There seems to be a lot of fear around these days. Much of this fear is magnified, exaggerated, or manipulated. On a universal level, we fear that an asteroid may come hit our planet and destroy us all. On a planetary level, we fear that we are destroying the planet through ignorance, greed and overindulgence. We in the United States fear terrorists, our government, and each other. We fear for our health and well being. We fear for our safety. We fear our greatness and we fear our inadequacy. We fear being crowded and being abandoned. We fear pain and we fear meaninglessness. We fear abundance and we fear scarcity. We fear our fear. Indeed, it was one of our presidents who declared that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

            We think that fear must be controlled, conquered, suppressed, avoided or denied. There has been much written about how to deal with fear. We are told to embrace our fear, face our fear, let go of fear, surrender our fear. However, after an extensive search, I was not able to find any material on how to appreciate fear. I occasionally found some incidental appreciable comment about fear, such as fear being a survival mechanism that told us when to fight or flee, but outisde of psychological theory, I found little to suggest that fear was an integral part of life that can be experienced and expressed in healthy ways. Instead, we treat fear as if it is not a part of us, but some separate emotion which comes upon us and with which we are forced to endure. We have separated from fear, fragmented fear from the whole of our being and our culture, and relegated it to the position of a despised monster; not unlike the monster Frankenstein tried desperately to escape.

            However, I believe that fear is an essential element of our wholeness. Renounded physicist David Bohm eloquently discussed humanity’s need for wholeness and the consequences of fragmentation when he said, "It is instructive to consider that the word ‘health’ in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word ‘hale’ meaning ‘whole’: that is, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew ‘shalem’. Likewise, the English ‘holy’ is based on the same root as ‘whole’. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation." 

            Bohm goes on to say that sustaining fragmentation defeats our deepest urge toward wholeness. I believe that in fragmenting fear from the whole, we have defeated our deepest urge toward wholeness. As long as fear sits outside the vessel of our wholeness, fear is fragmented, alone without the support of the rest of our wholeness. In our separated fear we feel alone and in misery, depressed, and isolated. In separateness and fragmentation, fear becomes anxiety, fright, terror, trepidation, horror, alarm, dread and dismay. Only when we incorporate fear into our vessel of wholeness are we able to reframe our fear through love, intentionality, and intuition; thus creating meaning and peace.

The Meaning of Fear

            There are many meanings given to fear. Webster’s Dictionary defines fear as: “Agitation or dismay in the anticipation of or in the presence of danger.” In researching the etymology of the word fear, I discovered that the word has been transferred from the cause to the feeling. The root of the word fear is Sansk, which means to go through. In early English, fear described the cause; it meant disaster from the thing undergone. Only later did it shift to the feeling or dread of the event. 

            Psychology includes various definitions and descriptions of fear. Freud described fear as ".... a specific reaction to such as escape, combined with a sense of terror in the presence of a specific object.” (Freud 1926)

            “Fear is the awareness of an imminent incidental change in one’s core structures” (Kelly, 1955, p.533)

            Goleman (1995), describes the physiology of fear:

With fear blood goes to the large skeletal muscles, such as in the legs, making it easier to flee—and making the face blanch as blood is shunted away from it (creating the feeling that the blood ‘runs cold”). At the same time, the body freezes, if only for a moment, perhaps allowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better reaction. Circuits in the brain’s emotional centers trigger a flood of hormones that put the body on general alert, making it edgy and ready for action, and attention fixates on the threat at hand, the better to evaluate what response to make.

             However, each of these descriptions or definitions of fear describe or define fear from the reductionist view of a scientist; fear as something separate rather than related to the whole. Each of the above definitions describe our response to fear or the object of our fear, but none describe or define fear itself.  When fear is described through older more wholistic wisdom, it is described as follows:

            “Rather, it is the fear lovers feel when they are afraid of losing the other’s love. The Sufi master Shibli stated, ‘Each day that I was overcome with fear, the door of knowledge and insight opened to my heart.’ (in Shafii, 1985, p. 183-184)” (From Fadiman & Frager, 1997.)

