Befriending Fear to Find Freedom
Hacerse amigo del miedo para encontrar la libertad
A reflection on how becoming comfortable with fear and pain expands our capacity for choice, and how deeper longing becomes accessible only when we stop avoiding what we're afraid to feel.
Befriending Fear to Find Freedom
A reflection on how becoming comfortable with fear and pain expands our capacity for choice, and how deeper longing becomes accessible only when we stop avoiding what we're afraid to feel.
To become friends, in a sense, with our own mind and our own emotional body is to be able to say: this is what I'm afraid of. This is fear. This is pain. This is how it feels.
What befriending actually means
By becoming friends with these experiences, I mean that we become able to rest in some form of okayness, some comfort, even within that which brings fear and pain. When we can do this, our choices and our ability to move are no longer conditioned by avoidance. Because if we are avoiding fear and pain, we reduce our movement. We reduce our freedom.
The question that opens when fear no longer controls us
Another way to think about it is this: if I knew that I could be with the vastest fear, the deepest pain I could experience, and still be okay, then where would I want to go? What movement is calling? What is it that my deepest desire longs for?
The paradox of opposing longings
Consider the common paradox of being torn between two polar ways of living, such as being alone and having a family. These are very common tensions of thought. Perhaps what I am most deeply afraid of is loneliness. Perhaps it is relationship. The direction forward doesn't come only from knowing the fear. It comes from the combination of knowing the fear more deeply and feeling more fully into the longing, into what I deeply want. That deeper desire will be known as something more expansive.
Expansion lives on the other side of avoidance
The qualities of love, vitality, and expansiveness: we often don't feel them because we are trying to avoid the fear. What we often truly want is something like a roller coaster. You cannot have it without the moments of fear, the moments of pain.