"I think we are frightened every moment of our lives until we know him." — Hafiz
I have struggled with debilitating migraines for years.
And by "debilitating," I mean 24-48 hours of sustained ice-pick through the skull agony, the kind where light hurts, and sound hurts, and every movement makes me nauseous, and hot tears pour for hours from my eyes not because I'm crying but because the pain is so bad it makes my eyes water constantly. Except, of course, when I am crying.
These are the kind of migraines that take me out of action for days. I miss clients calls. I miss critical deadlines. I have to cancel plans with friends and family. I stop exercising or eating. I don't see the sun. Several times a month, I just lock myself away in a dark room, bury my face in a pillow, and stop living until the pain subsides.
For years, I sought relief through medicine. When that didn't work, I sought relief through natural remedies. Then through meditation or prayer or spiritual deliverance. Then through anything I could find. I have tried some pretty "out there" wacko things. I consider myself a logical person, but it's funny how quickly logic can fly out the window when you've got an ice pick repeatedly stabbing into your forehead.
Eventually, after exhausting nearly every other option, I started seeing a cranial sacral therapist. Honestly, I didn't even know what a cranial sacral therapist was. It was just the next thing on a long tired list of things I might try. In my cranial sacral massage sessions over the next two years, I learned that I was carrying a lot of fear in my body. (You might also know "fear" by the other aliases it likes to hide behind: Stress. Anxiety. Worry. Tension. Dread.) Fear was bound up in my muscles. Fear was bunched up in my neck and shoulders. Fear was grinding at the nerves at the base of my skull.
Fear was causing my migraines.
Turns out my problem wasn't the headaches. They were merely a symptom. My problem was that I had a chronic pattern of denying and ignoring my fear. Instead of facing it and processing my feelings of fear, I would unconsciously stuff them away. So fear just kept building up in my body like a toxin that had no where to go. It built up so much and for so long that eventually it started making me physically sick.
Over those few years working with the cranial sacral therapist, I learned how to release the fear bound up in my body. I learned how to relax again, and let my body heal. I learned how to recognize when new fears show up, and how to process them in the moment instead of stuffing them away.
As a result, the migraines, I'm very happy to report, are gone.
Fear is running rampant in our society these days. It's so ever-present in our daily cultural exchanges we almost don't even notice it anymore. In many ways, fear has become our new normal. But, as I have learned the hard way, fear is at its most dangerous the moment we start pretending it isn't there.
I mean, I get it. Fear is exhausting. And we, as a people, are simply wiped out from feeling so much of it so relentlessly for so long: Pandemic, Political Division, Climate Change, Wars Across the World, Economic Stress. It's been years of hit after hit, and it's just not letting up. We're bone-tired of feeling afraid. Plus, fear is very uncomfortable. Fear makes us feel powerless, vulnerable, and exposed. Who wants to feel that?
So rather than feel our fear as fear, it's much less stressful to mask our fear as anger, or as suspicion, or as conspiratorial insight, or as courage, or even as righteousness. Whenever our fear wears these clever masks, we no longer have to recognize our fear as fear, or even admit to ourselves that there's any fear in us at all. That way we can feel justified in whatever actions we take, however radical or extreme they might look from the outside, because (we tell ourselves) it’s not fear that's controlling us. It's wisdom. It’s courage. It’s justice.
But it’s not really any of those things.
It’s fear.
When we deny the fear within ourselves, we eventually become a source of toxicity within the culture without realizing it. We project our fear “out there” onto other people. We judge them for being afraid, and will sometimes say or do very hurtful things to try to control them or stop "their fear" from impacting our lives. But this is just scapegoating, since we carry in ourselves the same fear we deem unacceptable in them. This principle is in part what Jesus was speaking to when he said,
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” — Matthew 7:1
This is how fear can become so destructive—not because fear in itself is dangerous, but because our refusal to feel it is. When we don’t own the fear in ourselves, we scapegoat it out onto the people around us, then try to forcibly control it in them.
The way out of this destructive trap is as simple as it is difficult:
You have to own your fear.
Whatever fear you refuse to acknowledge inside you will control you from the shadows. To dethrone the fear that drives your thinking, you have to bring it into the light. You have to recognize what you’re feeling as fear. You have to name, as best you can, what exactly you are afraid of. Most important of all, you have to fully accept your fear without any judgment or condemnation. You must extend kindness and compassion toward yourself, toward the simple truth that you are afraid. Why? Because until you accept your fear, you cannot change it. The first step to letting go of your fear is to accept without judgment that you are afraid.
How do you do this? How do you unmask the fear within you, so that you can accept it and work with it from a place of compassion? These three steps have been a great help to me in my own journey with fear:
1. Begin by noticing where your energy is going. What has your attention? What are you thinking about a lot? What do you find yourself ruminating about when your mind wanders off the task at hand?
2. Once you identify what has your attention, then ask yourself a few questions about it:
What are you concerned might happen, or will happen, or is happening, with this thing you are thinking about?
What is at risk for you personally if the thing that you are concerned about happening, actually does happen?
What do you fear you might lose?
What do you fear will become of you if you lose it?
3. Once you identify the real fear you are feeling, you need to consciously welcome it as a part of your current experience. It might be helpful to simply name your fear as precisely as you can. For example, you might craft a simple statement like this:
“I am afraid that if X happens out there in the world, then Y will happen to me,” or
“I am scared that if X happens, I will lose Y,” or
“Because X is happening, I fear I will become Y.”
Once you bring your fear into the light, and name it for what it is, and fully accept it, then you are free to decide what you will do with it. For example, do you want this fear to be running your thoughts, or driving your behavior? If not, then what is the deeper truth, or the grounding belief, that you want to guide your thoughts and behaviors instead?
These same principles apply at the level of society as well. We cannot be at choice as a society about our fear-driven ways until we recognize them as fear-driven, and compassionately accept that we are all feeling afraid. But we cannot help society recognize its fear and stop being driven by it until we first deal with the fear that is secretly driving us.
Then, as you become free to feel your own fear without trying to deny it or mask it as something else, you free other people to do the same. And as you choose to not allow your fear to drive your thoughts and behavior from the shadows, you show others how to do this as well.
This is what many wisdom traditions call grace. This grace is what we all need most right now. We need to be gracious with one another. But we cannot do that until we first extend grace to ourselves and to our own fear. In essence, we need to choose to show love to our fear. By choosing to love our own fear, we choose love over fear. And this is a very powerful and transformative force in the world, because, as we know, “there is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear…” — 1 John 4:18.
As a next step, what if you took some time this week to walk through the 3 questions above and inventory your fears from a place of love and acceptance?
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