How To Be Fearless — By Being OK with Being Afraid
The less it bothers you to be afraid, the less afraid you will be.
The only big problem we have with the natural emotion of fear (anxiety) is that we have been conditioned to believe that being afraid/anxious is in itself a problem. We have been taught to be afraid of being afraid. We have taken a naturally occurring emotion that in its small original occurrence is meant to signal the need for our attention so that we might look for potential harm or danger (or to take some important action), and turned this signal into a problem itself. Now when the signal arrives, we start an increasing upward spiral of anxiety/fear that has little or no connection to the outside event the signal originally pointed at.
The problem is such that most of us are now afraid and unaccepting of even the slightest tinge of anxiety when it arises. We are afraid of the signal experience itself. Further, we are not just afraid of big fear, but we start a process of running from our feelings when even the slightest bit of anxiety and discomfort arises.
The seeming irony is that when we can arrive at a healthy position of not minding or caring if we have this occurrence of beginning anxiety/fear in our bodies, it quickly resolves itself and moves through us, and we therefore are cleared of the emotion of anxiety/fear. It is when we fear the emotion itself and resist feeling it, that we start an increase of this anxiety/fear and have even more of this emotion.
How is it that resistance to feeling anxiety/fear increases anxiety/fear in us?
All your emotions merely want naturally is to be felt physically, somatically, as the experience they truly are, in your body, as they arise. This is different than our usual conditioned process of running into our heads to talk intellectually, cognitively about the emotion, and what we believe is the entity or condition outside of us that caused this emotion — this thinking process is decidedly not the feeling of the emotion.
The very movement to our heads away from the physical occurrence of the emotion in our bodies shows our conditioned fear of actually physically/geographically being with our emotions (in this case the emotion of anxiety/fear) as they arise in our bodies. This very belief (from mind) that there is something happening in the body to fear and move away from (the emotion of anxiety) thus increases our fear of the emotion in an upward spiral. We thus have the beginnings of anxiety of anxiety. We then notice the subsequent increase of the emotion of fear/anxiety in our bodies, which we further fear to feel physically, somatically, which then just amplifies our desire to remain in our heads and intellectualize further about how much we ‘really don’t like this feeling’, and how we wish this thing outside ourselves would ‘really stop making us feel this way’ (a belief causing further loss of our agency). So begins a negative feedback loop and upward spiral of anxiety/fear that can potentially lead to a very unpleasant panic attack.
“Feel the Suck” — A U.S. Marines Mantra
It may be a crude saying, but it is brilliant and wise: “Feel the Suck”. This was shared with me years ago by a client who was a retired Marine, and who learned this mantra in the Corps. We explored its deep wisdom. As he related, if you are in a foxhole and people are shooting at you, trying to harm you, it is intelligent and reasonable to have some fear/anxiety arise in response to the situation. That is actual intelligence operating — you are being alerted to danger and potential harm. This intelligence can lead to constructive action. The wise move is to “Feel the Suck”, meaning: “Acknowledge the feeling of fear in your body, and in this way you make ‘friends’ with it, and it doesn’t grow and dominate you.” From this understanding one discovers that courage isn’t the lack of fear; courage is knowing your fear so well that it doesn’t control you, and you can therefore do what you need to do. As this former soldier further shared: “I don’t want to be with a soldier who isn’t sometimes afraid, something is wrong with them.”
If one feels one’s anxiety, it remains smaller and moves through and out of one as it is recognized as the experience it is, because all that emotions want is to be recognized and felt. If one refuses to feel the anxiety however, the upward spiral of fear begins as we run away to our heads (thinking mind), and then one can become paralyzed with great fear.
Normalize for yourself that as human beings we are meant to feel emotions all day long in each moment, all the time. If we felt these experiences freely, we would notice that every moment comes with a small emotional valence, and that this emotional ‘flavor’ is what gives life its taste and meaning. However, our culture has taught us to push back and repress awareness of this constant arrival of emotion in our chest and belly. This causes a build-up of this energy, as emotions not felt never us leave us until they are felt.
