essay - The Heart Of Fear - Robert Augustus Masters

Fear is adrenaline-infused contractile aversion, manifesting as a mildly to profoundly unpleasant gripping sensation that compellingly and viscerally announces: I am not safe, I am threatened, I am in danger.

This message -- information scrawled in our own blood -- may often be all but impervious to cognitive intervention. Consider, for example, the following: If we suffered a particularly difficult birth, with our vital signs having accelerated for a significant amount of time into zones of extreme danger -- so that our survival was clearly at stake -- we obviously didn’t think rationally about our situation, but rather automatically reacted by “doing” whatever most quickly and effectively reduced the danger, like going neurologically limp or “depressing” our vital signs. Later in life, when in the presence of sufficiently heavy danger (real or imagined), we not only get afraid, but may also revert to what originally had “worked” to save our life (during our birth): We withdraw, shut down, turn off, get depressed (preferring the burdened beasts of depression to the monsters of the deep).

Whether it manifests as worry, anxiety, dread, or terror, fear very easily undercuts our rationality. Animals get afraid -- or at least demonstrate the physiology of fear -- when actual danger is present and registers; the electrifying biochemistry of fear immediately and powerfully enables them to flee or, less commonly, to freeze. However, humans are usually far less practically inclined, at least after infancy; we get afraid not only in the present, but also project our fearfulness into the past (as in guilt) and the future (as in anxiety), generally keeping ourselves not only chronically afraid, but also enslaved to whatever most successfully keeps us from our fear.

Fear can be adaptive or maladaptive. The rush of fear we feel when we are getting too close to a precipice is useful, immediately alerting and readying us for needed action (like stepping back). Worry, on the other hand, is far from useful -- when we permit it to gnaw at us, and to enlist our cognition in its service, we’re only keeping ourselves off track, bound up in a too narrowly framed view.

The key to working effectively with fear is to get inside it.

This means, among other things, that we need to have a clear knowledge of all the ways we’ve learned to get away from fear, so that when one of them shows up, we’re capable of looking at it -- rather than through its eyes -- and, to whatever degree, saying no thanks. Getting inside fear means getting past its periphery, getting past its defining thoughts, getting past its propagandizing sentinels, getting past our problematic orientation to fear. Entering the dragon’s cave.

Once we are within fear, under its skin, with our attention scanning our surroundings like a miner’s headlamp, we can begin acquainting ourselves with its basic characteristics, particularly those sensations and beliefs that together make it into a something we label “fear.” The closer we get to it, the better we can see it.

However, we need to learn not to get close too quickly, not to move so fast that we can’t keep digesting and integrating what we’re experiencing -- if we’re entering something as intense as terror, we have to step very carefully. Taking on too much only increases our aversion to fear.

So slowly and carefully we go, feeling our way in, remaining as aware as possible of our breathing and feelings and sensations, keeping some contact with the “outside world,” letting our Ariadne’s thread of remembrance have some slack, but not so much that we forget to keep in sufficiently-embodied contact with it. In touch. Asking a few key questions of ourselves as we proceed can be very helpful: “What sensations am I experiencing in my belly, my diaphragm, my throat, my upper back, my forehead, my hamstrings? And how are these changing? What is their texture, tone, temperature, color, shape, directionality? And what kind of mental processes are going on as I do this? And to whom is all of this arising?”

That is, we deliberately cultivate some curiosity as we enter the den -- we are on guard, but we’re not all that solidly armored. It is also helpful to view the storyline presented by your fear as just that, a story -- treat it as you would a dream that you’re beginning to suspect is indeed a dream.

Sometimes it may be useful to personify fear (and not only ours!) as a scared child, a very hurt child, a child who is aching for our touch, our care, our love. As much as that child, that locus of frightened vulnerability, may initially shrink from us, it is only for as long as we forget or avoid our compassion.

When we remain outside our fear, we remain trapped within it.

When we, however, consciously get inside our fear, it’s as if it turns inside out. Getting inside our fear with wakeful attention and compassion actually expands (or everts) our fear beyond itself. Once the contractedness at the center of fear ceases to be fueled, fear unravels, dissipates, terminates its occupancy of us.

In entering our fear, we end our fear of it.

Through attending closely, caringly, and carefully to the particulars of our fear, we decentralize it, so that its intentions and viewpoint can no longer govern us. When the light goes on in the grottos of dread, then fear is little more than Life-energy having a bad day. When we touch our fear with authentic caring, it de-tenses, de-compresses, usually quite quickly becoming something other than fear, something unburdened by fear’s agendas or headlines. Fear met with an open heart does not usually take long to dissolve.

The key is to actively and decisively disidentify with our fear.

Then all that’s happening is a fluxing mix of phenomena that we typically label “fear,” along with the awareness of it. Then our fearful thoughts and assumptions do not center us. When we no longer feel as though we’re constellated around our fear, then fear is no longer fear -- it may still phenomenologically resemble fear, but it doesn’t have us so compellingly hooked. We may still be squirming, we might even still be frightened, but we know we’re not really in as much trouble as our fear initially announced to us.

