What event transformed your fear?You had five fears before you started adventuring. What moments helped you conquer these fears?
Fears based around the body are immediate and obvious. They are also almost always reasonable. Being worried about potential harm can keep you alive. A fear of pain or death can also be related to fear of the unknown. That means moving past a fear for your body is not always a positive experience.
REASONS TO TRANSFORM BODILY FEAR
• Experience: A fear that becomes reality has the potential to change perspective. One might discover that a scorpion’s venom is not as terrifying after surviving a scorpion sting.
• Perspective: Learning there are fates more terrifying than your imagination originally envisioned is harrowing, but it can also put lesser concerns to rest.
• Acceptance: Some fears can be banished with acceptance. This can be a healthy move to understand mortality or a grim urge to confront morbidity.
What event transformed your fear?
Mental fears are often puzzles that need to be unraveled. Most fears are built out of simple biological concerns. In the mind they can be ill defined and complex—difficult to express, let alone conquer. Many fears based in the mental space are smaller concerns that have metamorphosed into behemoths far in excess of their component parts.
APPROACHES TO TRANSFORMING MENTAL FEAR
• Introspection: Understanding yourself is the key to untangling nameless fears that haunt the mind. Many adventurers are focused on the mission ahead, but taking the time to address personal concerns can prepare you to face your tasks with clarity.
• Aid: Few people ever do anything alone. A hero who opens her- or himself to others risks pain but gains allies who can care for her or him. Some problems are best approached from the outside.
• Therapy: It may be a simple matter of taking the time to care for a concern and soothe it. Adventurers mostly solve their problems by drawing a sword and charging into action, but some beasts can only be slain with time and care.
When you look back on your mental fear, what do you think of it?
Even in a world where good and evil are forces that can be detected and measured, the realm of the soul is governed by faith. The existential threat of evil is tied to someone’s personal beliefs. The thing that separates those who cower in the face of darkness from those who stand against it is the belief that the darkness can be conquered.
ROOTS OF BELIEF
• Belief in self: Believing that you cannot be corrupted and that you have the power to stand against those who have been is all you need to dismiss most spiritual fear.
• Belief in others: Holding the conviction that certain people or social qualities are worthy opponents to darkness is a powerful shield against spiritual fear. You don’t need to believe that you personally can banish evil in order to stand against it if you trust that you are not alone.
• Belief in a higher power: Having faith that there are forces as powerful and mysterious as the horrors you face is enough to give you the courage to confront the unimaginable.
What do you think of when confronted with harrowing darkness?
The heart is tied up in other people. Fears of the heart are built around social anxiety. Ironically, the remedy for these fears also rests in social structures. Fear of being rejected by one group is easily banished when you find acceptance with another. Social concerns can be easily drowned out by social comforts.
SOCIAL STRONGHOLDS
• A partner: A partner is someone you can trust entirely, whose opinion matters to you. It is easy to ignore stress from other places if you can rely on one person to help sort through the chaos.
• A family: Families are more chaotic than partners. They can be the source of great social stress, but they have an underlying permanence that offers stability.
• Friends: A group of people defined by their mutual enjoyment of one another’s company is crucial to escape interpersonal horror. Friends offer escape and therapeutic reprieve.
Whom do you confide in when the world seems to be set against you?
The beast has many forms. It slides into every realm of fear, enhancing and underscoring what is already there. There are two ways of dealing with the beast, and they are both, sadly, temporary remedies:
• Confirming absence: Many claim that knowledge conquers fear. To an extent this is true. The beast fills in gaps in your knowledge, deepening shadows in your mind. When you learn about the true nature of things, you banish traces of the beast from your thoughts.
• Obscuring presence: On rare occasions more accurate knowledge of the world can actually unleash the beast. Discovering a problem is larger and more immediately dangerous than you first realized courts the beast. Focusing on a complicated web of issues you can’t solve locks you in fear. In order to function, sometimes you have to narrow your focus so you are not conquered by the enormity of your task. A distraction that allows you to even momentarily leave the beast’s shadow can also provide fortitude.
What circumstance brought you to confront the beast?
What do you tell yourself about this experience in order to keep yourself functional?