Fear Can Be Your Friend

“If you’re not willing to risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot be your best. If you cannot be your best, you cannot be happy. If you cannot be happy, what else is there?”
— Les Brown

Most of us grow by moving through fear of one kind or another. It can be moving through the fear experienced from triggering old wounds. It can be moving through the fear of pushing perceived limits. It is often a little of both as our old wounds come up for healing in the process of expanding our limits. 

Doesn’t that make fear our friend?

Personal growth makes us feel alive. It is stimulating. It is energizing. Even when it’s uncomfortable or scary, even when it brings up fear, there is a sense of aliveness about it, a feeling of movement and growth.

We can grow through pushing our limits, stepping outside our comfort zones, the way a crawling baby will pull herself shakily to her feet, and then to take that first step. Sometimes we fall. Sometimes we are injured and so we also grow through healing those wounds.

That doesn’t mean we enjoy the discomfort.

Most of us would rather grow through choosing to learn something new, pushing our limits, moving through any fear that might bring up and becoming more than we were.

A few years ago, I traveled with a group to Brazil. One of the most challenging parts of the trip was the opportunity to go hang-gliding off a mountain in Rio de Janeiro.  Let me tell you that created lots of opportunity for me to move through fear, pushing me way out of my comfort zone as I stood on the top of the mountain and waited my turn to fly. Even though I was riding tandem with an experienced hang-glider, during that run off the edge of the mountain my body was convinced that I was dying. The result of moving through all that fear was a huge adrenaline rush as we soared high over the coastline and intense exhilaration as we landed on the beach hundreds of feet below.

Would I be in a hurry to do it again? Maybe not. But I did it once. I’ve got a video to prove it!

Most of us would prefer that exhilarating kind of growth to the growth of triggering of old wounds. Both processes bring up fear and its consequences and having to deal with that. But the former is more fun. The latter less so.

Either way there is growth and development.

“Fear has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.' The choice is yours.”
— Zig Ziglar
 
You don’t always have a conscious choice about it. Old wounds surface when they are ready for healing and that may not be when you would prefer.

I encountered an old wound that brought up a cascade of fear just recently. It was pretty benign really yet the fear it brought up was as malignant as ever.

I was out at a restaurant with a family group. A chance remark, pointed my way in all innocence, triggered me back to another remark when I was younger. This one not so innocent. It felt almost like a PTSD episode. In the middle of a pleasant family chat I was drowning in memories of this incident in my past that I allowed to injure me for years. The injury was not so much from the incident itself or what was said at the time, but because I used it as evidence of my own unworthiness.

All of this came rushing back at me with that one innocent remark in the restaurant. It felt like new evidence of unworthiness.

I hadn’t heard that old story line for a long time and it was shocking. Fortunately, I’m not willing to believe that story anymore. At least not for very long. I breathed through the fear while we were at the restaurant, and was able to enjoy the rest of our visit.

The next day those same fearful thoughts came up again, telling me I wasn’t done with this yet. I cleared through them once again with breathwork and also with EFT.

Eventually, I was able to acknowledge that the experience came up because I was ready to heal that old wound and finally release the fear. I felt both grateful and excited at the prospect of clearing that painful story.  

I believe our Soul’s purpose is to grow and develop, and we grow rapidly through fear. That makes fear our ally in the process of our growth.

We’re not talking about survival fear here. That’s the kind of fear that told our forebearers to hide from a saber-toothed tiger. We’re talking about the fear of emotional pain, the fear of rejection, abandonment, failure, success, unworthiness, and any other fears life experience has taught us.

We’re talking about the kind of fear that tells us it is too scary to try new things, or maybe it's the fear that tells us we aren’t good enough to succeed, or the fear that says we have to avoid certain kinds of situations or we will feel emotional pain.

But what if this fear that we’ve been resisting all our lives is actually our friend?

Can we welcome fear when we encounter it knowing it offers us an opportunity to grow? Can we feel curious and intrigued when fear shows up? Saying to ourselves, “Thank you fear for showing up. You’re showing me a new place to grow.”

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
— Joseph Campbell

What if underneath most fear is the Soul’s excitement about an opportunity for growth? Would the fear related to pushing our comfort zones and triggering old wounds transmute into excitement? If we stop struggling against feeling fear and instead welcome it and the opportunity it presents, we might experience our Soul’s excitement.

I think it is possible. It’s worth a try.

“When a resolute, young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
​
The same might be said of that great bully, fear. Perhaps it is not such a great bully as we thought. Perhaps it is even our friend.

Photo by Dương Hữu on Unsplash

Your Spiritual Toolbox

​
 “Fear is excitement without the breath. Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.”
― Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level

We talked a little about using the breath to transform uncomfortable feelings in the post Getting to Know Your Subconscious Mind I. Here we will go into a little more detail about using the breath as a healing tool.

The next time you find yourself faced with fear, maybe an old wound that is triggered or a choice to expand your comfort envelope, use your breath to transform the fear.

Fear constricts the breath and the body. Deep breathing relaxes the body and the fear.

Locate the feeling of fear in your body. It is often experienced as a feeling of constriction and shallow breathing in your chest area or tightness in the solar plexus. It might be a nervous, fluttering sensation in the stomach, your legs or anywhere in your body.

Focus on the feeling of fear in your body and breathe deeply, sending the breath to that place in your body.

​Keep breathing deeply into that area until you feel that place in your body relax. 

Sometimes the fear sensations will move in your body, follow them with your breath, continuing to breathe deeply into that new area in your body until you feel it relax.

You may also find yourself refocusing your fear thoughts onto other aspects of the situation or memory. If you do, keep feeling the fear and breathing deeply through it.

Continue this process until you feel the fear relax in your body and your thoughts are calmed.

Chances are you will find yourself able to think about this growth opportunity in a new way.

​You may even feel excited about it!