“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death
that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me
and through me.
And when it has gone past me, I will turn to see
fear’s path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
Frank Herbert (Dune).
We know from our study of A Course in Miracles that our only
choice is between love and fear. In truth fear does
not exist, being an
illusion of our ego-mind. When we rest wholly in our true nature we can
experience a fraction of the immense love that we are.
Tragically, when we feel
threatened, like a fly caught in a spider’s web we struggle and panic; from
here the web tightens even more. Terror is the real enemy.
Our fight, flight and freeze
response is so strongly hard-wired that the flood of chemicals it releases can
send us into frenzy. Once the storm is past, if we can allow it, a natural
equilibrium takes place which calms and restores peace to our being. If this is
interrupted we remain stuck and cannot move past the obstacle that is now
lodged in our body-mind, even though the event is long past.
As Frank Herbert notes, when
we turn to face our fear and feel it pass through us, it is really nothing at
all. The problem emerges when it remains as a ‘brain glitch’ and we store its
energy in our bodies so it can be released at a later date.
As long as we inhabit bodies
there is always a tendency to feel fear and terror that can mobilize our primitive
responses. Transcending this fear helps us develop mastery and makes us wiser
and more fully human. The trick is not to be fooled by our capacity to reflect
and rationalize by turning the response into a full-fledged story. Our stories
do not serve healing; they only embed the fear and unhealed trauma deeper into
our minds and bodies. From here, the spider has us, hook, line and sinker. This
is how fear becomes suffering.
If we can take our stories
of unhealed hurt and hold them with awareness, they too can be resolved and
unwound. It may take the guidance and support of a trusted friend or trained
therapist who can hold our fragile psyche while we heal. After this, we may
remember the event, but the ‘charge’ will be gone. We may never like spiders
but don’t get lost in terror when we see one. We don’t keep spinning an outworn
tale of how we almost died because we thought we saw one, Once Upon a Time.
Instead we choose love. We
know that fear is only a story and that there is much more to us than this
limited mortal frame that we inhabit. The beasties that used to terrorize us
are no longer all-powerful. Our world expands from its contracted fear state
and we unwind to a fuller expression of ourselves.