Honoring Your Fear

I was standing at the top of Mt. St Helens, looking down at 5,000+ feet of descent and several glacier fields below me, when the fear showed up.

Last weekend, my partner and my bestie and I had just made the day-long slog up this beautiful volcano, climbing over boulder fields and trudging up the shifting sands of pumice-covered ground. It was magical and mysterious and a beautiful challenge!

After soaking in the breathtaking views from the rim of the crater and taking a lunch break at the top, it was time to start plotting our descent. Most hikers were glissading down the glacier fields to avoid the pumice fields and cut their hiking time in half.

Glissading, if you haven’t heard the term, essentially means sitting down on the snowy side of a mountain and sliding down on your butt.

Now maybe you’re the type of person who reads this and thinks: ‘OH HOW FUN!’

Or maybe you’re like me and your first thought is: ‘OH HELL NO.’

I have always been fearful of the combination of steep plus fast (this is why I still don’t downhill ski). But this was a situation where the glissading was actually the SAFER option for me rather than trying to not fall on my ass while carefully slip-sliding down the pumice fields (not to mention the hours of descent it was going to save my knees from). So it was time for me and my fear to team up.

What do YOU do when fear arises?

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines fear as “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.”

In the moment, yes, fear can be an incredibly unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling. And today, I want to challenge you to begin seeing fear not as an enemy, but as a friend…it’s one of our hardwired, evolutionary responses that is there to alert us to something very important and to keep us safe.

Sometimes fear shows up to tell us: “whoa, you are seriously in danger right now and need to exit this situation!”

Sometimes its message is more like: “whoa, you might totally screw this up and fail big time and that would be SO humiliating!”

And the real challenge is this: our nervous system won’t know the difference between these messages, because they often come in exactly the same package (think: racing heart, sweaty palms, muscle tension, elevated body temperature, a fight or flight or freeze response in your body or behaviors, etc.).

This is why it can be helpful to utilize ALL of our decision making centers (our logical mind, our feeling heart, and our gut intuition) when facing something in daily life or work that feels scary to us.

In her incredible book, “The Language of Emotions,” author Karla McLaren describes fear as the dance of both intuition and action. She describes how fear “hones your senses, alerts your innate survival skills, and increases your ability to respond effectively to novel or changing environments”. McLaren argues that when we allow fear to do its job and flow through us, we’ll feel more “focused, centered, capable, and agile” in every area of our lives.

It’s when we ignore or minimize our fears that we can get ourselves stuck.

Because our nervous system can’t tell the difference between these two different kinds of fear messages, until we develop a practice of using our head-heart-gut together to make decisions, we can get stuck in a loop of always turning away from what “scares” us.

And when we habitually avoid discomfort, the world around us begins to contract.

New opportunities, new learning, and new adventures begin to pass us by, because we were so focused on staying in our comfort zone.

Alternatively, our collective culture has taught many of us to just “push past fear”, to see it as weakness, maybe even to take risks that impair our boundaries and put our well-being last.

Fear is always there to take care of us and to bring our attention towards something important. The more we learn to turn towards our fear and see it as our ally, the more we begin to identify the difference between a fear that must be heeded, and a fear that is rooted in our old stories & beliefs that are stuck on repeat.

Back on the volcano, I listened to my fear. What do you need to be able to do this? I asked her. She guided me to seek more information, so I listened carefully as a volunteer named Andy gave us tips on how to slide down safely. I observed a few other hikers and Mischa first to get a sense of what to expect. I was still a little shaky but this data helped me feel more grounded and ready to at least give it a shot. You can just try it first and stop if you decide you don’t like it, fear reassured me.

Fear never left. She was with me as I made my first slide down, a little too fast and uncoordinated, and came to a crashing stop against Mischa’s backpack. He gave me some tips for controlling my speed better, which I was able to apply thanks to Fear’s ability to shut my Pride up in this kind of situation…

And thanks to Fear’s clarity, focus, and agileness, I GLISSADED DOWN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE SNOW FIELDS. Once I relaxed and actually looked up and around me on the descent, I was stunned by the beauty around me. I felt like I was flying! And it was actually fun!

I was so grateful that Fear had helped me take the leap that day.

When you find fear rising in you about a situation, try utilizing your head, heart, and gut to help you find your way forward:
First: identify what your fear is (mine was “sliding uncontrollably into a rock field to my death!”).

Next: ask your logical mind how likely it is for this fear to come true (seeing and hearing the data helped me realize it was highly improbable) AND how you’d want to handle the worse case scenario (if I started sliding out of control, I knew to flip over onto my belly and use my hiking poles to arrest my slide!).

Next: ask you heart what you need to feel safe and open to doing this right now (being able to observe first, having support from my partner and my bestie, knowing that I only needed to try it once and could stop if I didn’t feel safe)

Finally: tune into your intuition to get focused and grounded in your body (garbage bag wrapped around my butt: check; hiking poles ready to grab snow: check; knees bent and heels ready to slow me down: check; flexible posture ready for anything: check)

And by the way: it’s perfectly okay if the final answer from this check-in is: NO, I’m not moving forward with this.

Whatever the answer, you can thank your fear for guiding you there.

If you’re looking for some one-on-one support around any fears coming up in your life or work, I’d love to chat more with you. Book a free 30-minute call with me here.

Want to connect more with your intuition in a beautiful outdoor setting in the Seattle area? Come join me on one of my upcoming Hiking & Coaching experiences on July 30th and August 20th!

Yours in love, light, and wildness,

Becky