I'm Afraid .... I'm OK

All that stands in the way of our great actions is our fear of them, of what will happen if...

Our great actions may not necessarily bring us fame or fortune. It can be a great action to consciously choose with your partner to bring a child into the world, or to object to someone’s cruelty, or to quit your job, or to take your vacation in Peru, or to go and work for the International Red Cross in Bangladesh, or to open your own art gallery.

If I look back at my own great actions over the years, and the missed opportunities too, I see that what made the difference was my relationship to my own fear. Sometimes I let it stop me; other times I acted anyway. To do what I’m afraid to do because it matters that much has always felt good. Conversely, my saddest memory is of a certain occasion when I was too afraid to say Yes. I will always carry the wound this caused, and I let it be every day of my life a guide and teacher, reminding me of how important it is to be willing to breathe through my fears instead of being stopped by them.

I’m not talking about learning to be fearless. Fearlessness is a "battlefield mentality". True, it sometimes enables people to accomplish awesomely brave feats, and some people enjoy fearlessness so much that they spend their lives in pursuit of life-threatening adventures. Fearless people can perform brave or reckless actions because they don’t feel much. They are desensitized, often as a result of having suffered an abusive childhood in which they had to learn to protect themselves by shutting down their feelings. Or they may have been raised in stoic families or cultures to endure everything and fear nothing. Again, essentially this requires a denial or rejection of all tender and vulnerable feelings.

I’m talking about something more genuinely courageous; being fully aware of your fear and choosing to act anyway. Your action arises out of full acceptance of what you are feel-ing and of all the con-sequences of your action, whatever they may be. The learning is not about enduring without feeling, but about being willing to experience everything that happens in you, and to live anyway. This is learning that transforms your whole being!
Your Life is Hidden in Your Fear

Virtually the first lesson people learn in all Art of Being workshops is to become aware of their feelings, or of how they are suppressing their feelings. Your feelings are like the weather. You don’t decide what the weather will be like. The weather is what the weather is! What you can do is learn to have a healthy relationship with whatever you are feeling. The healthiest relationship you can have, and the most heart-warming and nourishing, is friendship. As you become aware of your feelings and fears you can gradually learn to be friendly towards everything that they ever experience.

I grew up in a world where the people around me did not respect my feelings. How could they? They did not respect their own. Whenever I felt tender, sad, vulnerable, I tried to suppress those feelings. But sometimes my feelings were so strong that they would overwhelm my defences against them and I would end up in tears, or just feeling really helpless and lost. That felt like defeat; "they" had won and I had lost. Because there was no one around to help me to trust my tender feelings it took me many years to discover that surrendering to them wasn’t defeat. It took me even longer to learn to trust and surrender to my feelings of joy and ecstasy. I didn’t know I was afraid of being joyous. It just wasn’t something that I could fully allow; I always had to maintain a certain amount of restraint. How very English of me!

But this is the way it is with what we fear in ourselves. We don’t notice what we’re missing because we are used to not feeling it, whether it is joy or sadness or anger or sexual or whatever. Many, many people in our culture are petrified. What a perfect word! It means very afraid, beyond terrified; and it means turned to stone. When our fear is extreme, we live in a petrified state. Whatever is too fearful for us we deaden; or maybe we just half-deaden it because what we fear is our own intensity and excitement.

So this is why I make a point during my workshops of directing people over and over again towards awareness of their feelings, or of the dead holes where their feelings would be if those feelings had not been driven into hiding. Then gradually they can begin to restore life to whatever they are afraid of in themselves, as long as they are willing to feel afraid. This is an essential requirement because the first thing that you are going to feel if you have petrified some part of yourself and you begin to say hello to it, is afraid. Of course, because what caused you to deaden it in the first place was your fear.
You Are Already Good Enough for Existence

You had to put your joyousness away because it made your serious father angry and that scared you. You became frightened of your erotic feelings because you grew up always feeling your mother’s sexual shame, or God’s condemnation handed down to you in no uncertain terms by teachers, priests and puritans. You grew up terrified of anger because your alcoholic father taught you that anger equals violence. You desensitized your skin because nobody stroked and massaged your body in the days and weeks after you were born; and so to be touched sensually and lovingly thirty years later would arouse all your petrified infantile longing for contact.

Ah, how many ways we have become afraid, and mostly hardly aware of the fact at all! But if you become willing to feel these fears, or even just the deadness in yourself, then life reappears. If there is someone there with you who can say to you, "It’s OK, breathe, let yourself feel it, you’re allowed to be scared" so that you keep finding the courage to be afraid, then your fear gradually becomes excitement. After all, this is what fear is! Trembling is an excited state. So is your pulse racing, your palms getting sweaty, your breath coming hard and fast, and so on: all excitement!

There is magic in this excitement; it begins to awaken the feelings and experiences you are afraid of. At this moment your whole conditioning starts ringing alarm bells warning you to shut down. At first you may need to do this too, just to feel safe. Then gradually, knowing that you have this old dead safe state that you can return to whenever you need, you can begin to feel more and more of what you had become afraid of in yourself.

An old, long-dead English psychologist used to say "you are good enough". That’s beautiful! As you learn to let yourself be you gradually realize that who you already are is good enough. After all, you’re good enough for existence! You begin to see that other people’s judgements about you are reflections of their own unfriended fears. They judge in you what they are not friendly towards in themselves.

This doesn’t mean that you’re always loving and caring. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have moments of unkindness, coldness, meanness and so on, and being friendly towards yourself in such moments doesn’t mean saying, "My unkindness is good enough". No, it means you are friendly towards the feelings that are causing you to behave meanly. Instead of judging yourself for being mean the way others probably judge you, you are willing to feel everything that is going on in your unkindness.

Have you ever had the experience of being loved by someone when you were being ugly or mean or cruel? I think those moments have opened me up, broken my heart open and dissolved my nastiness more than anything else. To be loved anyway is one of life’s great healing experiences. I believe we all need, many times in our lives, to experience being loved this way by someone, preferably by our parents from the day we are born, so that we can learn how to give this kind of love to ourselves (and then to our children and each other).

To allow yourself to feel everything that is going on in you when you are being unkind transforms you because you are so much more than just unkindness. Behind that is the pain and hurt that triggered your unkindness. Opening up to these wounds in a spirit of friendliness is what surrender really means, and it is the beginning of your healing. If you keep surrendering in friendship, you will eventually learn to love.