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

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a
fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

Every day, Kris Carr wakes up not knowing whether today could be her last. We all do, technically. Any one of us could die today. But for Kris, it’s more in her face. Kris was in her early 30s when she was diagnosed with a rare type of stage 4 cancer for which there is no cure. Radiation and chemotherapy don’t work, and the only surgical options include transplanting her tumor-ridden organs, which still doesn’t address the microscopic cancer cells that line her blood vessels.

When Kris was diagnosed, she was told to do whatever she could to support her immune system, so she embarked upon a radical journey of self-healing, which included switching to a largely raw, vegan diet but also included spiritual practices and other lifestyle changes. Regardless, she was informed that she would probably die within ten years. Kris made it her mission to prove that you could be “crazy” and “sexy” and still thrive with cancer. She turned her cancer journey into a documentary film, Crazy Sexy Cancer, and has since inspired millions with her message about how to be a “cancer thriver.”

Along the way, Kris had to deal with a lot of understandable fear. Her cancer was diagnosed on Valentine’s Day, so every February 14, she would get a CT scan that assessed the size of her tumors, an understandably fear-invoking annual event. She never knew what the scan would find. As it turned out, every year, the tumors were the same. They hadn’t grown, but they hadn’t shrunk.

After a decade of fearing something she couldn’t control, something in Kris finally shifted and she allowed her fear to point to one thing that needed healing in her relationship to her cancer—her tendency to resist it. After ten years of hoping her cancer would one day go away, she decided to let go of her attachment to a cure. Instead, she chose to accept her cancer and to thrive in the face of the ultimate uncertainty. On her eleventh Valentine’s Day anniversary, Kris got the good news. For the first time ever, her tumors had actually shrunk.

Although we are always staring uncertainty in the face, few people ever have the opportunity to consciously practice making peace with uncertainty on a daily basis the way Kris Carr did. Most of us do everything within our power to avoid uncertainty, and when we do face it, we do everything we can to try to return to a state of certainty. But making peace with uncertainty may be one of the most powerful spiritual practices there is.

Immaculée Ilibagiza was also faced with daily fear and the constant threat of death. During the Rwanda genocide in 1994, Immaculée, a Tutsi, spent 91 days huddled silently together with seven other women in a Hutu pastor’s cramped bathroom, not knowing from one minute to the next whether she would be found and having no idea what awaited her on the outside. A healthy 115-pound university student when she entered the bathroom, she weighed 65 pounds when she came out to discover the worst—that most of the Tutsis in her village, including almost all of her family members, had been violently murdered while she was in hiding.

Immaculée says she would have been crippled by fear, anger, and resentment had she not been in constant prayer, holding a set of rosary beads given to her by her devout Catholic father before she went into hiding. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we live in a dangerous world, living in constant communion with a divine force helped her find peace and solace during her confinement. Later, after she was released from the bathroom, she found herself face-to-face with a Hutu with a machete, who threatened to kill her. Instead of succumbing to fear, she stared down the man, and he let her escape, along with the other refugees who accompanied her. Years later, when she was working for the United Nations, she was given the opportunity to face the man who had murdered her mother and brother. Others expected her to spit on the man, but instead Immaculée said, “I forgive you.”

Kris Carr and Immaculée Ilibagiza offer extreme examples of individuals who were able to find peace in unusually uncertain and frightening circumstances. But you can too.

I present these two examples to help us question Fearful Assumption #1: “Uncertainty is unsafe.” You might argue that both Kris and Immaculée were unsafe in the face of uncertainty. After all, Kris still has stage 4 cancer, and Immaculée almost lost her life in the Rwanda genocide. But both are thriving at this point in their lives. Kris is inspiring millions of people to realize they can thrive in the face of uncertainty, rather than letting fear of the unknown stunt their growth. Immaculée is teaching the orphans of genocide to forgive those who killed their families so we can stop the cycles of revenge and violence that plague our world. I suspect both would agree with Courage-Cultivating Truth #1: “Uncertainty is the gateway to possibility.” I’ll bet you can think of examples in your own life when your willingness to lean into uncertain times without resistance opened a doorway into something larger. But most people don’t let themselves think this way …

We are a culture of certainty addicts, yet the reality is that we can’t know what will happen even one minute in the future. For all we know, the earth could get hit by some cosmic event that would destroy our whole planet tomorrow. And we are simply not okay with this. We smother our deep-seated fear of uncertainty with food, alcohol, cigarettes, excessive exercise, busyness, television, and other numbing behaviors that distract us from our discomfort with the fact that we can’t control life the way we wish we could. We collect more and more things to make ourselves feel safe, and then we become even more afraid that we might lose what we’ve acquired. Our primary goal becomes keeping things safe and secure, even at the price of living a rich, meaningful life full of opportunities for soul growth and real connection.

