Fear was spoon-fed to me in my childhood. I recall a family\u00a0gathering when danger became the topic of conversation around the dinner table.\u00a0An aunt talked about the horrors of kidnapping. An uncle talked about his fear\u00a0of heights. Each family member took a turn but my mother won the contest when\u00a0she said quite simply, \u201cThe whole world is dangerous.\u201d And she went on eating. \u00a0<\/p>\n
My mother was afraid of so many things that stopped her from
living a full life. When I was growing up, she and I were out shopping one afternoon\u00a0and we were about to cross the street. We looked both ways, there was nothing\u00a0coming in either direction so I stepped off the curb. Suddenly my mother\u2019s hand\u00a0flew up against my chest and she yelled in a high pitched panicked voice,\u00a0\u201cWatch it!\u201d<\/p>\n
She startled me and I frantically looked around, expecting to\u00a0see something hurtling through the air toward me. There was nothing. My mother\u00a0stood paralyzed on the sidewalk, she looked like a frightened little girl and I\u00a0took her hand and walked her slowly across the street.<\/p>\n
When my first celebrity book hit #1 on the bestseller list\u00a0in one week, a publisher offered me a six figure deal for the next one. I\u2019d\u00a0never made that much money and I called my mother to tell her. I thought she\u2019d\u00a0be proud since she was obsessed with counting pennies, but I could hear the upset\u00a0in her voice when she said, \u201cYou\u2019ll have to be very careful.\u201d I’d hoped she\u00a0would be happy and tell me to buy myself something nice for myself, but her\u00a0reaction was no surprise. Success meant fear of loss to her and she instilled\u00a0that in me.<\/p>\n
Fear shows up for all of us in various ways. One of my writing
students gets sweaty palms before she reads her pieces. She\u2019s afraid of being judged.\u00a0Another student\u2019s mother is an English teacher and he\u2019s afraid to get his\u00a0punctuation incorrect. A cousin of mine lies about his report card and sometimes\u00a0I don’t tell the truth about how I feel because I want people to like me. Then\u00a0I take it one step further by beating myself up for being afraid in the first\u00a0place.<\/p>\n
If someone says they\u2019re not afraid of anything, I don\u2019t\u00a0think they\u2019re telling the truth. Fear is a primal emotion that helps us identify and avoid threats to our survival. The Dalai Lama himself, a man who is considered the highest spiritual leader and the head of Tibetan Buddhism, has aerophobia, fear of flying.<\/p>\n
American modernist painter, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, said bravely:<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been absolutely terrified<\/em> And I\u2019ve never let it keep me<\/em> I wanted to do.<\/em><\/p>\n The trick is not to get stuck in it by facing\u00a0it head on. At four I rushed over to\u00a0the kitchen door behind me and grabbed upwards for the doorknob. It was just out\u00a0of my reach. I began to panic, it felt like a trial by fire, when I realized\u00a0that I was dreaming and I needed to wake up. I rolled my body into a tight\u00a0little ball on the floor, covered my head with my hands and waited for the\u00a0beast to attack. I heard the raspy inhale, I felt a blast of hot air and I\u00a0smelled the musky scent as he flew into the air. A moment later, I woke up in\u00a0the kitchen, standing barefoot at the Formica table, fingering a pink plastic\u00a0placemat. I had surrendered to the formidable dream foe that wanted to eat me\u00a0alive. He was the embodiment of danger but I had faced my fear and I had\u00a0awakened and survived.<\/p>\n From a Buddhist\u00a0perspective, fear is a journey of courage. Remember the old adage, you can run\u00a0but you can’t hide. As we live our lives, sooner or later, we\u2019re going to have\u00a0to face off with that lion: the blank page, telling the truth when it\u2019s\u00a0unpopular, being the object of bullying. You can run away and give up, or you\u00a0can stay with it and break out of the prison of a fear-based life.<\/p>\n During a Buddhist\u00a0gathering, the facilitator went to sit beside a woman who was trembling on her\u00a0meditation cushion. \u201cStay. Stay,\u201d she whispered. The meditator understood and said\u00a0quietly, \u201cI\u2019m afraid. I\u2019m afraid.\u201d She kept her attention on the truth of what\u00a0she was feeling, she breathed deeply and eventually the trembling stopped.<\/p>\n Worry and\u00a0distraction escalate fear. Acceptance shrinks it. The Dalai Lama says, \u201cIf you\u00a0have fear about anything, you should examine whether there is anything you can\u00a0do about it. If you can, there is no need to worry about it. If you can\u2019t,\u00a0there is also no need to worry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fear was spoon-fed to me in my childhood. I recall a family\u00a0gathering when danger became the topic of conversation around the dinner table.\u00a0An aunt talked about the horrors of kidnapping. An uncle talked about his fear\u00a0of heights. Each family member took a turn but my mother won the contest when\u00a0she said quite simply, \u201cThe whole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2385,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions\/2385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
every moment of my life,<\/em><\/p>\n
from doing a single thing<\/em><\/p>\n
years old, I had a dream that I was sitting on the\u00a0black and white diamond shaped kitchen floor tiles in my childhood home,
staring down at my white lace-up shoes. I heard a guttural growling sound. I\u00a0looked up and there was a massive lion on the other side of the room. I covered\u00a0my ears with my hands to block out the roar. His thick yellow and brown mane\u00a0that encircled his powerful neck was wet with drool, his eyes were inky and a\u00a0tuft of thick black hair stood upright at the end of his long bushy tail.<\/p>\n