Everyday Enlightenment, page 19
• You may avoid expressing your true feelings out of fear that the feelings may come back to you and cause discomfort.
• You may give yourself a label that becomes both explanation and excuse: “I can't do that because I have a phobia. I'm a phobic personality.”
Phobias and Other Labels
Phobia is a fancy psychological name for a big fear. Little fears generate subtle physiological reactions; big fears generate dramatic ones. When our physiological reactions to elevators, closets, wide-open spaces, dog, cats, snakes, spiders, mice, moths or other insects, or heights become unpleasant enough, we call them phobias
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
—Helen Keller
We often say “I can't” when we really mean “I don't want to” or “I won't.” We truly cannot do some things such as leap up to rooftops or outrun a race car, but we can overcome any fear. It may feel unpleasant—we may tremble, faint, sweat, and have flulike symptoms—but we can do it anyway. I have a friend named David who is afraid of flying (well, actually afraid of crashing). His palms sweat, his heart beats fast, he trembles, and his knuckles turn white as he grips the armrests. He would likely be diagnosed as phobic by some psychologists. Despite these symptoms, David flies many thousands of miles around the world every year because it is necessary in his work. The fear (phobia) has not gone away. He has not tried to make it go away. Those who say they can't fly because of their fear actually cannot fly because they don't buy a ticket and get on the airplane. David buys a ticket and gets on the plane. This is how he faces his fear.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased
to let fear control me.
—Erica Jong
Fear Is Not the Problem
Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck. The problem in fear is our response—the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us. Fear is the cornered animal within us, baring its teeth, the lowest common denominator of human experience. Fear crushes the delicate spider or slender wasp. Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways.
Nevertheless, let's appreciate fear for its whispered or shouted warnings. Fear calls to you like an overprotective mother to whom you should always listen but not always heed. Show more respect but less obedience to the frightened child inside you who, after all, may be wise or foolish, helpful or disabling. Appreciate fear as a voice of caution, but view it as a wall to scale, a hurdle to leap, a challenge to meet, a call to action.
You cannot control your fear. You can control your response: You can slow your breathing. You can shake loose and relax your muscles. You can feel the fear and do it anyway.
Those of us with the strongest fears gain the most from our passage through the eighth gateway.
Using Anger to Overcome Fear: An Exercise
Have you ever been afraid, but then got angry? What happened? If you don't remember such a time, imagine what might happen. You may conclude that anger is stronger than fear and can be used to move through fear into action. And you would be right. The following visualization exercise conveys a clear metaphor to your subconscious mind about how anger overcomes fear. By following the process precisely, you will form a template deep within your psyche that you can draw upon any time you need it in everyday life
• Imagine that you have spent your life in a dimly lit room. Outside, a new free, open life awaits you. You would like very much to go outside and step more fully into life.
• You walk to the entrance and are about to step outside, when a figure appears. Mr. (or Ms.) Fear blocks the doorway. Imagine who or what Mr. or Ms. Fear might look like. A parent? A teacher? A stranger? An apparition, monster, alien, or clown? Visualize this figure.
• Now you walk to the entrance, desiring to step outside, but just as you reach it, Mr. or Ms. Fear steps in front of you and says, “Stop! You can't, you mustn't, you will fail, it's too dangerous, it won't work.” Stop at the entrance, even though you deeply want to go outside into the light. Feel what it is like to let fear stop you. Imagine Mr. or Ms. Fear blocking your way, intimidating, discouraging, paralyzing you. What does this feel like?
• Now, repeat this process in exactly the same way. Replay the movie of your wanting to go outside but letting fear stop you. Run this scenario again and again—three times, six times, ten times—each time letting fear hold you back. Do this as many times as necessary until you become angry. Not just a little sad or discouraged, or frustrated, or peeved, or irritated, but angry. At this point you are ready to do something different.
• Take that anger and turn it into resolve. Take a deep breath, and this time replay the movie and walk to the entrance. Mr. or Ms. Fear hasn't gone away. He or she is still standing there, telling you to stop. But this time, giving fear no more attention, walk out of the door—step outside into the sunshine, into a new life.
• Now bring this experience into your everyday life. Having learned the process, pick a specific fear in your life that has stopped or inhibited you. This fear may range from expressing your feelings to bungee jumping. As before, imagine fear stopping you again and again until you grow weary, then irritated, then angry, and, in your mind's eye, change the outcome as you walk through the fear. Then go out and do it.
The lesson and moral of this exercise is that when you meet fear on the road and need to get past it, get angry or get stopped. The choice is yours.
Courage 101
The fears that give us the most trouble in daily life are more often psychological than physical. We may routinely race down the roads and highways at death-defying speeds, but get weak in the knees if we have to speak in front of a group of people or ask a special person for a date
Facing high-adrenaline (but relatively safe) activities such as white-water rafting, skydiving, rock climbing, ropes courses, bun-gee jumping, or fire walking may appear to be the ultimate ways to overcome fear, but are actually Courage 101—symbolic ways that may prepare you for truly terrifying challenges of everyday life—like expressing your feelings, admitting you were wrong, risking embarrassment, ridicule, or rejection—or just being yourself.
