It was Christmas, and I was looking at being evicted and homeless. With a toddler. With no spare resources to settle the house we were renting or get to a safe place.
I couldn’t even get transport to the social services office. Our car had been smoking if it went over 40 miles an hour. My toddler would have to come with me, and we lived in a rough neighborhood far from bus stops.
It had been a perfect storm of problems. My work had dried up. My toddler had hit a demanding phase, and I was getting no sleep, and he was getting into everything, and I had no one else to watch him. A broken pipe and broken heating in our rental had cost us extra. And then a lost job and a lien on a grandfathers’ medical debt clinched things.
There was no way we would be able to make rent next month. We had a month to get rid of everything, with nowhere to go, and figure out how to survive.
I was the most terrified I have ever been.
In desperation, I bundled up the toddler and went outside into the early dark. It had just started snowing, and there was a layer of pink and blue and purple shadows over what had yesterday been scrub grass.
A street light cast an ethereal glow over an old tree growing from a median at the end of our block. Tiny flakes melted on my face. The air was crisp and sharp, fresh and cold, and alive.
It was achingly beautiful.
Right in that moment, I knew we were okay.
Fear As a Part of Personality
Life, frankly, is scary.
We usually try to break fear up into pieces, to understand-why-it-to-death. But it keeps coming back.
Jiddu Krishnamurti takes a different approach. He sees fear as a whole, and perhaps one of the greatest problems in human suffering.
In a nutshell, he sees fear as a part of you. As part of the “who” that can feel fear, that thinks and desires and wants to live. We have to be still enough to see and accept fear as a whole, as a condition of being alive.
Likewise, fear is not present in the moment – it is always a result of thinking about the past or the future, so if you stay in the moment, there’s no fear.
It makes me think of Eckhart Tolle, who wrote the lovely book “The Power of Now”, with a lot of great insights on being present in the now. But – he also had this weird battle with “The Pain Body”… which he called an almost-entity of collectively unconscious pain that rises up and causes people to act like assholes occasionally… so he has to master them by staying present in the now (or ignoring them away).
This always hit wrong for me, and Krishnamurti explains why. Being present in the now and fully seeing and accepting the self without running from it or trying to escape means sitting with that pain, accepting it as a condition of the personality.
Tolle, in other words, was struggling with his own unaccepted fear and pain. So it kept rising up, from seemingly other places, to remind him of what was left unaccepted in himself.
Tolle wanted there to be a now that is free of fear and pain – but while we can see around them and accept them – we can never really be free of them as long as we are human and have a “who” in us. It’s a condition of being alive.
Detachment and Acceptance of Fear
Instead, you can detach from the fear and pain – to see around it exactly as Krishnamurti advised – much like how Buddha sought a release from suffering.
His insight was that you can’t avoid the pain and fear, but you can accept it, and live without attachment to the outcome (in the present), because the attachment (to future and past outcomes) is what creates suffering.
Fear as Movement Into the Unknown
Krishnamurti further points out that fear is always what happens when we move from the known to the unknown. It’s basically the natural response of the neural networks in our brains being asked to fire in a different pattern. Again, this is a condition of living to accept, not something we are going to be free of.
In “War of Art”, Stephen Pressfield talks a lot about battling resistance, the feeling of terror and avoidance that comes up whenever we try to make something new and creative. A big problem for entrepreneurs and creatives.
His book reads like a Shakespearean battle cry – resistance will come, it will always be there, do the work anyway – he admonishes.
In contrast, in Awakening Creativity, by Carrie Schmitt, she encourages us to be kind and loving to our fears, love creativity more, step over them to create.
But both ignore the key point. That every step into the unknown will create fear – that is how our brains are wired. And the only lasting solution is to learn to see and accept our fears as a whole – and to live in the present, where their emotional powers of control are weakest.
We will never get complete satisfaction without fear. But we can enjoy our satisfaction, accept our fear, and learn to live in peace with both.
A Process for Peace Amidst Fear
1) Notice your own core fears – Whether you are afraid of shame, losing those you love, pain, losing your identity, or one of the dozens of other core fears, just gently see it and acknowledge it. It’s like a friend, just trying to protect you.
2) Allow them – Like the desire for food, they are just part of the desire for satisfaction, to keep existing. There is nothing wrong with wanting to eat, take care of yourself and others, feel satisfied, and exist.
3) See fear as a whole – But the greater challenge is Fear itself. Don’t divide it into fears of this or that, fears of present or future, fears conscious and subconscious. Writing the origin story of each fear will not stop it from springing up at each new step.
4) Ground in the present – Notice: are any of the fears here right now in this moment? No. Right now there is peace, or there is action. Stay here. Stay present. Look for something beautiful or grounding. Use your senses – can you feel, smell, touch, hear, taste something in this moment?
5) Stay still and see if you can feel the edges – A great technique for pain is to feel out to the very edges, and stay there. Don’t try to fight it or resent it, just be with it. Feel the edge. Breathe.
6) Meditation time – See if you can sit still, and gaze without judgment or needing to change it long enough, to be aware of your fear as a whole. And then feel for the “who” who is looking at the fear. The two are connected. Made of the same raw stardust.
7) Accept – The fear will always be there, each time we walk into the unknown. That’s part of being alive, part of being human. We cannot avoid it. But we can learn to carry it, be at peace with it, and keep walking.
In the End
If you are going through a time of great fear, I’m sorry. We can’t always avoid them. Maybe all we can do is try to live in the moment, find the beauty and peace in the here and now, accept it, and make peace with it.
To a lesser extent, fear will always be there. We can’t chop it up or rationalize it to death. It’s a condition of being alive and walking with the unknown.
But we can learn to see it, accept it, and carry it.
As to me, in the end, we did find a new living situation. Some family stepped in and helped us get there, although it meant moving across the country and leaving many things behind.
And I learned that even in our scariest times, there is still beauty and peace in the dark.
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