GO WHERE YOUR FEAR IS, THERE IS YOUR STRENGTH

We all have fears: of life, death, chaos, uncertainty, illness, stepping into the unknown, being in the known for too long, getting out of bed, getting in bed etc.

The nature of our fears is primitive and as old as the world itself. They descend from two main sources - the fear of losing what is desired and the fear of gaining what is undesired. Like in the animal word, it's the fear of losing prey, essential for survival, which has evolved into fear of loss, and the fear of becoming someone else's prey, evolved into fear of death or extinction. The primitive nature of fears has evolved vigorously over time, branching into numerous derivatives such as anxiety, phobias, and other disturbances.

For Shamans, fear is our primary teacher that helps us step into the Unknown with trust and an open heart. Fear is one of the most primal and fundamental emotions, helping us stay safe by mobilizing the sympathetic nervous system to its maximum before an anticipated threat. Fear always indicates an area of Unknown we need to step in and it can be both our enemy and our ally.

The fears of losing what is desired and gaining what is undesired are kind of the same, as you may have noticed, like two opposing poles—phobia and philia, negative and positive, pleasure and suffering, ideally balanced. For instance, we may be deeply attached to someone, yet simultaneously fear losing them, developing a kind of phobophilia or philophobia, combining both poles of our fears within us.

Nature has generously bathing us with pleasures and joys, as well as with suffering and pain. Our goal is to maybe try and achieve emotional balance in this lifetime, enabling us to boldly face life and fearlessly embrace the Unknown every single minute of our existence.

Thus, the more fantasies, illusions, and sandcastles we build in our minds, the stronger the fear of losing them becomes. If we expect strictly defined outcomes from our relationships and are convinced our loved one must meet our pseudo-illusory expectations, then the loss of such relationships is only a matter of time, and the fear of losing them becomes our obsessive idea.

In such cases, phobia becomes our ally, helping us set realistic goals, foresee possible obstacles on the path to achieving them, grounding us and helping us not react to difficulties with hysterical cries of helplessness, but actively participate in overcoming them, or even better, preventing them.

Our fears provide feedback that, perhaps, we are setting unrealistic goals for ourselves, thus clouding our path with illusions and fantasies. Perhaps...

It also happens that we expect only pleasures from life, denying pain and pushing it into our Subconscious, habitually chanting the slogans of positive affirmations. Then our fears and phobias, once allies, turn into enemies and start haunting us, as we forget our deep true nature in pursuit of illusory values.

For our addiction to happiness, we pay the price of sorrow and anguish. Our shattered illusions are often paid for with nightmares. Perhaps, even depressive and anxious disorders, the whip of modernity, stem from the mismatch between our reality and the fantasies, in which we have comfortably lived for years.

Nature strives to bring us into balance. If we are trapped in positive fantasies, life surprises us to sober our view of it and bring us into emotional balance for our own good, freeing us from dependence on cloudless happiness.

Everyone has different values, but a simple pattern emerges - the higher our values on Maslow's or any other similar hierarchy of human needs, the more emotionally balanced our life becomes, making us more apt in dealing with our fears. We thus gain a more objective and less clouded view of life, shedding the skin of a person, torn by passions, and gaining the detachment of an observer of life itself.

This feeling could, perhaps, be compared to that of an astronaut observing Earth from the vastness of space, where your minor inconveniences seem insignificant, suddenly grasping the big picture and becoming one of the myriads of miraculous forms of life in the Universe, not just a resident of apartment number one hundred seventy-seven. It's an expansion of consciousness, that rare moment when we leap into something that surpasses our consciousness so profoundly that everything else fades away, and our ordinary fears seem less significant and even somewhat primitive. That's how we develop a VISION OF LIFE, which helps us conquer Everest or write Ulysses.