Because we’re so uncomfortable with uncertainty, we make up stories to comfort ourselves, stories that fluff up our sense of certainty, like “My child will never get cancer,” “I’ll keep my stable job forever,” “A natural disaster will never threaten my life,” “I’ll always have plenty of money,” “I won’t die until I’m a hundred years old,” or “My beloved will always love me.” On some level, we know that our stories of certainty are nothing more than illusion. These stories we tell ourselves are only thoughts, yet we cling to these thoughts, which are fueled by underlying fears, and we become emotionally overwrought if the certainty of our stories is threatened. Many people will sleep through life in this way until what we fear most happens and tragedy hits. A life-threatening illness strikes. A loved one dies. You’re fired from your seemingly stable job. Financial ruin befalls you. Such life changes shake you awake only to reveal that it’s hard to go back to sleep, now that you’re aware that certainty is nothing but an illusion.

How you deal with uncertainty tends to differ depending on how you approach new situations. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., taught me that we each have a part of ourselves that we trust the most—our “frontrunner.” When we come into a new situation, especially an uncertain one, we send the most trusted part of ourselves in first to check out and validate the scene. The cognitive person sends in the cognitive mind. You ask, Who’s there? How reliable are they? What does the data say? Does this make sense? How does it work? Can I explain it? Is there a mechanism I can prove?

But maybe it’s not the cognitive mind that you trust. Maybe you trust your heart or your intuition. When you send that in as the frontrunner, you might ask, What’s the vibe in here? How does it feel? Are people loving? Are they connecting? Are they competing? Does it feel aligned to be here? Do I belong?

The cognitive mind, while useful when it comes to solving cognitive tasks, is also the birthplace of the scared voice of your Small Self. This may not make sense to the mind, since the mind thinks of itself as the smart, adult, trustworthy voice. But while it’s true that the intellect comes from the cognitive mind, fear stems from thoughts arising in the mind as well. Your Inner Pilot Light, on the other hand, resides in your heart and your intuition. Your Small Self craves certainty, but your Inner Pilot Light is just as comfortable with the unknown as with the known. It doesn’t require certainty in order to feel at peace.

We all have within us both parts, but many people in our culture trust the cognitive mind more than we trust intuition, so we give the cognitive mind more power to validate our experiences. This creates a problem, because the smaller part of you (your cognitive mind, or Small Self) cannot easily validate a larger part of you (your heart and intuition, or Inner Pilot Light). You can validate the conclusions of the cognitive mind with intuition, but you can’t do the opposite. You get stuck, because the cognitive mind craves certainty. It will always seek safety, security, and comfort, even at the expense of personal integrity, alignment, adventure, and joy.

What determines whether someone is a “cognitive validator” or driven by intuition instead? As children, when we face recurrent uncertainty and don’t feel safe, we tend to “go cognitive.” We start to crave explanations, a sense of control, rational thinking, and a feeling of certainty. It makes us feel like we have some control over our uncertain world. But “going cognitive” cuts us off from our capacity to lean into uncertainty with curiosity, wonder, even awe.

Think about what you give up if you insist on certainty. You close the door on curiosity, creativity, and possibility, you cut off your openness to new things, and you miss out on the excitement of being a perpetual student. As Rachel Naomi Remen says, when we take this stance, “We trade mystery for mastery and lose a sense of aliveness and possibility.”

Traditionally, I have been a cognitive validator. Twelve years of medical education drilled into me the importance of valuing the rational, logical cognitive mind above all else. I always felt most comfortable when I could rationally explain how things worked. I valued science, with its detailed explanations about the nature of things. I felt uneasy in the presence of things I couldn’t explain. Yet something started to loosen in the wake of my Perfect Storm.

