Like most people in our society I always believed that fear was something I shouldn't be feeling. That it was a sign of weakness or disfunction. That it was embarassing to be afraid.
Whenever I felt anxious or afraid I would think that something was wrong with me and that I had to do whatever it takes to hide and get rid of the fear.
I didn't realize that my wanting to get rid of it was actually making it worse. And that trying to avoid was leading me away from my true calling.
Unwelcome Anxiety
German society in particular seems to be very keen on avoiding fear. Almost everything that can go wrong you can buy insurance for. Fear is a very unwelcome emotion for most people and it’s not surprising, given that it is a very uncomfortable and often overwhelming feeling. Too much anxiety either paralyses us or send us into wild and frenetic efforts to rush to safety.
But if fear can have such a great effect on us, shouldn’t there be a way for us to harness all that energy?
Emotions as Energies
In her book about feelings and emotions author Vivian Dittmar writes that all emotions are forces that live inside us and that have a light and shadow side.
Healthy anger for example brings clarity and decisiveness, however too much anger becomes destructive.
What truely baffled me though was that according to her, healthy fear brings creativity. I had never felt very creative when I was anxious, on the contrary, I felt paralysed and boxed in to the point where I wasn’t even sure what I wanted anymore. How on earth should this emotion make me more creative?
The Sign of the Unknown
According to Dittmar, anxiety signals to us that we are encountering the unknown. We are about to enter a space where we cannot predict what will happen. We cannot know how we are going to deal with whatever arises. We have no patterns or experiences to fall back on, thats what makes it so scary. We don’t have an established program yet for handling the situation.
What's easy to miss tough is that this lack of established structures also holds massive potential for creation. The absence of the familiar is the freedom, in fact the necessity, to create something entirely new, to act in ways we haven’t acted before, to become someone, we can’t imagine yet.
Fear is the emotion that signals to us that we are entering into a special space, where there is a chance for tremendous growth. It is a portal into Self-creation. And without the initial charge of fear, we would lack the necessary energy once we enter that space.
Activated Fear
It was only when I decided one day to just sit down, let go of all resistance and avoidance strategies and just let the fear flow, that I really understood this.
Like all emotions, fear only becomes a problem if we resist it. As we try to suppress fear, we actually become afraid of being afraid and that can send us into a downward spiral of anxiety attacks and drepression.
If we accept however that fear is a healthy emotion, that guides us as we step into the new, and allow it to flow, something magical happens.
Dittmar refers to this as activated fear. If we manage to bravely walk into it, at some point our fear will transform and the emotion that made our hands shaky and our knees wobble suddenly turns into a flood of creative energy. Unrestrained by preestablished patterns, we find ourselves fully alive in the here and now. We become inspired by our own courage as we expand the boundaries of what we can be.
When we realize this, we will no longer run away from healthy fear, but happily walk with it, knowing that before long it will reveal its true face as the gatekeeper to Self-creation.
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