These lessons can help you uncover the wisdom of fear so that you learn, grow, and come out the other side
Published in Mystic Minds
Mar 6, 2024 (Medium.com)
No one escapes fear. You can’t run away from it. But once you understand it, it becomes your teacher. Fear’s lessons can lead to wisdom, self-improvement, and spiritual development.
Rather than get stuck in our fears, which cause suffering incessantly, we can shift beyond them. First, though, we need to accept and understand them, and then we can use them to our advantage.
We are all fearful at times, and always for good reasons. Even when what we are afraid of isn’t dangerous in a practical sense and stems from the imagination, our emotion offers an important message that can bring growth and transformation when we listen and respond.
Fear is an energy that demands your attention
The first step to overcoming fear is the willingness to accept it exists, and we can take this scary step by recognizing our fears as energy. Indeed, all emotions are energetic in nature. Until we see them as such, we label them as good or bad, and naturally, we place fear on the negative end of the emotional spectrum.
Fear can be uncomfortable or downright paralyzing, so we may feel the urge to bury it or push it out of sight. If you imagine it as a cork that you hold underwater, you soon realize that repressing it takes tremendous effort. Doing so steals your attention and energy, stopping you from enjoying the moment.
Attempting to subdue your fears or getting lost in them means you don’t attend to the present fully. Later, you become weary of holding them down, and they vigorously pop to the surface of your mind, demanding attention.
I find recognizing fear as energy is helpful because it means I don’t automatically resist it. Instead, I respect it as a reaction to an event that demands consideration. Then, I can explore it to discover how it’s manifesting in me and find out what it wants to say.
Fear affects your body and your mind
Understanding the symptoms of fear is helpful. It teaches you to quickly recognize the moment fears arise so you can pinpoint their cause. Comprehending how your fear manifests will also help you realize when you move through it to the pleasanter emotions beyond it.
The physical symptoms of fear might include a rapid heartbeat, sweating, clenched muscles, a headache, stomachache, and feelings of panic. You may hold your breath on autopilot and experience the feeling of restriction in your body. Think of an animal that’s afraid and tightens into a ball to make itself smaller and protect itself. Your response could be similar.
It’s also worth noting that sometimes people run toward what they fear, hoping to make it disappear and defeat it. Hence the term fight-or-flight. We’re designed to flee from what we fear, defeat it, or remain motionless (freeze).
Your emotional symptoms might include brain freeze, whereby you can’t think straight about what to do. Or your fear might change to anger or blind panic. Fear’s physical and emotional symptoms seem drastic, but they are strong energy to grab your attention.
Fear offers a helpful message
Fear exists for good reasons. Sometimes, it wants to tell you to stay away from something dangerous or stop taking a course of action that could harm you. Think of the terror you may experience when you look down from a great height, come close to a venomous snake, or witness a wildfire. In such cases, fear is instinctive. Its job is to help you stay safe.
Fear can also arise from your stories about what’s happening. Often, such narratives are off course from the truth. They could be exaggerations, fantasies, or based on misinformation. Fears that involve repetitive negative stories create paralyzing mental states, including confusion and a sense of powerlessness.
In short, fears tell you you’re in danger. If they are based on genuine challenges, their message is to take action; this could be to stop doing something, avoid some situation, or change your actions to procure a positive outcome.
When your fears arise from your imagination, they still impart a helpful message. They could, for example, tell you that you’ve misread a situation, have made assumptions, need support or more knowledge, or have unresolved issues that you need to handle.
Fear from a spiritual perspective
When viewed from a spiritual perspective, fear allows you to transform. Listening to its lessons can help you better understand yourself, avoid danger, and improve your inner narrative to serve your greatest good.
According to the Toltec tradition, long-term fear is disabling because it reduces people’s strengths and abilities. When you see it as a helpful energy straight away, it has the opposite effect, helping you grow and evolve into your best self.
Fear may also be viewed differently depending on other spiritual beliefs. For example, from a Christian outlook, it could be a call to develop trust in God. From a Buddhist view, fear is the root of the ego and can be transmuted by bringing your attention to the present.
Then, if you’re in immediate danger, you can act. Or, if you fear the future, returning your mind to the present transforms your fear because you’re okay at the moment.
