Moving Beyond Fear
February 7th, 2008 by John Wolfe
If you’ve ever visited my other website, you know I love October 31st. One of the reasons in particular is that it finds creative means for symbolizing humanities biggest fear: death. While that may sound strange or macabre, I believe it can be extremely beneficial. In the midst of this symbolism (and when done “properly”), it has the potential to engage our curiosity and interest in the subject, thus placing us partially in the driver’s seat- a location which is conducive for embracing and exploring.
When we are exploring from a place of interest, though we may still have some trepidation, we aren’t cowering from a place of terror. This is all part of taking the emotional journey back to reclaiming our power over fear. Once we release a large portion of our fear of the unknown, we can move into a more amazing experience of living.
To that end I’d like to discuss an ongoing encounter I’ve had with a strong fear and my process of working on releasing it, in the hopes it will provide benefit to my readers that may be struggling with some phobias of their own.
While my story is definitely not a life and death situation, it is about an issue which represents a lot of personal resistance. For my entire life I have had an acute fear of visiting the dentist. This primarily stems from the fact that every procedure I’ve ever had, at every visit, has been accompanied by large amounts of pain- this includes average, run of the mill cleanings. Ever since I was a young child I’ve been a mouth breather at night time. Mouth breathing (in some people) can lead to extremely agitated and highly sensitive gum tissue. This in turn leads to large amounts of pain and bleeding during ordinary dental procedures.
For years I pressed on, with my visits, in the face of the pain. While I did succeed in making it through each appointment, I was doing so through an action only strategy. I was not balanced in my decisions. My emotions were all over the place about going, but because I was more concerned about the aesthetics of my smile and what society thought of me (if I didn’t obtain regular dental check ups) than I was about my own emotional well being; I continued forcing myself to go in spite of my phobic feelings.
And because I was highly stressed concerning the circumstances of my mouth, I continued to compound the situation further. As I’ve mentioned before, high stress levels lead to the opportunity for disease within the body and I was certainly dis-eased about this situation.
Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go to the dentist, but I am saying we should go for reasons which aren’t primarily based in fear. We should never follow fear’s lead for taking physical action (unless we are faced with a life threatening situation). And essentially that was exactly what I was doing. I was taking a fear filled, painful experience and trying to motivate myself into moving forward through the use of more fear based tactics- not a good mixture.
Unfortunately, this is the strategy most dentists and doctors use to get us into their offices. How often do we see propaganda warning us we had better get in and have certain procedures done or else? And often times, the or else has more to do with a potential blow to our delicate self-esteem (and a lining of their pockets) than it does with preventative medicine and concern for our health. I’m not insulting the entire medical/dental community, but it’s blatantly obvious a large portion of the healthcare industry uses strong arm fear tactics, aimed at our insecurities, as marketing strategies for boosting business.
Western medicine has yet to understand our role in influencing our individual reality because it’s still stuck in the old Newtonian and Cartesian views. Until it’s ready to embrace the shift, which the new models of quantum physics have revealed, it will continue seeing an increase in problematic health conditions that its current understanding of the physical body (and reality) can’t explain.
Our health is just like everything else in our lives. It requires a fifty-fifty balance of action and emotional/thought tuning. Until we are ready to fully engage on both levels (and in most cases back way down from the action only strategies we’ve become accustomed to employing) we will never be whole in our body’s ability to attain wellness.
Since, for years, I never located that balance concerning my oral health (let alone realized it was important) my fear continued to intensify like a snowball rolling down hill. It built up to the point of becoming a serious phobia. It was out of control and I was out of alignment; feeling tremendous resistance around the subject matter. Even though I continued performing all the usual personal care for my teeth at home, I stopped going to the dentist for a little over three years. I was paralyzed by a feeling of sheer terror. My back was against the wall and I knew I needed to discover a way around it.
The first step, I found, in moving beyond this condition was to fully acknowledge that my fear was stemming from within. While this didn’t fix everything, it did place me in a position of feeling stronger about my circumstances. Instead of trying to strictly blame my fear solely on my past dentists and dental visits, I was able to claim responsibility for my feelings. This claiming of responsibility helped me to realize my fear was not external from myself. I had created it all on my own.