The following activities can, for anyone, serve as sound preparation and safe practice in facing your fears.
Movies: Suspense thrillers, horror films, science fiction, or similar tension-release genres provide a chance to vicariously face murderers, lunatics, and monsters and become heroes and courageous adventurers.
Virtual Reality: Far more than film, today's virtual reality rides closely duplicate the visceral experience of racing along in vehicles, flying through the air, or even diving into the sea, so that you can safely engage adventures and challenges that would otherwise be death defying.
Amusement Park Rides: Roller coasters and other thrilling rides offer maximum fear with minimum risk. Unlike film or virtual reality, such rides entail real-life somersaults, speeds, physical forces, and visceral experience.
Challenge Courses: “If I did that, I can do anything!” For those of us who want such an exhilarating experience, some personal growth seminars provide opportunities to face your fears through such activities as
• fire walking: Once limited to yogis and shamans, now experienced by thousands of people who have walked across red-hot coals as a metaphor of facing their fears.
• skydiving: Today's tandem jumps and new parachutes create a relatively safe experience leaping out into the void.
• white-water rafting: Depending upon the rating of the rapids, this experience ranges from a pleasant paddle to white-knuckled white-water rafting.
• bungee jumping: Why would you leap from a tower with elastic cables attached to your harness or ankles? For cheap thrills, it's hard to beat.
• rock climbing and high ropes courses: While safely tethered, participants climb, balance, and perch on trees, poles, or cables up to fifty feet high. Puts you right up against the “I can't possibly do this” feeling. Then you do it.
Then there is performance and competition. Anyone who has done stand-up comedy (including telling jokes at family gatherings), acted in a drama production, given a speech, played a musical instrument, sung in concert before an audience, or participated in an important sports competition knows the fear associated with performance. This, certainly no less than skydiving, requires that you face your fears square on. In fact, many people rate the fear of public speaking as slightly higher than the fear of death.
The key point here is that you don't need to leap from airplanes to demonstrate courage. If you really want a scary challenge, take a date to a local restaurant and sing a few lines of a love song over dinner. (I have many friends who, if given the choice of singing in public or skydiving, would head straight for the airport.)
Each of us has our own pet fears. Those of everyday life are the most challenging and most significant. Take a few moments to reflect on your everyday fears.
Just Doing it: An Exercise in Facing Fear
• Choose one challenging activity or task ( such as speaking or singing in public, asking for a date or a raise, expressing a fantasy)—something that you would truly like to do but haven't because you might fail, or be rejected, or feel foolish.
• Commit to doing it within the next six weeks.
• Tell a friend about your commitment and your reasons for doing it; alternately, write a letter describing your plans or draw up a contract with yourself and sign it.
• Make whatever preparations or arrangements you need in order to follow through.
• As the date and time draws near to confront and overcome the fear, remember to stay in the present moment. When you think about the action you'll likely feel nervous, anxious, or maybe just excited. It may not turn out to be as frightening as you had imagined. Or it may. By directing your attention to the present moment, you restrict your fear to when it is natural and appropriate—when you are about to do what you fear, rather than hours or days before.
• After you do it, draw or paint a picture of what the experience meant to you. You can also write a few paragraphs about it, but drawing more appropriately expresses the experience of your subconscious mind. You don't need to understand what you draw or paint; just see what comes.
• As a follow-up, you might pick one action each month that you would like to do but haven't done, at least partially from fear, and go through the same process of commitment, preparation, then action. It might be one of the challenges on previous pages, such as going on a virtual reality or amusement park ride or even white-water rafting or skydiving, or it might be something immediate and practical you face in everyday life.
Action Overcomes Fear
Far more important, however, are the fears that come up in your everyday life and interactions. When you notice yourself avoiding taking action because you feel nervous or reluctant, that is your moment of truth. What will you do
Anyone who has faced a moment of truth—who has felt the fear and leaped from the airplane, walked onto the stage and sat down to the piano or begun speaking to an audience, or otherwise walked to the raw edge and leaped—knows something that more timid souls do not. That once you are fully engaged, immersed in the activity, the fear either vanishes or fades, because your attention is no longer focused on what might happen; you are absorbed by what is happening. Fear may remain, but you don't notice it.
No matter how committed you may say or think you are, it is only an intention, a plan, or a fantasy. You cannot know your degree of commitment or courage until you test it in the fires of action, in the moment of truth, when it's all or nothing, do or die. The following test is one practical way to develop, discover, and demonstrate courage and commitment. It serves as a metaphor for any moment in life you need to break through your fears.
