The Fear Cure: Cultivating Courage as Medicine for the Body, Mind, and Soul

by Lissa Rankin

Fear points a bony finger at everything that needs to be healed in our lives, and if we’re brave enough to heal it, courage blossoms and peace is the prize.

Repetitive triggering of the stress response makes the amygdala even more reactive to apparent threats. Fear flips on the stress response, which triggers the amygdala—on and on and on. As this happens, the amygdala, which helps form “implicit memories”—fragments of past experiences that lie beneath our conscious recognition—becomes increasingly sensitized and tinges those memories with heightened residues of fear. As a result, fearful feelings, often manifesting as feelings of anxiety, exist even in the absence of any objectively fearful experience. Simultaneously, the hippocampus, which is critical for developing “explicit memories”—clear, conscious recollections of what actually happened—gets worn down by the body’s repetitive stress responses. Stress hormones like cortisol weaken neuronal synapses in the brain and inhibit formation of new ones. When the hippocampus is weakened in this way, it’s much harder to produce new neurons, thereby making new memories. As a result, the chronic, painful, fearful experiences the sensitized amygdala records get programmed into implicit memory, while the weakened hippocampus fails to record new explicit memories. When this happens, over time, you may wind up feeling chronically fearful and anxious, with no real memory of why you’re even afraid. You may feel an overwhelmingly pervasive sense of doom and gloom, as if something bad—something very bad—is threatening you, even though, to an objective observer, you appear safe. Even long af...

Stressz response biochemistry

Fear rules our whole culture, so nobody is immune. We’re afraid of unwanted pregnancy, date rape, and infertility. We’re afraid of gay marriage, socialized medicine, and electing the wrong president. We fear failure, success, withering away into obscurity, and failing to discover our true purpose in life. We’re afraid of financial disaster, but we’re also afraid of making too much money. We’re afraid to dream big, but we’re terrified of not being extraordinary enough. We’re afraid of expressing our creativity because we fear judgment or making mistakes, yet we fear keeping the song within us unsung. We’re afraid of dying, but we’re even more afraid of living.

if we wish to live long, optimally healthy lives, addressing our fear is arguably more important than what we eat, whether we exercise, how many vitamins we take, or how many bad habits we have. I understand that it’s radical to suggest that unchecked fear may lie at the root of many diseases. I’m not suggesting that these diseases don’t also have biochemical roots, but I am suggesting that fear predisposes you to those harmful biochemical influences.

But individuals deal with stress very differently. When you let fear become your teacher, allowing it to illuminate anything in need of healing in your life, stressful life events may even relax the nervous system because on some deep level, you know you’re growing.

In other words, it’s not life’s stressors per se that make us sick and miserable. It’s the stories we make up about these events, which translate into negative beliefs that activate chronic repetitive stress responses, shorten our life expectancy, and lead us into despair.

Becoming aware of the fears you’ve inherited from your ancestors isn’t about blaming your ancestors or playing the victim. Your ancestors need your compassion, not your judgment, and you can be grateful that the fears you’ve inherited are helping you heal. Like you, your ancestors inherited these fears from their own predecessors. Awareness allows you to forgive them while reprogramming your subconscious mind, so you are free to act from a new set of operating instructions—the instructions of your Inner Pilot Light.

FOUR COURAGE-CULTIVATING TRUTHS Truth #1: Uncertainty is the gateway to possibility. Truth #2: Loss is natural and can lead to growth. Truth #3: It’s a purposeful universe. Truth #4: We are all One.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves.”

Adversity is a natural part of being human. It is the height of arrogance to prescribe a moral code or health regime or spiritual practice as an amulet to keep things from falling apart. Things do fall apart. It is in their nature to do so. When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. We are listening to our fear of life and death, our lack of faith, our smaller ego’s will to prevail. To listen to the soul is to stop fighting with life—to stop fighting when things fall apart; when they don’t go our way, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty, and to wait.”