            “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 1:7)

            “In the Toltec tradition, fear is one of the many forms of love.” (Ruiz 1997)

            In older tradition and wisdom, fear is not fear of the object to which we attribute our fear, but rather the uncertainty of the utterly unknowable.

            One of my favorite places to go in the world is high in the Cascade Mountain Range, a place called “The Enchantments.” The hike to reach the Enchantments is difficult, challenging, and potentially dangerous, especially following a long wet winter with lots of snowfall, which was the case in the late 1990’s, when my daughter came with me for the first time. Even in July of that year, there were deep snow drifts and snow fields that had to be crossed. The trail disappeared in the snow covered areas, making it easy to wander off the trail only to find yourself walking on snow that was being undermined by the runoff from above. In that case, what appears solid footing is actually the weakening roof of an underground river.

            That year a group of us were hiking through one of these areas when my daughters' leg caved through the snow. She was close to me and I was able to reach out to her and break her fall enough so that she did not fall through the snow, but kind of did the splits with one leg down the hole and the other splayed in front of her on top of the snow. She was unable to push herself out because the leg that had fallen through was dangling in air, unable to touch ground. My husband and I moved around, testing the snow, and managed to find a place that was solid enough for us to reach my daughter and pull her out of the hole and onto solid snow pack. After we hauled her out of the hole, she told us that the scariest part of the ordeal was when she realized that there was no ground underneath her. She said that it felt like her leg was kind of separate from the rest of her body, dangling in a dark abyss.

            My daughter faced other challenges and dangers on the hike that year. She felt fear many times along the way. At one point, while looking at a dam face that we had to cross that was approximately 60 feet long, but only a foot wide with about six inches of water spilling over the top, she said half jokingly, “Why did you bring me all this way just to kill me?”

            I saw the look of fear on her face and my heart opened to her and I said, “We can do this any way you want. We can take all day to make this crossing.” My husband said, “Or, we can just stop here and go no further; whatever you want to do.”

            We all stopped and rested. She asked us about our past experiences crossing the dam face. We did our best to describe the experience of balancing with a backpack while walking across with the water seemingly trying to push you off the face of the dam onto a log jam about fifteen feet below. After some time, she decided that she wanted to attempt the crossing. She wanted to be sandwiched between her boyfriend in front of her and me behind her. We arranged that she would control the pace of how we crossed. She  could say ‘faster', 'slower,' 'stop', or 'go back’ as words to determine the direction and pace of the crossing. We crossed the dam face uneventfully and continued our climb into the Enchantments. On our return trip, she crossed the dam face again with her boyfriend in front of her and me behind cheerleading, “Your doing great, Sweetie!”

            At the end of the trip, my daughter announced, “If I can do that, I can do anything.” She came home and completely rearranged her life, doing many things that she had previously been too afraid to do. I watched her in awe of her courage. I did not know at the time what accounted for her bravery. I just thought (and still do) that she was one of the most courageous women I knew.

            On a subsequent hike out of the Enchantments, I had my own experience and epiphany that gave me insight into my daughter's courage.

            There is a place that I have always found slightly fearful when climbing out of the Enchantments when the snow is deepr. There is a place where I must make a blind jump off a granite face over a crevasse onto a snowy slope which is approximately eight or nine feet below. In a snowy year, the crevasse is deep enough so that, from above, I cannot see the bottom of it. The trick is to jump off the granite face, clear the crevasse and land on the far snowy slope without sliding off the side of the mountain into the treetops below. As if that were not enough, there is also the matter of the thirty pound pack on my back that I have to take into account in the jump and the landing.

            While I always felt fear accomplishing this maneuver, on one particular occasion as I was hiking down the trail, I felt my fear rising in anticipation of the jump. The fear was different than in past years. In the past, I would have called it mild fear, but this time, with the snow so deep and the crevasse wider than usual, I felt my fear widen and deepen as well. The more I tried to rationalize, justify, deny, or suppress my fear, the more it grew and multiplied. My fear became so great that I was afraid that I might not be able to make the jump. I knew that I would have to jump since it was the only way down the mountain. I began to worry that my fear would cause me to fall, or not jump out far enough, causing me to slide into the crevasse. I became afraid of the pain of falling into the crevasse. I feared that I would be trapped, unable to free myself. I thought that I might suffocate in the crevasse. I then began to worry that if I fell into the crevasse, my husband would hurry down the trail to get help and get hurt in the process. I was afraid that if I did clear the crevasse, I would slide down the snowy slope on the other side, which was surely soft and slippery, having been warmed by the sun on that cloudless day. I felt my fear, anxiety, and worry rise to almost panic. My stomach gurgled, my bowels rolled and growled, my head pounded with my heartbeat and my neck felt stiff and flushed. I found myself stumbling on the trail unable to focus, slipping on the granite, mildly spraining my wrist to avoid falling.

