Start Before You're Ready

Leaning into fear as your compass

Mar 06, 2024

Hello friends! The days are getting longer, and the promise of Spring can be seen early this year as the cherry blossoms prematurely bloom around the city here in Seattle. This palpable shift has infected every aspect of my being, and I have been deep cleaning my space and removing stagnant energy in preparation for this new season.

Today we are exploring the topic of fear. A topic that I have been researching for a good chunk of the start of the year, and how fear is a companion that can help us live better more fulfilled lives.

But, before we dig into this negatively perceived emotion, a special thank you to my the new Sobremesa subscribers! I see you, and I appreciate you.

This is a long one, so grab your favorite drink of choice, and buckle up because we are about to get scary.

If someone knows the original photographer please let me know. For the record, I don’t think birds are scary, but I do find this picture incredibly hilarious.

If I were to tell you that fear is a physiological construct, you could very well tell me to go kick rocks with open-toe shoes. Our fears feel real, very real.

The fear that I am referring to today is not the aversion you might have to rodents, heights, or like this adorable toddler and my best friend Mack—birds. No, the fear that I am referring to is the one that creeps up when you feel rejection, what keeps you from ordering something different on the menu, what fuels your people-pleasing, or keeps you from making the leap into your dream job.

Before we start to chat about how fear can become our best friend (and possible pet), we must address what really is fear.

Fear,

according to the Cambridge Dictionary is an unpleasant emotion that occurs when you perceive a state of danger, pain or hurt. It is usually characterized by unpleasant subjective experiences; physiological changes, such as increased heart rate and sweating; and behavioral changes, such as avoidance of fear-producing objects or situations.

Duh- I know you don’t need a dictionary explanation of fear because if you’re a human, fear is one of the emotions that’s guaranteed we have all felt at some point in our lives.

But, what if I told you that you could be in a state of fear without being afraid? Would you believe me?

Could it be possible that fear can be both a state (emotion) and a trait (way of being)? The answer is yes, to both.

The Oxford Review Encyclopedia of Terms explains:

A trait is considered to be something that is a part of an individual’s personality and therefore long term characteristic of an individual that shows through their behavior, actions, and feelings. It is seen as being characteristic, feature, or quality of an individual. For example, someone who says “I am confident person” or “I am just an anxious person” is stating that these attributes are a part of who they are.

A state, on the other hand, is a temporary condition that they are experiencing for a short period of time. After the state has passed, they will return to another condition. For example, someone who says “I am feeling confident about this interview” or “I feel nervous about doing this” is describing states.

It’s very rare that someone would self-diagnose as a “fearful person”, yet most of us have described someone as a “scaredy cat” at some point, or used the phrase “I’m scared” when talking about something that is causing us feelings of distress.

Whether or not you consider fear to be a particular personality trait that you carry, it is something that plays a constant role in our decision making and how we navigate the world and experience our lives.

As Brené Brown writes in her book Atlas of The Heart “both our anxiety and our fear need to be understood, respected and perhaps even befriended. We need to pull up a chair and sit with them, understand why they are showing up, and ask ourselves what there is to learn.”

Befriending fear. Imagine that.

There is a Sanskrit word and mudrā that describes this befriending of our fear.

Abhaya, which translates to a “gesture of fearlessness” or as peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh describes “non-fear.”

“When we fear, we suffer and have the impression that we are nothing than our fear. But, if we have the capacity to deal with our fear, we realize we are capable of handling that fear.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

Have you ever been afraid of fear? It’s a funny sentence to write, or even read out loud. But, most of us are living in a way where we are afraid of our fears and so we avoid them.

In a recent interview I had, I described how what we don’t understand, we fear, and what we fear, we avoid. This can apply to practically anything in our lives.

Because most of what we don’t know, like the future for example, we can’t totally comprehend, we are inherently afraid of it, and therefore we want to avoid feeling that feeling so we run away. We have a fear of fear.