What if, instead of being victims of adversity, our souls—on some level—choose these challenges as a way to help us grow? I once gently asked someone with Stage 4 cancer whether she thought it was possible that her soul and God sat down for tea before she was ever born and decided that, in order for her to grow into the enlightened being she was becoming, she would need to get cancer at a young age. Is it possible that cancer or abuse or divorce or bankruptcy might be necessary for spiritual development?

Once you start viewing loss as an opportunity for growth and initiation, you stop fearing loss, you start accepting what is, and you absorb the lessons life on earth is trying to teach you. And once this happens, once you let yourself become a student of life, humbled by life, no longer resisting it, something shifts, and life no longer needs to teach you by whacking you with cosmic two-by-fours. Once one of your greatest fears comes true, you learn that you are not in control the way you thought you were, and you let go if you’re willing to let fear cure you of your constant grasping. Once you learn what you’re meant to learn from loss, you can lean into joy without holding back. Perhaps our ability to surrender into loss with an open heart is the measure of a successful life.

Most of us are control freaks, and this attempt to control life leads to a lot of false fear. But when you believe you live in a purposeful universe, you realize the universe doesn’t need you to be in charge, so you don’t need to be afraid of letting go of the reins. Living in a purposeful universe allows you to come into right relationship with uncertainty because now, instead of viewing uncertainty with suspicion or fear, you can be at peace in the face of the unknown. Instead of guarding against loss, you can trust that even loss has a purpose, even if you don’t know exactly what it is.

This doesn’t mean you won’t have emotional responses. If you lose a loved one, break up with someone you love, or face your own health battle, professional failure, or financial loss, of course you’re going to experience grief, anger, and sadness. Trusting that you live in a purposeful universe is not about taking some spiritual bypass that skips you past painful emotions, but you don’t have to get stuck in those emotions or in the victim stories that tend to arise when the universe doesn’t deliver what you desired.

Life can be the same way. We can guard against uncertainty, resist what lies outside our comfort zone, and grip the safety bar when we feel afraid. Or we can use our discernment in order to choose to take appropriate risks, so life can be exciting, fun, and filled with meaning, purpose, and love. Cultivating courage is not about being reckless and rushing headlong into scary situations without suitable caution. It’s also not about traumatizing yourself. A friend of mine is terrified of roller coasters, and a spiritual teacher she worked with required his students to ride roller coasters in order to learn to let go. She says it didn’t help her at all. All that happened when she was forced to ride roller coasters is that her nervous system wound up on perpetual red alert. She had to learn to let go in her own way. Most people don’t cultivate courage by being thrust into scary situations against their will. You’re better off stretching yourself than having someone else push you too hard. What does help is putting yourself in situations that stretch you beyond your comfort zone in the presence of others who help you feel safe. But you have to be ready. You must really want to let fear grow you so courage can blossom. Doing so is all about learning to trust that you are safe, connected, and always being guided toward your true nature and your life’s purpose.

When fear does pop up (and it will), you don’t automatically react to it. Instead, you question it. With open curiosity, you ask what it’s trying to teach you. You explore the edges of your growth. You allow fear to be a marker for your progress. As time goes on, fear lessens. You feel more serene, and the space between fearful thoughts stretches out. This inner spaciousness and peace signals that you’re making progress on the path to cultivating courage.

The cognitive mind, dominated by the Small Self, has a hard time letting go as long as it thinks nobody it can trust is in control, but if you can trust that it’s safe for your Inner Pilot Light to take the lead, you can calm this smaller part of you and help it let go. Letting go feels completely unnatural when you’re afraid. It’s so much more tempting to grasp in desperation and try to control your life. Yet letting your Inner Pilot Light take the lead requires trusting that it’s safe to surrender control completely.

Letting go simply means being fully present with exactly what

is in the present moment, without either resisting it or clinging to it because you’re afraid to lose it. It means stepping into the part of you that is pure consciousness, completely accepting of everything exactly as it is.

Our nervous systems calm down when we can come into right relationship with uncertainty, make peace with loss, trust that we live in a purposeful universe, and remember that we are never alone.