            I did not know what I was going to do about the jump, I just knew that I needed to take a break, sit and reflect on what I was thinking and feeling. I picked a spot on a sunny rock with a particularly majestic vista that in the past had brought me to tears with its beauty. As I sat feeling the cool breeze blowing through my hair and cooling my face, I began to feel at one with the place. Everything seemed keenly alive and connected. The smell of the rocks, trees, earth and air was sensuous to me. The experience of feeling the warmth of the sun, the deep blue cloudless sky, the wedge of the silvery moon in daylight, the outline of the grey rocky snow-covered Cascade Mountains contrasted against the deep blue sky; and the whisper of the breeze blowing through the rugged twisted evergreens was sheer bliss. For a moment, one brief moment, I and Thou, in the form of this place, melded together. I was one with the world and the world was one with me.

            Following that moment of sheer ecstasy, I felt that I was but a minute part of a great macrocosm. I identified with the smallness of the ant crawling on my leg. In that moment, I realized that I was indeed a part of the macrocosm. I was a part of this ‘whole.’ In that moment of realization, my fear dissolved and I found myself in delirious joy, knowing that I was one with this world. I had fallen in love and I was loved and cradled in this nature that surrounded me. I thanked God for the experience of wholeness, including my fear that provided the opportunity to experience such ecstasy, love and joy. I turned to my husband, who was laid out dozing next to me, kissed him awake and we got up and headed down the trail.

            When I came to the jump, I noticed that I did not feel fear until I jumped. When I landed, I realized that I had not feared the crevasse, the snow, falling, getting hurt or even death. My fear was the empty space between the ledge I left and the snowy ground below where I landed. For that moment in space, I was in the uncertainty of the utterly unknowable. In that moment of fear, I felt divine grace and surrender to the unknowable. I felt humility. I realized that it was in those moments of fear in life that I feel closest to the essence of the Divine.

            I had experienced fear and realized that my fear was not the object of the fear. My fear was the empty space, the utterly unknown empty space. I do not believe that I could have grasped this realization if I had not, in the moment of my ecstasy, had the experience of complete wholeness, inclusive of literally everything melded into one, including my fear.

            I do not believe that I would have had this epiphany if I had suppressed my fear. Author Theodore Rozak said, “…the feelings most apt to influence behavior are those that we try hardest to suppress.”  Suppression of fear leads to our living in irrational fear. An accurate acronym for suppressed fear is:

            False

            Evidence

            Appearing

            Real

             I had attempted to suppress my fear as I hiked along the trail by telling myself that I had jumped the crevasse successfully several times before. I had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. I had no reason to fear. I tried to push down the fear by looking out at the beautiful terrain. The more I tried to suppress my fear, the more fear began to influence my behavior, emotionally and physically. However, none of my fear was real. I had not fallen into the crevasse; hurt myself, suffocated in the crevasse, slid off the side of a mountain, or caused my husband to be hurt. By trying to suppress my fear, I created a fantasy that affected my emotional and physical behavior enough to have created potential danger for myself and others. Blessedly, though unconsciously, intentionality, love, and intuition were all playing a supporting roll in my experience with fear.

            Suppression of fear creates emotional disturbances such as anxiety, worry, irrational fear, phobias, irrational anger and violence. Suppression of fear takes us away from joy, bliss, insight, and wisdom. Suppression leaves us stuck running around in our fear believing there is no way out. Suppression of fear is fear fragmented and separated from the whole, alone with no way to ‘see’ what is real.

