Fear that shows up in masked form
For many of us, “fear” shows up indirectly. The mind can go into overdrive, assaulting us with the litany of our failures, or the undone tasks that somehow signify our incompetence. We may find ourselves impatient: nothing is moving fast enough; the people we depend on seem unresponsive to what we say; we feel we’re yelling into the wind. We can’t recognize that the engine of our frustration is fear.
One strategy we can use is to jam the accelerant energy. When we stop the freight train of doing and food stomping at ourselves and others, we can drop out of anxiety—which often presents as busyness—and into the more powerful emotion, which is fear.
The fear of the fear—the fear that we can’t tolerate it, that we’ll fall apart, or sink into deep powerlessness and inaction—is what drives the mind to compensate. It persuades us that if we can control our external environment, if we can eliminate our faults, and those of the people we depend on, we can become perfect. If we are perfect, we can inoculate ourselves from fear.
What to do:
Spend some time noticing what you’re doing. Call in the observing self—the part of you that can witness you without judgment. What’s happening in your body? What is the tone and tenor of your thinking? Where is your focus? Are you unable to focus? If you sense a rushed intensity in the way you’re moving through the world, see if you can tolerate sitting down, even for ten minutes. Close you eyes. Drop into your center. Ask yourself what else is present, besides the thoughts that are filling your consciousness. Practice encountering the fear, even for a short time, to build your capacity to move in and out of its energy.
Fear about the future
I think this is the big one right now. Here’s some things you can try:
When your mind paints a picture of a new disaster that’s coming your way, get curious about it. Don’t turn away from the images and try to put a different, soothing image in your mind. Don’t move into distraction. Don’t reassure yourself that what you fear won’t happen. All of these techniques, though they appear kind, are minimizing a message that is very important.
The energy that is driving the fear will likely respond to the above minimizing techniques by trying even more forcefully to get your attention. You might even start feeling sick, hot, sweaty, breathless, nauseous. These are ways our spirit, our essential self, will get our attention, if we don’t listen the first time. We might actually get sick, in fact, if that’s what it takes for us to stop long enough to hear the information that wants to reach us.
The message is likely more complex than the terrifying scenario that’s conjured in your mind. In this moment, I’m testing a hypothesis: I think there’s a strong connection between fear and love. That is, much of what people fear might happen in the future is linked to their deep love for something that appears threatened. (I notice how much of my thoughts right now are about protection.)
You can ask your fear to show you as vividly and specifically as possible what it is you want to protect. You can ask what it is you love so deeply that your long to reach into the future and control time, avert catastrophe, out think a scenario you have invented, out argue a person who isn’t here.
You can marvel at the depth of your love, the deep current of connection between you and what you love and care for. You can ask if you are protecting that entity now, or if, now that you can feel your love, you need to act. You can ask yourself what you might do in this present moment to make that love even more powerful and alive.
To be in the doubleness of love and fear, braided together, changes the fear. When we are solely envisioning a disaster in the future, it’s like hearing a siren and watching a building burn, with no water, no power, no fire truck, no people to help. It’s pure powerlessness. It’s a warning we can’t heed, because we aren’t there yet.
But when we have an opportunity to feel that our fear is at the same time invoking our deep connection to the world—all of it—we move from the lonely isolation of pure powerlessness to the depth of our interconnectedness with Being itself.
The simplest way to deal with fear of the future is to drop into our love, and bring that love forth into the present. To hold with gentleness our desire to know what it going to happen, and to remember how much power we have in the now. Our love is the flashlight that carries us, inch by inch, into the unknown.
It is virtually impossible to engage deeply thought collective action in the present and at the same time stay paralyzed with fear about the future. Our anticipation of future threat blocks our capacity to actually address harm in the present.
We can remember that it is not our job to be the lone hero who pulls the crowd to its feet; to be the one mind that solves the problem; the only person who can see what is endangered. We can instead invoke the ingenuity and participation of the more the human world; the ineffable power of Spirit, however we define it; the river of history and the wisdom of the ancestors who felt as we do now and came together to engage in singing as they struggled.
That we are here and cannot know if what we are doing will have the outcome we hope for—this can feel like a crippling burden. But that we are here at all, that we exist and still now can take the next breath, make the next pot of soup, create the next thing—that can be a manifestation of love; a way of transmuting the energy that drives the fear into conviction and promise.