For example, say you’re at a restaurant and you’re afraid to order something new because you don’t know if you’re going to like the taste, so even though you’re in a new country you order the Chicken Alfredo because you’re familiar with it. (For the record, seeing Chicken Alfredo in virtually any international restaurant I have visited while traveling from the Philippines to Guatemala makes me want to die inside).

Or, you finally receive the job offer you were waiting for, but when it comes time to negotiate your salary you sit on your hands because you’re afraid that the answer might be no and worse, they might even pull the offer.

The list can go on and on, and this fear of not knowing what will happen, of what you don’t understand, is robbing you from your joy.

Theologist and writer Anne Robertson explains that the word chairo is described by the ancient Greeks as the “culmination of being” and the “good mood of the soul.” In our modern language, this would be described as joy. Which Brené Brown describes as “an intense feeling of spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.”

The most fascinating part of the word chairo and this research, is that according to Anne Robertson, the ancient Greek say the opposite word for joy is not sadness— but fear (phobos).

So if the opposite of fear is joy, we must learn to utilize our fear to find more joy. Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh would have it— practice non-fear.

According to an article by the National Library of Medicine on The Biology of Fear:

“Fear is commonly thought to have adaptive functions in terms of both cognition and behavioral response. Unlike reflexes and fixed-action patterns, the relationship between stimuli and behaviors mediated by fear is highly flexible and context-dependent.”

What this means, is that we have the power to override how we perceive and experience fear from a negative emotion that can lead us to fight, flight or freeze into a sign, or light if you will, signalizing that instead of fighting, running away or hiding from our fear, we should actually lean into it.

I titled this newsletter “Start Before You’re Ready” because this has been a mantra I have adapted to remind me to lean into fear.

Most of the time when I have felt afraid of something is because I feel unprepared.

Maybe, I don’t feel ready to try the more difficult modification when the instructor announces it as a possible choice in my Lagree class, but instead of waiting to feel ready I lean into my fear and just go for it, realizing quickly that I am a lot stronger and that my body is more capable than I give it credit for.

When I announced the launch of my cookbook Mamacita, I wasn’t ready, the book wasn’t ready. But, I leaned into that fear and put it out into the world anyways, regardless of the voices in my head that were telling me that I had made a grave mistake by telling the public about my family’s immigration status and therefore being vulnerable to their political opinions.

Every time I have sat with my fear, and decided to go for it anyways it has paid off in ways I would have never imagined. And I have never once regretted it.

But, you know what I have regretted? The times I let phobos steal my joy. The times I let fear speak louder than my desires and fought back, ran away or hid from my dreams.

So let’s make a pact right now, you and me okay? We are not going to let fear rob us from any more possible joy in our lives. Instead, we are going to use fear as a compass pointing us in the direction we should go.

We can cultivate, nourish and watch the non-fear inside of us grow.

A childhood favorite

show of mine growing up was Dora the Explorer. Recently, I had a phone conversation with a friend who is traveling solo in Patagonia and feeling homesick and afraid of continuing to pursue her trip in solitude.

To encourage her to practice non-fear, I created an analogy using Dora as our persona.

In life, we are all Dora the Explorer navigating the world. The backpack we carry is inside of us, and contains everything we need to live happy, joyful and fulfilled lives. The map in our backpack is our intuition, telling us which path is right for us. And that pesky little fox that always seems to be hanging around and trying to swipe what we are going after, well that my friends, is fear.

Fear or Swiper as he is called in the show is always around. But, we see him hiding in the bush and peeking from behind the tree. We know that he is around, looking to rob us from our joy. But, instead of being afraid of Swiper, we face him in the eyes and loud and clear yell “Swiper no swiping!”

By acknowledging our fears, we can disarm them of their power over us. And we can guarantee that if Swiper is around, we are on the right path. Because only what scares us, is what is truly worth pursuing.

SOBREMESA with Andrea Pons

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