            I do not believe that I would have had this epiphany if I had avoided my fear. If I had turned back and decided to stay in the Enchantments instead of jumping the crevasse, my fear would have grown into the Frankenstein monster. I would have created rigid boundaries for myself, justifying why I could not leave the place. Avoidance is great fuel for fear. The more we avoid what we fear, the more our fear will grow. Avoidance of fear is an illusion since we are only avoiding the object of our fear, not the fear itself.

            By avoiding the crevasse and the jump, I would have been blind to the awesome magnificence of this universe. I would not have experienced the ecstasy. I might have begun to view the Enchantments as a prison from which I could not escape. I would have become victim to the danger that lurked on the trail below, trapped and angry that the world would treat me so unfairly.

            I do not believe in our ability to control fear. According to Webster, control means to ‘have influence over or to restrain’. If we want to influence or restrain something, we must know what it is that we need to influence or restrain. Since fear is the experience of the uncertainty of the utterly unknowable, we have nothing to influence or restrain. Control is not possible; it is an illusion or fantasy.

            Take, for example, a simple piece of paper, wad it up into a ball and then control it. In order to keep the paper under your control, you must hold onto the ball of paper. You might try to place the paper in your pocket so that you can have use of your hand, but then your control of the paper comes into question. What if it falls out of your pocket? If you have no pockets, you must hold onto the paper. At the very least, remaining in control of the paper means losing the use of your hand. You may become creative and place the paper in a bag that you tie around your neck with a string so that you can again use your hand and control the ball of paper. However, you may then experience some feelings about the puzzled looks from other people who see you with a bag tied around your neck.

            My point is that there is very little that is actually within our control without taking a great toll on our well being. To control fear is simply illusory. We may have the ability to suppress, avoid, deny or run from fear, but we do not have the ability to control fear. As demonstrated above, it is difficult to control an object as simple as a piece of wadded paper. At any rate, attempts at control do not lead to any positive outcome or the wholeness for which we all strive.

            In order to conquer fear, I must be in a war where I am fighting some great battle. What we know about being in battle is that it takes its toll on mind, body and spirit. While there are incidents of tremendous human courage and growth that come from the experience of war, it does not seem to me that being in battle as a way of life is a productive path to wholeness. There is plenty of evidence as to the mental and physical toll experienced by soldiers due to the stress and continual hypervigilence required in war. 

            To deny fear undermines trust. Denial is a breach in integrity. To deny what I think and feel, to deny my pain and fear is to support a lie which undermines trust. If I deny that I am in fear, I cannot trust my mind to know or to stay present to what is in the moment. I am too busy convincing myself that I do not think what I think, or feel what I feel. In denial, I disrupt the chemical changes in my brain created by fear that are necessary for me to properly perform in mind and body during times of danger. It is the chemical changes created by fear that cause my foot to instantly move from the gas pedal to the brake in order to avoid the child who jumped out in front of my car. If I had to cognitively assess what to do in a case of emergency, I would fail every time. Fear leads to victory in such circumstances. To deny fears’ existence or purpose is to stunt its miraculous purpose in the face of great danger. To deny that I am in fear robs me of the connection with Spirit or God, leaving me no ability to appreciate the fear through spiritual love and compassion.

Fear and Love

            Integrating fear into our vessel of wholeness creates a framework for our experience of fear through the other qualities of wholeness, such as love, intentionality, connectedness, compassion, purpose, integrity, imagination, intuition, spirituality and surrender. Our fear is supported and balanced in our wholeness. When seen in the context of wholeness, fear becomes informative. It tells me where I need to go, not where I need to go from.

            We are born with two primary emotions, love and fear. All of our other emotions stem from either love or fear. We easily see quality, purpose and value in love. However, we do not see the quality, purpose or value in fear nearly as easily. Yet, fear and love have similarities. Both are primary emotions, yet they are more than emotions. Love and fear are each qualities of wholeness from which all other emotions stem.