Prior to my Perfect Storm, I was slogging along in what might have looked like a perfect, predictable, stable life, but this security came at a price. What others didn’t know was that my life was unraveling from the inside out. I had the “dream job” working as a full-time OB-GYN physician, making a cushy six-figure salary that allowed me certain luxuries, like an ocean-view house in San Diego, fancy European cars, and vacations in Hawaii. My job afforded me a certain position of respect and status in society, and I was admired by my peers as a skilled, conscientious doctor who really cared about her patients. My personal life also looked great on paper: I was married to a kind, intelligent, loving man, we were about to have our first child, and I had a lot of friends. By the age of 35, I had achieved everything I was taught to believe would make me happy, which is why I felt guilty and ungrateful for feeling so desperately unhappy, like I’d somehow sold my soul in exchange for the “perfect life.”

For years, I had been feeling an inner restlessness I couldn’t quite explain. Why was I not happy? I had everything society says you should have in order to live the good life. I tried focusing on gratitude. I had so much to be grateful for. Surely, if I focused on being grateful, I could find the spring in my step that would allow me to navigate the next 30 years in my high-pressure career until I could finally retire at 65 and really enjoy life.

But gratitude wasn’t working, and I was often waking up at 2 A.M. in tears. I tried to ignore my unhappiness, busying myself with my satisfying career as a doctor, beginning a successful professional art career on the side, and drinking wine in the evenings to take the edge off my growing feeling of uneasiness. But my efforts to distract myself weren’t working. My body was betraying me, with the laundry list of chronic illnesses I faced mounting as the years passed. By the time I was 35, I was taking seven medications for a whole host of chronic health conditions that were only getting worse with treatment. I should have predicted that the Universe was about to call my bluff, but I got blindsided when my wake-up call finally came.

When I was six months pregnant with my daughter, my mother called me to tell me that my father was making up words. When she put him on the phone, he told me he needed to go to a “travel one llama center.” I knew something was very wrong and, thinking he was having a stroke, I told Mom to take him to the emergency room right away. When they did a CT scan, they found an enormous brain tumor in Dad’s temporal lobe, and after a further workup, they found other tumors all over his body. A biopsy of a liver tumor confirmed the diagnosis of metastatic melanoma. My beloved father, who was only 59, was given three months to live.

Almost exactly three months later, I gave birth to my daughter, Siena, by C-section. I was recovering from surgery when my father and mother flew out to San Diego to meet their granddaughter. A course of whole brain radiation had failed to shrink my father’s tumor, and Dad’s doctors predicted that the end was near, so my parents rented a beach house, where Hospice brought in a hospital bed, and my father prepared to die while I nursed my daughter and the incision on my belly.

My brother Chris and my sister Keli both live out of town, so they flew in to be with my father in his final days. When healthy 33-year-old Chris arrived, he wound up in the emergency room in full-blown liver failure as a rare side effect of the antibiotic Zithromax, which he was taking for a sinus infection. That same week, my beloved 16-year-old dog, Ariel, died. Then, exactly two weeks after I had given birth to my daughter, we lost Dad. It was the most traumatic two weeks of my life, and it changed everything. I suddenly realized that certainty was merely an illusion, and having awoken from the dream state, I found myself staring, terrified, into the vast mystery of the uncertain. I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

A series of uncertain tragedies, like the ones that made up my Perfect Storm, have a tendency to affect people in one of two ways. Either you shut down, demanding even more certainty, guarding even more against the unknown, fortifying your cognitive mind and instructing it to be on high alert, or the absurdity of life hits you so hard that you’re knocked to the ground. The seeming meaninglessness of life tears you apart and you find yourself feeling lonelier than you thought it possible to feel. You’re driven to the edge of insanity with despair. And then, just as you’re losing faith in the cognitive mind, something bigger reaches up to meet you in your devastation. In this annihilated state, you may surprise yourself with a strength you never knew you had, one that allows you to do what you never thought you could—accept the unacceptable. What you’re really doing here is letting fear cure you.

This ability to accept the unacceptable may only last for a few minutes, but when it happens, it leaves a crack in the shell of who you thought you were. Through this crack, there’s an opportunity for the light of who you really are to shine through, often for the first time since infancy. Once this crack appears, once you have even one moment in which you see your true nature, you can never unsee it. You may turn your back on it. You may deny it. But you will never be the same, because you have glimpsed another state of consciousness, one far vaster than the limited view of yourself that has dominated your sense of identity for so long.

