Last week I asked people on the Yoga Wellbeing team what they thought was their biggest negative emotion. Three out of four people said “fear.” The truth is that fear doesn’t have to be paralyzing: For most people fear can be a great teacher. But if you want freedom from fear, you also need to learn how to work with it. You’ve no doubt heard or experienced how yoga can help you release fears from your body. Yet at some point, most of us will be asked to move into our fear, to explore its different layers in the body and mind. Here’s a guide to working with fear from three points of view— inspired by questions from readers in the process of encountering and moving through some basic fears.
There different kinds of fear.
One is the biological fear that is built into the body and helps ensure our survival. This is the kind of fear—call it primal fear, or natural fright—that gets your heart pumping, impels you to defend your safety and ultimately protects you. The second is psychological—the fear that you create by anticipating a painful future or by dwelling on painful past events. Most of the negative outcomes you dread will never happen, and yet when you think about them, you trigger the physiological reactions in the body that actual danger would set off. It has been suggested that you can deal with the psychological pattern primarily by finding the part of you that is not touched by fear.
Meditation is, among other things, a journey through the layers of your psyche. As you move deeper, you’ll travel past the fairly superficial level of your conscious mind—with its mental chatter, problem-solving tendencies, and the like. You’ll also encounter your subconscious, with its insights, feelings of blissfulness, waves of irritation, volcanic pits of anger, or swamps of sadness. One of the great boons of meditation practice is that it can teach you to move through these layers without identifying with them. With practice, you learn to recognize that all this stuff is arising, passing through you, and subsiding.