            In falling in love, there is inherent fear; Eros meets the uncertainty of the utterly unknowable. When we fall in love, we do not know what is going to happen. In falling in love, we lose our intellectual perspective and our hearts become open and vulnerable. Our fear informs us that we are, at least temporarily, losing some part of ourselves to the object of our love. It is partly our fear that leads us out of our bliss and passion long enough to see that we need to pay the bills and feed the children. However, it is not fear separated or fragmented fear that keeps us from losing ourselves to our bliss. It is fear integrated into our wholeness, in a free and informing exchange with love that leads to an experience of passion and bliss from which we will return.

Fear and Intentionality

            Intentionality determines outcome. It is through our intentionality that we make meaning and move toward something. In his discussion on the etymology of intention, Rolo May noticed that throughout the history of the word, the word tend was invariably included. Tend refers to movement toward something. In our turning toward something, we make meaning of it. May said, "Meaning has no meaning apart from intention. Each act of consciousness tends toward something, is a turning of the person toward something, and has within it, no matter how latent, some push toward a direction for action." 

            When we frame fear through intentionality, we are able to make meaning of our experience of fear. It is intentionality that turns us toward our fear.

            Several years after my daughter’s experience in the Enchantments, I heard her talking with a group of people about how that experience changed her life. She talked about crossing the dam with the water rushing over her feet trying to push her over the edge. A woman who was listening to her said, “I bet you were terrified of falling off the edge.” My daugfhter replied, “No. I wasn’t afraid of falling off. My fear was that I did not know what was going to happen.”

            When relating her experience of breaking through the snow, she said that she was not afraid of falling through the snow as much as her leg’s terror of the unknown abyss. She was not afraid of falling through as much as she desperately wanted to get her leg out of the abyss.

            When she related her experience of jumping off the granite face onto the snowy slope below, she was not afraid of landing in the crevasse or sliding down the snowy slope as I had been, but rather, falling into the abyss on the other side of the snowy slope. She also talked about her joyful experiences of being within feet of mountain goats, climbing peaks, and scenes of such fantastic beauty that she expected to see fairies and gnomes pop out before her eyes.

            In listening to my daughter relate each of her stories, I realized that her courage came from her fear integrated into her wholeness. Each time she experienced her uncertainty of the utterly unknowable, she turned toward it for information and meaning. Through integrating her fear with intentionality, she did not become afraid of the object of her fear. She was not in fear of the dam face, the log jam, falling through the snow or sliding down the snowy slope. When I talked about this later with her, she had additional insights that were very interesting to me.

            My daughter said that she knew that fear would be a part of the trip. She had contemplated not going because she was afraid of heights and had many other fears, but decided to go because she wanted to live her life more adventurously where she would be faced with challenges and succeed because, somehow, she just knew she would be OK. I suggested to her that her decision to go might not have been decision at all, but an intention which determined her outcome. She certainly had an adventurous experience, faced challenges and succeeded, returning to succeed in several subsequent adventures and challenges.

            In my own experience, in the simple act of turning toward my fear, I was able to experience a sense of wholeness in the universe, an experience that changed the way I view myself, universe and Spirit. My life changed meaning and the meaning changed my life. Rolo May said, “Intentionality is shown in the act itself. By my act I reveal myself, rather than by looking at myself.”  

            Earlier in our Enchantment experiences both my daughter and I had experiences of ‘just knowing’ without knowing why we knew. These are examples of intuition, a quality of wholeness that can inform fear, as well as compassion, support and connectedness. How fear works in spirituality, imagination, integrity, play and other qualities of wholeness are subjects for another paper. Or you can try them out yourself.

            I have spent about a year asking people what qualities they believe are essential to wholeness. I have received responses that are as simple as ‘all we need is love’ to lists similar to the various qualities that I have included here. However, not one person included fear as a quality of wholeness. I believe that this omission is primary in the magnification and proliferation of fear in our culture. Carving fear out of our vessel of wholeness as if it is a cancer that needs to be removed has not worked. Fear has nowhere to go if it is separated from the whole. Separated and fragmented fear just keeps spinning around fueled by our resistance, refusal, or ignorance in feeding it the food of denial, suppression, and avoidance. We are born with fear. Fear is an essential part of our wholeness. Whatever our experience of wholeness may be, we cannot have it without fear. We do not need to fear fear itself, we just need to include it in our vessel of wholeness and reframe it through the eyes of love.