If You Feel the Beginning of Emotions, They Usually Resolve Themselves and Move Along
Think of your emotions as arising down in your torso, either in the belly and/or chest. If they are recognized and felt physically, phenomenologically (as ‘lived’, as ‘experienced’, as they arise as a physical happening or event), this usually is the full life cycle of the emotional event. The life cycle is the appearance and then the recognition physically, bodily. If this recognition takes place, then the emotional energy is resolved or dissipated.
Notice that separate from this emotional life cycle is any other piece that may arise intellectually about what the emotional uprising might ‘mean’ or signal about the outside world. While this separate intellectual piece may have important information, it should not be used as a reason to move away from experiencing the emotion in the first place. The best solution is that in parallel we fully feel the emotion in our bodies, and simultaneously notice if the emotion presents a signal about the outside world that needs attending to.
Misunderstanding: Wrongly Taught to Ignore the Experience of the Emotion, and Focus on What it Signals
A fundamental problem we have set for ourselves culturally is a belief system that teaches us that the experience of an emotion itself should be repressed or ignored, and instead we should focus solely, intellectually, on what the appearance of an emotion signals about the outside world. Further, we are taught that the appearance of emotion means that something outside of us is the direct cause of this emotion, and so some action must take place outside of us to resolve this emotional state — a state that we have been taught to fear. The movement of attention is immediately almost completely away from ourselves to the outside world.
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Separate the Outside from the Inside
While there may indeed be something to attend to in the outer world that coincides with the appearance of an emotional response inside of ourselves, it serves us to no longer directly connect resolving the outside situation with resolving our inside state. In other words, nothing outside of us directly causes our inner emotions, and nothing short of actually feeling our self-generated emotions will resolve them. If we merely change the outside situation and repress the inner emotion, the repressed emotion still remains unfelt within us, stored away until some further date when we allow ourselves to feel it.
Separate the outside from the inside. In any given situation there are two realms to deal with: 1) Your inner emotional state that is solely yours to deal with by genuinely feeling it as it arises physically in your body.; and 2) The outer world where you may indeed need to take some action including setting boundaries or asking for something you desire or require. Learn to stop neglecting your inner world in favor of only focusing on the outer world.
We Give Away Our Agency and Power
Because we have been taught to fear our own emotions, and because we are taught that events outside us directly cause our inner experiences (fallacy), when emotions arise, instead of taking a moment to feel them, we quickly turn our attention away from the emotion to the outside world. In the case of fear, this turning of attention away from our own experience of the initial anxiety/fear, prevents us from resolving the anxiety/fear early by just experiencing it physically/bodily. We quickly assign the cause of our fear to some entity outside ourselves, thus giving away our agency. Simultaneously we internally begin an upward spiral of anxiety of anxiety as we have run away from the emotion in our body, and continue north to our heads to intellectualize about the rising emotion (Again, erroneously intellectualizing about how something outside us is causing our own inner state). It is as if we believe we are meat-puppets at the emotional mercy of all outside actors.
It is not ‘Strength’ to Believe Others Control Your Emotions
There is such a loss of agency in constantly believing that anytime an emotion arises inside us — in this case fear — it has been caused by some external actor or circumstance. This is hardly standing in a position of one’s own power. This is particularly striking when you consider our conditioned belief system that holds that it is ‘weak’ to admit experiencing fear to yourself or others. How ‘strong’ do we think ourselves to be if we operate from a belief system that has us operate as if others or outer conditions control our inner emotional states?
That we operate from a belief system that robs us of agency, and puts us in a position of ‘weakness’, is particularly striking if one considers the emotion of anger, which is intimately linked with anxiety/fear.
Anger as a Secondary Emotion with Fear/Anxiety Underneath
A challenging truth to contend with, especially if one manifests a lot of anger, is that anger is a secondary emotion that always has fear/anxiety present simultaneously underneath it. Ironically, it can cause an outburst of anger if you unskillfully, undiplomatically share this observation outright with someone who has a lot of anger, because below their conscious awareness they are very fearful that they could have fear present in themselves.