The Pin Test: Commitment in the Moment of Truth
What if one day a car suddenly swerved into your lane or someone on the street began to shout curses at you or attack you? Would you freeze, panic, or take committed, decisive action? The following exercise—the pin test—serves as a lesson and metaphor for showing courage in your personal moments of truth
In preparation, you need to find a wooden surface, such as a tabletop, and several ordinary straight pins—the kind of sewing pins used in hemming pants or keeping new shirts folded neatly in the stores.
The first step in this exercise is to stick the point of a straight pin down into a tabletop or other wooden surface so that it stands up vertically by itself. Then you slap your flat, open palm down nto the tabletop, directly over the pin, so that you bend the pin.
This pin becomes a symbol of the fears that stand between you and your goal. Going through it—slapping the tabletop and crushing the pin—represents the committed action you need to break through fear to reach your goal. With this in mind, do the following:
• On a flat wooden surface, such a a tabletop, slap your open palm so it stings slightly and makes a resounding noise. This is your rehearsal of the same movement you will make as you slap your palm directly down onto the vertical straight pin with its point stuck into the wooden surface.
• First, test your pins by carefully holding one and bending it. You may even wish to push the point of one pin down into the tabletop so that it stands vertically and drop a hardback book on it to see how it bends. Then you're ready.
• Focus on the pin and form the commitment to slap your palm down onto the pin and tabletop as if the pin weren't even there. Don't think to the pin; think through the pin the way martial artists must think through the board in order to break it.
• When you are ready, simply do it. This is your moment of truth.
• If you fully and forcefully bring your flat palm down on the table with a loud slapping sound, you won't even know the pin was there. The pin will simply bend in half, leaving your palm unmarked and completely intact. (The only discomfort you may feel is the sting of your palm slapping the table.)
• No halfhearted attempts. Almost enough isn't nearly enough. If you hold back—if you let fear interfere with your resolve and cup your palm or slow down—you are far less likely to meet your objective, and you might even nick your hand.
• Either choose not to take this challenge or go for it with the full force of your being. It's natural to feel reservations, doubts, or fear. Just don't let those feelings interfere with what you have chosen to do.
• When you accomplish it, notice how it feels to do what you set out to do despite your fear or doubt.
If you choose not to try the pin test, honor your clear choice in the matter. At the same time, note that this challenge is an opportunity. You can benefit only from what you actually do.
Self-Doubt: The Great Impostor
As you've seen, not all fears are as specific and defined as facing the pin test or jumping off a high diving board or giving a speech. Just as some of us don't recognize when we are being manipulated or exploited or seduced until we are hit over the head, so we may not recognize the subtle and insidious workings of fear when it appears as a vague, barely discernible sense of discomfort or doubt. We often don't realize that we are facing fear when it appears as nervousness, hesitation, procrastination, reluctance, lack of interest, or (the most insidious form fear takes) self-doubt.
When you were an infant, it never occurred to you to doubt yourself. Whoever came up with the proverb “If you fall down seven times, get up eight times” must have been watching infants try and fail and try again as they learned to stand or walk.
As you grew and began to compare yourself with others, you started to form beliefs about your capacity. Nearly all our beliefs about our competence or capacity stems from believing that we lack talent when we lack only experience.
Here is how it happened in my case: I began kindergarten two weeks late, so by the time I started painting trees, the other kids had been doing it nearly every day for a week, but I didn't know this. I only knew, when I started to compare my trees with the other children's, that their trees had branches and leaves while my first effort looked like a green lollipop. I assumed that they had more talent. So when given the choice to paint or to play in the sandbox (I was really good at sandbox), what do you think I chose?
Each of us carries within us a short (or long) list of things we sincerely don't believe we are very good at. We may be able to justify those beliefs with examples from our own experience. But what appeared to be true then may no longer be true now. Ugly ducklings have a way of turning into swans. Albert Einstein flunked math in his early school years, and Babe Ruth was the strikeout king before he was the home run king.
Doing the Impossible
You are now about to face a task guaranteed to raise significant doubts about your ability to accomplish it. Your past experience will tell you “I can't do this.” Your powers of logic will also say “nay.”
The following challenge will prove to you that you can do more than you believe:
• First, read the following list of twenty objects: a table, a bunny, a telephone, an automobile, an orange, blue jeans, a lit cigar, a small fishbowl, a television set, a handbag, an old alarm clock, a motorcycle, a refrigerator, running shoes, a mountain, yellow paint, a waterfall, underwear, a tennis ball, and an elderly physicist.
• What if I told you that within the next four minutes you will be able to memorize that list of twenty objects—not only forward, but backward. And that's not all. If I name any object on that list, you'll be able to remember which object came just before it and which came after.
• Based on past experience, you may have strong doubts about your ability to accomplish this. Please rate your doubt on a 1-10 scale, 1 (very little doubt) to 10 (strong doubt). Write that number here_____or say it aloud.
