How to Lose Fear
I found myself on the most deserted stretch of beach I know of in the world, near the southern tip of the island of Niijima. There wasn’t another person as far as the eye could see. The still air, the warm autumn sun, the coarse glass sand that coats the skin but brushes away just as easily, the gently lapping waves, the large rock protruding from the water a few hundred meters offshore – these were my companions for the afternoon.
I reached a place where I thought I might take a rest. The beach rose up from the water and gradually steepened into a hill, and I wondered about camping there for the night. I imagined what would happen if a large earthquake and tsunami struck and thought better of it. Still, I let the placid surroundings envelope me and sat down to enjoy the sleepy calm that had descended upon me.
Before I could even situate my backpack into a suitable pillow and flick my sandals to the ground, a piercing ringing entered through my left ear. Without thinking I stood up and walked urgently away from the area and rejoined civilization for the rest of the trip.
At the time I thought it was a typical episode of heightened fear, which occurred fairly often to me in those days. I would feel sniper rifles pointed at me while smoking hand-rolled cigarettes on my Tokyo apartment balcony, and I would lie down on the ground so that the guard rail would hide me from view. Then I would scurry back inside to the isolation of my living room, uneasy but alive. When panic pierced through me on the beach, I explained it away as a reaction to my previous imaginings of natural disasters. Only much later did I understand and appreciate the significance of what had happened.
I left my Fear on that deserted stretch of beach in Niijima. I released it into the wild, and for all I know it remains there, perhaps haunting the creatures of the rock just offshore. I haven’t been back there to check, though I’ve toyed with the idea of fulfilling that camping adventure. I doubt I would find it there in any case, or anywhere else for that matter. This is because when you leave Fear behind you never go back to it. That would be like unlearning how to ride a bicycle. When you leave Fear, you have learned something – you’ve learned that Fear doesn’t exist. Just as cold doesn’t really exist, only the absence of heat, Fear doesn’t exist, only the absence of Love, the force that expands knowledge and consciousness in the Universe.
Not to dwell only on the theoretical, the loss of capital F Fear has many practical implications in daily life. The most notable is a sharp reduction in the impact of small f fears. I no longer have fearful episodes like on my apartment balcony. I no longer fear talking to strangers, uncomfortable situations, speaking to crowds. More accurately I do these in spite of any fear I might feel – I’m scared, nervous, but not afraid.
Bloomberg, the data platform almost all institutional traders use, runs a quote of the day that appears when you log in. Curiously around the time of my quitting finance, a few years after the beach incident, it ran one quote a number of times: “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” Losing Fear allows you to do this. It has allowed me to quit my stable career to pursue learning and teaching, quit drinking for health and productivity, and most recently take steps to eliminate animal suffering from my diet for the betterment of the planet and our human condition. It has also allowed me to speak, sing, dance, and create on a level that I could not have previously imagined.
Losing Fear also helps us lose our bigger fears. I no longer fear loneliness, hunger, poverty – I no longer fear death. Notice these widespread fears share one trait – lack – lack of companions, food, money, life. When you understand that Fear doesn’t exist in an expanding Universe, you also understand that lack doesn’t exist in an infinite one.
And yet approximately 7 billion people continue to live in Fear. Most of the people I know and work with live in this state. The process of losing this binding force is likely to be different for everyone, but I will share my experience in the hope that it will give people some ideas to try. Once you have lost Fear, whether in a single event as in my case, or a more subtle process, you will know, and feel, that no fear is holding you back from anything in life. I also hope others who have lost their Fear, like Anton, cancer survivor and contributor to this blog, will share their perspectives on how this happened and how others can achieve it.
Though I don’t completely understand how it happened for me, generally I think I lost my Fear when I committed to the path of expanding my knowledge. A few factors of my Niijima visit also helped to culminate in the purging of Fear on that beach. For one I faced the fear of traveling alone – something I had never done before. I also camped out in the open air of a deserted campsite, which was pretty scary. So facing up to your small fears, realizing they are only holding you back, is one step.
Another in my experience was isolation. Niijima is hours away from Tokyo by jet boat and home to only a few thousand residents, with a population density of around 100 people per sq km – compared to 60 times that in Tokyo. I traveled there in the off season and the camp grounds where I slept were completely empty. In the square kilometer centered at where I was sitting the exact moment Fear left me, there were likely only a handful of people, if even that.
Physical activation and strain may have been part of it. I had communed with my campsite with a celebratory yoga session. I had walked all over the island, opting to go on foot instead of renting a bike as I usually did. I had felt hunger and thirst. By the time I reached the southern part of the island I had probably walked close to 10km with little food or water.
Another component I can pinpoint is immersion in Nature. In the lead up to the beach episode I had slept under the stars, woken up to crickets and creatures of the forest buzzing and chirping, walked in the woods and along the beach, felt the cool ocean, and the warm sun on my back. All of these helped me connect with something deeper that allowed me to relinquish the binding force of Fear in my life.