This dynamic of anxiety/fear residing under anger/aggression is easier to entertain if you don’t just consider fear/anxiety as always being of the ‘shaking in your boots’ variety. Think of the beginning emotion of anxiety as a meaningful ‘concern’ that something is happening in the world that must be addressed in order to maintain one’s desired safety, happiness or well-being for self or loved ones. Now think of the beginnings of anger/aggression (before it turns into full-blown anger, and just remains forward aggressive energy) as an assertive energy that we sometimes chose to turn into action in the world to address the needs identified when the above-mentioned anxiety arrived. Seeing anxiety and anger in these utilitarian ways, it is easier to see how one can lead to the other, and how they are always linked. Anger/aggression will always have anxiety/fear underneath it. While one doesn’t have to turn their anxiety/fear into anger (or a forward aggressive energy turned into action), one can see that if one has run-away anxiety that is caused by an inner refusal to feel the initial anxiety/fear, then anger can often be the secondary result, regardless of what is happening in the outside world.
Anger is More Socially Acceptable than Admitting Fear/Anxiety
Anger can feel very energetic and ‘powerful’ to the body and thinking mind, and so it can seduce us as a choice over dropping into ourselves and feeling our anxiety/fears more fully. Further, it is far more socially acceptable at this time in our social history to exhibit the secondary emotion of anger, than to admit to the primary emotion of anxiety or fear.
The current political world is full of examples of people with run-away anxiety/fear, who are then turning these emotions into anger. Once one is spinning in one’s head/mind with anger, the head/mind searches for someone to point the finger at — “Who in the world is making me feel all this?” Thus, the blaming begins, and the various versions of the ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, and ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking.
How to Truly Feel Your Anxiety/Fear
First, see the truth that it isn’t a position of ‘strength’ to be afraid of one’s own self, and one’s own emotions. And it isn’t ‘strong’ to believe that others and outside conditions directly control one’s emotional state. See that we have merely been conditioned in a set of beliefs that have robbed us of our agency, and with a little awareness and work we can learn to more fully feel our emotions, including anxiety/fear in the moment, and thereby regain so much power.
Learn to drop one’s awareness and attention to your physical experiences in your torso where your emotions arise. As you drop your awareness into your chest and/or belly, gently interrogate yourself about what you feel physically. Is my chest/belly tight? Hot or cold? Is it lit up or dark in my chest or belly? Is there a color? Is there movement like a vibration or a spinning or churning? Focus on the physical manifestation of emotion in your body. What you feel physically is all that is important. And it doesn’t matter what you find. It will be different for people at different times. What is important is that the asking takes you there to ‘be with’ the experience of the emotion. Try and avoid the why questions about why an emotion is happening — those questions indicate a movement back to head and thinking mind, and is decidedly not a feeling of the emotion, but intellectualization.
This being present in the body more isn’t as hard to learn as one might think when we consider that at birth we held our consciousness evenly throughout our bodies, with as much attention given to what emotions and intuitions were being felt in our torso, as was given to what thoughts might enter our heads (thinking mind). With practice we can return ourselves to our more natural evenly distributed state. Do this through practicing activities that require a natural inhabitation of the body. This can be more mundane practices like exercise at the gym, running, or taking walks, or any athletic activity either mild or strenuous. It can include what were once considered exotic practices, but that are now becoming more mainstream and popular like meditation, Yoga, Chi Quong, Thai Chi, Aikido or any Martial Art. Basically, find activities that cause you to use and situate your attention in your body more, not solely up in your thinking mind.
With time, as one resides in one’s body more often, more regularly, the familiarity of rubbing up against the physical presence of your emotions causes you to become more familiar and comfortable with them. We learn to no longer fear them as they appear. With anxiety, we come to see it as it truly is — just a constellation of physical sensations to be felt and acknowledged and allowed to arise then flow through us. We learn to not fear having fear, and thus learn to be fearless.