Primarily, we tend to view our fear of the unknown as separate from ourselves. We’re always afraid of what’s “out there” waiting to get us. Each time we interpret things in that manner, we are giving up our power. This act of transference places us in a very vulnerable position because we are granting our fear the means for controlling portions of our thoughts and actions. We continue to create more fearful experiences and responses by believing fear has the power to force its way into our lives through its own accord. Nothing could be further from the truth.
After owning my fear (in a healthy way), I began to reason its intensity was so pronounced because I really did care about my teeth and my oral health, and not just because of social pressures. I reached a point where I honestly cared for my own well being instead of what other people thought of me. Now I was making progress. I no longer had a fear based motivational response for going to the dentist; instead I wanted to go for the general care of my mouth. Once my objective for going had been established and it was no longer for superficial reasons, I was able to work on relaxing the anxiety associated with the visits. This is where meditation and visualization came in very handy.
During my fifteen to twenty minute meditations, prior to my visit, I would establish a place within my mind that allowed me to symbolically release my resistance so the natural flow of my life experience could unfold. This was accomplished through the use of water as my visual aid.
I envisioned myself being part of a mountain stream. I would totally submerse my consciousness in the setting and become one with the water; gently and unhurriedly flowing forth around rocks and barriers. I took in the smells of nature and the colors of the sky and mountains. I worked to cement this location and the feelings associated with it in my mind, so it would be easy to re-create while sitting in the dentist’s chair.
While there was still some fear and pain associated with my first visit back, I was probably calmer during my most recent appointment than I’ve ever been before. I even found myself extremely present in each moment during the visit. I began to explore and take interest in the procedures they were performing (although admittedly that’s not always easy when you have a couple of sharp instruments stuck in your mouth at once 
). As I mentioned in my very first paragraph, it’s through exploration and engaging the circumstances we used to fear that allows us to regain some of our personal power.
The third step, which helped me to move beyond my fear, was to understand the necessity for embodying what I speak about and vice a versa. I can’t write about spiritually empowering my readers if I’m not consistently working on regaining my own place of empowerment.
Before I end this post I would like to address pain’s relationship to fear. There are a lot of macho slogans floating around on bumper stickers and t-shirts out there, such as: Pain is Fear Leaving Your Body, and No Fear! First of all, I believe fear exists for a great reason. If we didn’t know what it was like to fear something, we would have no clue what it was like to live minus that feeling.
Fear serves as an excellent contrasting experience and it also clues us in when we are picking up forms of resistant thoughts and ideas which obstruct our natural flow. It’s an indicator which helps to inform us we are creating an imbalance and aren’t at one in our current state of focus. It also exists to prevent us from moving forward in our current state of mind.
About the whole “Pain is Fear Leaving Your Body” thing- I say it differently: Pain is fear’s way of rummaging around in our bodies. As long as we are feeling forms of pain we are not fully rid of fear, but that’s ok. We can observe it from a place of understanding its purpose and when we do that we cease to give it the power over us to cause suffering. Pain can be present, but the choice is up to us whether or not we choose to suffer with it and become its victim.
To move beyond my extreme fear I realized I needed to make a conscious decision to take a different approach. I decided to own it, but in a way that would break my cycle of the depression, stress and anxiety associated with it. I decided to own it in a manner that showed responsibility for it.
In other words, I had to find the feeling place which caused me to know I had created this entire experience. It was no one else’s fault. While it very well could be compounded by someone else’s actions, if I continued to lay the blame on them I wouldn’t break the cycle and would only continue giving my fears their own power; rendering me helpless in the process. Once I was able to find the place within my emotions which re-instated my feelings of power, I then devised the means for getting through the physical actions required. Now, each successful step I take towards doing this continues to reinforce my feelings of control over my fear.
While I used a very specific situation to highlight my journey through releasing the majority of my fear; I believe we can apply these strategies towards any fear we may be dealing with.
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