A final part of the journey that needs mentioning is the material I was reading at the time. The night before the event I read the section of Carlos Castaneda’s work The Teachings of Don Juan on the four obstacles to knowledge, the first of which happens to be fear. Some might say I am simply projecting my reading at the time onto the event that transpired later, and on a rational level I would agree with them. But reason only serves to explain a small part of our existence. Perhaps the reading unlocked a little bit of awareness that combined with all the other things mentioned above to create a perfect situation for Fear to leave me in a single instant. In any case, it did leave me, and I have grown stronger in knowledge as a result. Now if I can only get over that second obstacle that is currently holding me back. Read on if you are interested in finding out more.
(copied from http://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/donjuan1.html) “A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning, a man who has, without rushing or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power and knowledge. To become a man of knowledge one must challenge and defeat his four natural enemies… When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. He slowly begins to learn–bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield. And thus he has stumbled upon the first of his natural enemies: fear! A terrible enemy–treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest and he will never learn. He will never become a man of knowledge. He will perhaps be a bully, or a harmless, scared man; at any rate, he will be a defeated man. His first enemy will have put an end to his cravings. It is not possible for a man to abandon himself to fear for years, then finally conquer it. If he gives in to fear he will never conquer it, because he will shy away from learning and never try again. But if he tries to learn for years in the midst of his fear, he will eventually conquer it because he will never have really abandoned himself to it. Therefore he must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task. When this joyful moment comes, the man can say without hesitation that he has defeated his first natural enemy. It happens little by little, and yet the fear is vanquished suddenly and fast. Once a man has vanquished fear, he is free from it for the rest of his life because, instead of fear, he has acquired clarity–a clarity of mind which erases fear. By then a man knows his desires; he knows how to satisfy those desires. He can anticipate the new steps of learning and a sharp clarity surrounds everything. The man feels that nothing is concealed. And thus he has encountered his second enemy: Clarity! That clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain, dispels fear, but also blinds. It forces the man never to doubt himself. It gives him the assurance he can do anything he pleases, for he sees clearly into everything. And he is courageous because he is clear, and he stops at nothing because he is clear. But all that is a mistake; it is like something incomplete. If the man yields to this make-believe power, he has succumbed to his second enemy and will be patient when he should rush. And he will fumble with learning until he winds up incapable of learning anything more. His second enemy has just stopped him cold from trying to become a man of knowledge. Instead, the man may turn into a buoyant warrior, or a clown. Yet the clarity for which he has paid so dearly will never change to darkness and fear again. He will be clear as long as he lives, but he will no longer learn, or yearn for, anything. He must do what he did with fear: he must defy his clarity and use it only to see, and wait patiently and measure carefully before taking new steps; he must think, above all, that his clarity is almost a mistake. And a moment will come when he will understand that his clarity was only a point before his eyes. And thus he will have overcome his second enemy, and will arrive at a position where nothing can harm him anymore. This will not be a mistake. It will not be only a point before his eyes. It will be true power. He will know at this point that the power he has been pursuing for so long is finally his. He can do with it whatever he pleases. His ally is at his command. His wish is the rule. He sees all that is around him. But he has also come across his third enemy: Power! Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks, and ends in making rules, because he is a master. A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on him. And suddenly, without knowing, he will certainly have lost the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious man, but he will never lose his clarity or his power. A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power. Once one of these enemies overpowers a man there is nothing he can do. It is not possible, for instance, that a man who is defeated by power may see his error and mend his ways. Once a man gives in he is through. If, however, he is temporarily blinded by power, and then refuses it, his battle is still on. That means he is still trying to become a man of knowledge. A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself. He has to come to realize that the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality never his. He must keep himself in line at all times, handling carefully and faithfully all that he has learned. If he can see that clarity and power, without his control over himself, are worse than mistakes, he will reach a point where everything is held in check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And thus he will have defeated his third enemy. The man will be, by then, at the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: Old age! This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he won’t be able to defeat completely, but only fight away. This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind–a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest. If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge. But if the man sloughs off his tiredness, and lives his fate though, he can then be called a man of knowledge, if only for the brief moment when he succeeds in fighting off his last, invincible enemy. That moment of clarity, power, and knowledge is enough.”
Have you lost Fear? Confronted any of the other obstacles to knowledge? What challenges have you encountered, and how have you overcome them? Share your stories in the comments section, and productive week ahead!
Good read and food for thought! I am learning to embrace “groundlessness” these days, leaning into uncertainty instead of fearing it.
I like the way you say “leaning into it”. Uncertainty surrounds us – it makes up close to 100% of the world. By leaning into that world of the unknown, we can eventually take steps into it, and begin to perceive and understand a small part of it.
Enjoyed this piece, but I didn’t understand one part. It sounds like the moment that fear left you was a moment of great fear. Is that right?
It appears that way, but I would say it was something more than just fear. It differed from typical modern-day fearful situations, where we hesitate, worry, or hide from what needs to be done. That day was more like a primal fear, where survival depended on my departure from that area. In retrospect I think it was what Don Juan would call a “cubic centimeter of chance” – a fleeting but life-altering opportunity, if only we have the presence of mind and body to reach out and take it. I think that ringing in my ear alerted to me that I had the opportunity to leave my great fears in life behind right then and there, and through all I had done in the lead-up to that moment – the isolation, immersion in nature, bodily strain – I was able to seize that opportunity.