If we let it, uncertainty brings us face-to-face with the nature of the Small Self. One of the reasons we cling to the illusion of certainty is because it gives the Small Self the false sense that we’re in control. Because the Small Self is the part of you that has an investment in maintaining your self-image and your worldview, the Small Self likes to be certain. The Small Self has a story about the kind of person you are, the kind of person you’re not, what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, what you’re capable of achieving, what you’re not, what you believe, what you don’t. The Small Self also has strong ideas about how the world works—what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s real, what’s not, what’s possible, what’s impossible, what’s sane, and what’s crazy. The Small Self doesn’t like questions that don’t have certain answers, and it’s willing to sacrifice mystery, wonder, awe, and possibility in order to fit everything into orderly boxes.

In Falling into Grace, spiritual teacher Adyashanti teaches that we begin as a vast inner space of quiet awareness. Then we are given a name, a gender, a series of rules for what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” and ideas about our place in the world. As we accumulate experiences, we build upon these ideas to solidify our self-image and our worldview. Some of us have a negative self-image, filled with painful thoughts about how we’re not good enough. Some of us have a positive self-image. Whether you feel superior or inferior, more worthy or less worthy, smarter than or stupider than, prettier than or uglier than, it’s all a story. These ideas are nothing more than thoughts, yet we’re so identified with them that we forget who we really are—pure consciousness free of the limitations of thought.

Everything in modern society feeds the Small Self. We shore it up, make up stories about it, pick out its outfits, and dress it up in a false aura of perfection. If anything or anybody challenges this image of who we are and how the world works, we get very uncomfortable. We wind up wearing masks because we’re afraid of disrupting the image we hope to project in the world, but then we wind up feeling like frauds because we’re not being honest about who we really are. Our quest for certainty creates suffering because, as much as we’re afraid of having our certainty shattered, we know in our hearts it’s even more tragic if we die with the song of who we are left unsung.

My patient Heidi showed up at my office one day in a total tizzy because she’d just had sex with her new boyfriend and failed to disclose to this guy, whom she really liked, that she had herpes. She asked for my help. How could she rectify what she had done and protect her boyfriend without losing face?

Heidi said, “Dr. Rankin, you don’t understand. I’m a person of integrity. I don’t do things like this.” She hung her head, unable to make eye contact with me.

I said, “What if, instead of being certain that you are a person of integrity, you’re simply curious about the kind of person you really are? Maybe you’re a person of integrity. Maybe you’re not. Maybe what you believe about yourself is true sometimes and not true other times. Would you be willing to let go of your story of who you think you are?”

I felt safe taking the risk to say what I did to Heidi because I know how dedicated she is to her personal and spiritual growth, and I knew she’d accept my challenge with love, which she did. Heidi got it. She went home and confessed to her boyfriend what she had withheld. He chose to start prophylactic treatment that could reduce his likelihood of getting herpes. The two were still together two years later when I saw Heidi for her Pap smear.

The Small Self tends to take conflicting views of who we are. We inflate ourselves by making up stories about how noble, smart, and full of integrity we are. Then we deflate ourselves with stories about how worthless we are when we fail to live up to those inflated ideas, letting down ourselves and others. The Small Self is always comparing us, judging us as either inferior to those we admire or superior to those we judge as “less than.” The truth of who we really are usually lies somewhere in the middle, where we’re able to witness our true magnificence from a place of humility and curiosity, where we are no better than or worse than anyone else, where we simply are who we are as we each walk our own unique path of soul growth. If we’re willing to simply be curious, our true nature starts to reveal itself. It can be painfully uncomfortable to put everything you think you know up for question, but if you’re willing to be curious, life can be your teacher. That’s where the real magic lies.

As Rachel Naomi Remen pointed out in the Medicine for the Soul teleclass we taught together, life can be the teacher, if only we let it. As children, as soon as we start preschool, we make up a story about how the teachers know it all, and we, as students, know nothing. We admire these teachers and long to be like them. Clearly, it is more valuable to know than not to know. Not knowing makes you small and weak. Knowing makes you big and powerful. We come to the conclusion that the more we know, the better our lives will be. This leads us to become intolerant of that which we don’t know. We start to value certainty at all costs. We come to believe that it’s better to be a knower than a learner.

