulence, and landing, allowing every air pocket to pierce through me like razor blades, convinced that if I relax the aircraft will literally fall out of the sky. I was therefore responsible for every person’s life on those flights and I seemed to be the only one who knew that these were our last hours alive together! So there was no sleeping and no eating, only hardcore survival. As you can imagine, with baby in toe, I would arrive at our destinations around the world looking like the kid from the Exorcist movie! I did this non-stop, flight after flight, year after year as we traveled the globe on our workshop tours until eventually, I decided that enough was enough. I said to myself, “I’m going to tackle this fear head-on now. No more running away. Great Spirit, it’s time for us to work on this together so I’m going to talk to you all of the time when in flight.”
At first, all I could say was, “Great Spirit, please don’t let us die. Please don’t let this plane crash.” And that was good enough. Then my courage and mantra evolved to, “Great Spirit, please help me unlock this fear. Bring it out into the open and dissolve it with light.” When I got really brave I would say, “Great Spirit, please unlock and intensify this fear one hundred times stronger and dissolve it with light.”
While I white-knuckled the armrests, sure enough, Spirit would unlock the fear. What I mean by ‘unlock the fear’ is that it would seem to get stronger for a few minutes (or hours at the start) and then suddenly lighten or dissipate altogether until the next layer would come to the surface. I cycled through this process over and over, consistently talking to Spirit out loud or in my head. Sometimes I broke into tears or thought I was going to pass out with terror, but overall the experience of fear began to lessen. So long as I kept dialoguing with the universe, the portal was open allowing light to pour through and transform the fear rather than me being stuck with it on my own. Working with Spirit in this way speeds up the transformational healing process a thousandfold.
All of this continued until one morning during take-off, I was staring out of the window feeling the usual contractions of fear coming on when suddenly I felt the desire for the plane to drop, fall and crash on the tarmac. It seemed that my body was so exhausted by the repeated pattern of control and contraction that I just gave up. This was not a conscious occurrence. It was all happening at the body level with my mind going along for the ride. I really wanted that plane to go down so I no longer had to suffer such intense pain. I didn’t mind dying. I surrendered deep inside. I realized it would be totally okay if I died because I was dying into Spirit. As the plane kept climbing, in spite of my longing, a huge smile grew on my face. The fear was gone. Gone, gone, gone. And in its place was total relief, peacefulness, gratitude, and bliss. I felt zero fear during that flight, and zero fear on the next twenty flights. There have been rare moments where memories of the fear come rocketing to the surface, but they last seconds rather than hours and are replaced very quickly with a deep sense of trust.
If there is one hindsight I can take away from this healing process, it’s that unbeknownst to me I was doing it all to deepen my trust in the Universe. Underneath the fear was and is an ocean of love that has changed my life as I’ve dropped down into it. So it was worth it. Facing my fear with Spirit, replaced my fear with Spirit. And there’s nothing greater I could ask for than that.
So I want you to imagine saying, “Great Spirit, thank you for this fear. Please intensify it one hundred times stronger and burn it up with light.” Now if you can say that while you’re 36,000 feet in the air and the plane is shaking like crazy, you’re well on your way to liberation.
Client:
“I am so happy! This is such a different point of view: to see it in such a positive way and to not fight against the fear but to let it in. “Oh hi fear, come on in…” To allow it. I have never thought about it in this way. I have only thought of all the ways to avoid and suppress my fear. And especially for my children. These are such important tools. OK, I am ready for my holiday now. I am ready to face my fear with Spirit.”
Me:
“Great! And yes, especially to impart this to your children. Can you imagine how good you will feel if someday one of your kids is confronting a fear, boarding a roller coaster ride, or getting their exam results at school, and they’re saying, “This fear is good. I can do this. It’s only fear and I love fear. Dear Universe bring it on! Mom, I’m going to face my fear today.”
It’s a whole different feeling, isn’t it? One is being the victim and the other is taking charge.”
To conclude:
Fear is made of contracting energy and yet the universe is always expanding. No matter how enlightened we think we are, the very expansion we create every time we transform our trauma actually creates the opening for the next layers to come to the surface. It is always this process of expansion/contraction/expansion/contraction while in this body and on this earth. If we don’t learn how to take what contracts us and transform it into expansion, then the contraction stays. It doesn’t disappear just because we disconnect from it or numb it out. It lingers on, finding storehouses to rest within various parts of our body and body of affairs. Put simply, there’s no way around fear and only one way through it. So the fear that we resist is actually the greatest tool we possess to create joy and love. That’s why I said earlier that fear is inverted love. It is our pathway to freedom.
*Sangha: Sanskrit word for ‘community’ or ‘assembly’. Most often used to describe the Buddhist community of ordained monks and nuns. It is one of ‘The Three Jewels’ in Buddhism: The Buddha; The Dharma (teachings); The Sangha.