When fear arises from the imagination, ask empowering questions
I like to ask myself these questions if I’m creating negative, fear-based stories in my mind. Perhaps they’ll help you, too.
# Am I making assumptions?
On occasions when I’m unable to sleep due to worrying, I often alleviate my concerns by asking myself whether I’m assuming something negative will happen. If so, I remind myself that I don’t know what will occur and that I’m making up unhelpful stories.
# Am I exaggerating challenges?
I know my mind enjoys hyperbole. Recognizing I place a metaphorical magnifying glass over challenges, exaggerating their size, helps me drop my fears.
# Has an event triggered an unhelpful belief?
I see that some fears aren’t based on my current reality. Instead, a present event might have triggered an old, unresolved experience I’ve yet to handle. Or it may signify I have unhelpful beliefs, like I’m not good enough or things don’t go my way. Recognizing unhelpful perspectives gives me opportunities to uproot them.
# Do I have enough information?
Sometimes, I realize I don’t have enough information to warrant worrying. So, rather than run through potential future difficulties, I relax and accept not knowing.
Spiritual practices to overcome fear
While asking yourself empowering questions can alleviate your fears, these spiritual practices are also beneficial.
1: Accept and integrate your emotion
Your mind and body work together in symbiosis, and your fear may subside if you recognize and work with it in your body. For example, consider where your fear arises and what form it takes. Is it spiky, soft, sticky? Is it large, small, or medium-sized? Can a color represent it? Scent? Or movement?
As a trained counselor and Neuro-linguistic programmer, I sometimes use such descriptions to change emotions. If someone describes their fear as hard and spiky, I ask them if they can imagine it becoming softer and smoother. If they can’t, I may ask what would need to happen for their fear to transform.
Alternatively, I can ask them to picture their fear getting so small that it disappears or turns into something they find empowering, like a lion, if they believe it represents courage. These ideas correlate somewhat with the antidotes to fear offered by author José Luis Stevens, Ph.D. in Shamanic Practice.
Stevens suggests creative visualization practices involving metaphors like sunshine melting ice and making friends with a jaguar. Maybe you can picture your fears melting or getting acquainted with your emotions and taming them.
2: Raise gratitude
Practicing gratitude is a way to move beyond fear because it connects you to your strength. Your courage and positivity will grow as you create feel-good hormones. I like to begin by mentally listing five things I’m thankful for in the moment. But you could take any approach that works for you, like writing in a gratitude journal or painting a picture of something that encourages gratitude to arise.
3: Practice breath meditation
Fear makes the body constrict and shut down, so open up, widen your perspective, and reduce fight-or-flight. This will help you think straight, have clarity, and make wise decisions.
Sit quietly, close your eyes, and take deep breaths. Focus gently on the breath as it moves in and out of your body. If your thoughts stray, calmly bring them back to the breath. Your worries will lessen, and your body will tell your brain you must be okay; otherwise, you wouldn’t be breathing so calmly.
4: Be mindful
Mindfulness can help you focus on the present so you don’t dwell on the past or future potential challenges. Use your five senses to keep you in the moment. You might listen to birdsong, for instance, watch the sky, smell the air, touch the bark of a tree, or concentrate on tasting an apple.
5: Say a prayer
If you are a Christian, you might like to offer your worries to God via a prayer. Or, you may follow another religion or have another spiritual belief system and think of a different way to pray that will alleviate your fears. For example, you could pray to Source or Mother Nature or pay homage to Buddha.
6: Build compassion
I always feel better after acting like my life coach and best friend. One way I do this is to self-soothe with words of compassion. I speak kindly to myself to reduce my suffering.
You could do likewise or employ another practice, like using your imagination to send compassion to someone else who needs help. When we help others, we also help ourselves because our kind thoughts generate happy chemicals in our systems.
Fear can be a painful, scary emotion. But, once you recognize it exists to help you learn and grow, you can uncover its wisdom and undergo its lessons. Acceptance, empowering questions, and various spiritual practices can put your worries into perspective and show you the light beyond fear.
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Written by ✨ Bridget Webber
·Writer for Mystic Minds
Freelance writer, avid tea-drinking meditator, and former therapist interested in spiritual growth, compassion, mindfulness, creativity, and psychology.Follow