Some years back I went to a two-week spiritual retreat in Arizona led by Carolyn Conger, a psychologist and one of the wisest people I've ever met. The experience included a solo retreat into the desert, where we would spend two days fasting and practicing total silence.
In preparation we practiced several different meditations, the group energy allowing for a far deeper calm, stillness and centering than individuals might have achieved on their own. Afterwards, we sat in a circle and each person told a story from his or her experience.
The story I remember best came from a woman who was more spiritually advanced than I could aim for. She had encountered a snake. Having practiced with discipline before heading out on the retreat for just this sort of eventuality, she understood that no harm would come to her if she achieved the place of stillness and calm she knew was available to her.
But there she was, face to face with a large rattlesnake, coiled, ready to strike, its rattling filling the otherwise silent desert air.
All that she had practiced in the way of meditation, mindfulness and inner stillness was useless. She saw the snake and she freaked and froze-which was far more adaptive than trying to make a run for it. The snake left her alone, but she was so disappointed in herself.
She would have preferred to tell the group a different story, say a story of having looked death in the face and suddenly spotting a delicate blue flower growing out of a crack of rock and being filled with the beauty of the present moment. Or perhaps a story about experiencing a transcendent sense of "oneness" with the snake-a feeling of deep inner peace and resplendent joy at the recognition of their shared being-ness.
In fact her story about the snake was just what the group needed-a reminder that we all freak out. Even in the absence of snakes and grizzly bears and other real threats, we can't rid ourselves of fear or always set it aside.
Books like The Dance of Fear (the latest of my "Dance" books) offer important advice about understanding anxiety and getting a grip. But while nothing is more important than calming down, but it's not always possible. Forget about the notion that you can learn to triumph, transcend, and overcome fear at will. Sorry, not where anxiety and fear are concerned.
Experts as divergent as mainstream mental health professionals and Eastern spiritual leaders teach that the best we can do with fear is to befriend it. That is, we can learn to expect, allow, and accept fear, to observe it, watch it rise and fall, attend to how it feels in the body, watch it mindfully, and understand that fear will always reappear. Fear is a physiological process that cavorts and careens through our body and makes us miserable. Eventually it subsides-only, of course, to return.
The real culprits are our knee-jerk responses to fear, and the ways we try to avoid fear, anxiety and shame.
Don't get me wrong: Wanting to feel better fast is a perfectly natural human impulse. It's healthy to seek relief when you feel hopelessly mired in the emotional soup, and calming down is an essential first step to accurately perceiving a problem and deciding what to do about it. But the last thing you need to do is shut yourself off from fear and pain-either your own or the world's.
If there is one overriding reason why our relationships and our world are in such a terrible mess, it's that we try to get rid of our anxiety, fear and shame as fast as possible, regardless of the long-term consequences. In doing so, we blame and shame others, and, in countless ways, we unwittingly act at the expense of the self, the other, and the web of relationships we operate in.
We confuse our anxiety-driven behaviors with what is right, best, necessary, or true. We think we are doing what the other person needs or deserves, as we pass our anxiety along like a hot potato.
The challenge is to not let anxiety, fear, and shame silence our authentic voice, close our hearts to the different voices of others, or stop us from acting with clarity, compassion, and courage. In today's world, no challenge is more important than that.