But sometimes fear can slam into us with such shocking force that we’re left devastated. Rape, war atrocities, torture, a sudden loss of sanity. Huge, huge blows. Even so, it is still possible to approach such trauma-centered fear -- at the right pace and very, very carefully, ideally with skilled help -- and defuse it. This, however, does not mean that this kind of fear always has to be tiptoed around; sometimes what may be called for is deeply cathartic release, as the following example illustrates:

Lorraine (in a group that I’m leading) is talking casually about what she has been ”going through.” This is my first encounter with her. The more she talks, the less confident she becomes. Soon, she’s saying how scared she sometimes gets, and how close, how very close, she has come to killing herself, sometimes holding a rifle to her head. Everyone is very still. Her right eye starts to widen and drift a little, losing focus.

I sense that she is far, far more terrified than she is showing. Though she is young and healthy-looking, she appears extremely fragile now, as if she is about to be swallowed up by something enormous. Her features are beginning to swim and eddy in my vision; the room is quickly shedding its familiarity. There’s a long pause, and then I ask her what she sees.

Blackness, she whispers. No faces, no room, nobody, just blackness. I feel very connected to her in the enormity of her terror, and also in her terror of her terror. No longer can she speak; her eyes are rolling with horror.

I have her interlace fingers with me. She grips very hard, and starts to scream, wildly but not fully -- she’s not so much expressing her madness as trying to get away from it. She is so, so afraid. The intensity is escalating. Quickly, I help her roll onto her back, knees up. She is shaking violently, and is fighting it. Guided by the half-dammed currents of the forces surfacing in her, I work with her body and breath, rapidly but not-too-rapidly loosening her diaphragm, her belly and solar plexus, her neck and jaw. There is no map for this, no preset somatic sequence or protocol.

Primal terror, trust, intuition, awareness, spawning through their meeting and mingling fitting directions and actions.

Now the energy, less and less an “it,” is not contained anywhere in particular. Lorraine is no longer “just” Lorraine, but is raw aliveness bursting with presence. Her screaming, now full-bodied, gives me gooseflesh and rips into my heart. I ask the group to breathe more deeply, to come closer to us and to each other.

Her terror is, it seems to me, not only hers, but mine as well, and all of ours. Terror of what? For her, extreme danger, seemingly represented by an all-consuming blackness, immeasurable and timeless darkness, forever edgeless.

I ask her to open her eyes. She is obviously still scared, but now not so overwhelmingly. Look into my eyes, I say, and let the terror, the darkness, the craziness, whatever it is, come out through your eyes, your throat, your whole body, but keep eye contact with me. As she does so, her expression changes dramatically.

No longer is she a terrified young woman looking at me, but something much, much older and darker, streaming with enormous power, pouring into me. Pouring and pouring, pouring into and through me. An avalanche of energy. Now it’s no longer an “it” but only reclaimed her. And reclaimed us. This lasts for perhaps two minutes.

She sits up and I hold her while she cries and cries. Many in the group are also crying. Gradually, she settles into a deeply relaxed, very loving state, a kind of “second” innocence that gives her faith in her capacity to continue her healing.

(Note: I don’t recommend making such catharsis a goal, especially so soon, but there are times -- as with Lorraine -- which demand responses that both energetically match and take care of what is being presented. Sometimes a particular opening with someone may necessitate many months of preparation, whereas at other times, to delay such an opening for even one session would be a disservice to that person.)

In working with fear, it is also important to take into account collective fear. Ever since we became capable of destroying ourselves through nuclear means, our fear-level has increased, along with our fear-distractions (psychic numbing ranking high on the list). We all know in our marrow that we feel threatened -- at least on a physical level -- no matter how “successful” our compensatory strategies are.

In one short century, we have done acceleratingly devastating damage to our home and ourselves, mostly showing only token signs of backing off, living as if there is no long-term tomorrow, generally paying not any more importance to the notion of a sustainable, ecologically sane economy than to the shallowest of news, literally turning our backs on the mess we’ve made, and are still making. Getting close, undefendedly close, to that mess is scary. Threatening. We all know the drill: ozone hole, oil running out, famine and greed doing a deathly two-step, toxic waste, super-germs, war and ecological rape still going on. Very threatening. But if we don’t feel, openly and mindfully feel, the threat and its catastrophic implications, we likely won’t deal very effectively with it. It’s so easy to put off. So easy to switch to another channel. So easy to sabotage our capacity to take the necessary action.

However, in entering our collective fear, and entering it with a courage born of compassion, we stand at the threshold of a dimension where an intoxicatingly sober sanity blooms. A place where we cannot help but incarnate a sense of self that includes all of us -- and all that is -- beyond the dramatics of good versus bad, light versus dark, higher versus lower, and so on.

As long as our desire to continue distracting ourselves from our suffering is stronger, or permitted to be more central, than our longing to be truly free, we will continue to be occupied (or colonized) by both fear and its “remedies” (not the least of which are the spiritually ambitious dreams and immortality aspirations of “I”).

Going to the core of fear deepens love. In fact, it’s only through openly facing our fear that genuine fearlessness arises. In fear, we do not feel safe; but in ego-transcending love, we feel and are safe, being in intimate resonance with that which cannot be harmed or left.