When Rachel was in second grade, she told her mother she loved knowing things, but she hated learning things. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said, full of confidence, “An expert.” But when Rachel grew up, she realized that the true wisdom lies in being the learner, rather than the knower. Sure, there is knowledge we can acquire in school, from books, and through our teachers. But there is something priceless that lies beyond knowledge. The willingness to be humble and curious, to simply wonder whether something is true, opens a doorway to possibility. It frees us from the limits of certainty and allows life to become our own mystery school.

Life as the teacher shows up in a variety of ways. Your children may be your teachers. The homeless guy on the street can be your teacher. Heartbreak can be your teacher. Abuse can be your teacher. Fear can be your teacher. Many of the gifts life has to teach us live not in the realm of the certain, but in the uncertain. A willingness to let life be your teacher requires a certain humility, but we are all capable of becoming learners if we’re willing to not know. Whether you’re the President of the United States or the dean of Harvard or a kindergartener, life can be your teacher, if only you’ll let it. It will tend to point to the places where your craving for certainty has made you the most blind.

This is what happened to me during my Perfect Storm. I was humbled by the stunning series of losses I experienced. My Small Self was still defending against uncertainty, but the crack left by my Perfect Storm began to widen, and it left everything in my life open to question. I suddenly woke up from the illusion of certainty that I would live to be a hundred and nothing I cherished would ever be lost. I realized that just as my father had suddenly been given only three months to live, the same thing could happen to me at any point. When I asked myself whether I would be living the same life if I knew I had only three months left to live, the answer was a resounding “Hell, no.”

I wound up making the difficult decision to quit my stable job in conventional medicine. Doing so would require selling my house and moving to the country, where the cost of living was lower. My daughter was only eight months old, and I was the sole breadwinner, since my husband, Matt, wasn’t working outside the home. I finally got up the nerve to tell my partners I was leaving my practice to embark into the vast unknown without a safety net or even a backup plan. That’s when Matt cut two fingers off his left hand with a table saw. After eight hours in surgery, a microsurgeon was able to reattach Matt’s fingers, but he warned us that Matt would need further surgery to make the fingers functional. With that kind of preexisting condition, I had to postpone leaving my job. The pain of staying put after I had already made the decision to leave was almost unbearable. I felt trapped. I questioned my decision. Was it a sign I had made the wrong choice? Or was my commitment simply being tested? Finally, after months of Matt’s surgeries, physical therapy, and recovery, and enduring the feeling that I simply couldn’t stay in my job one more day, no matter what the cost, I quit.

Between medical bills, leaving my job, buying my freedom by paying my medical malpractice “tail”—insurance that would cover me, once I’d left my practice, against claims of malpractice in the past—and paying for living expenses while neither my husband nor I were working, we went from owning our house with plenty of money in a retirement account to renting with over $200,000 in debt. I came face-to-face with uncertainty and all the fears it brought up—and I let fear and life teach me. My Perfect Storm and the choices I made in its wake became the first in a series of initiation rites that thrust me onto the spiritual path. I went from feeling terrified of the unknown to seeing the unknown as a potential gift. Maybe instead of being afraid of what I didn’t know, I could not only accept it; I could even allow it to excite me. Instead of viewing the unknown as a personal failure, I could see it as a gift from the Universe, an opportunity to learn, if only I was willing to be humble enough to seek out the lesson.

What I discovered is that the flip side of the fear of uncertainty is the excitement of possibility. Instead of fearing “I don’t know,” you start embracing “I don’t know” with a sense of adventure, because when you don’t know what the future holds, anything can happen. Such a perspective flies in the face of all of our cultural conditioning. The cognitive validator in us always wants to know “how” and “why.” But as Rachel said to me when I kept asking “how” and “why,” “Perhaps understanding how and why is the booby prize.”

Something magical happens when you stop trying to control every aspect of your life and commit to letting life be your teacher, even when things aren’t going your way. When you’re willing to release your grip on certainty and lean into the mystery of the unknown, life can start to delight you. You grow. You transform. You’re ready to move past the false fears that hold you back and lean into uncertainty from a place of faith.

When we’re willing to view life as the teacher, even in the midst of uncertainty, a journey begins. This journey—some might call it the spiritual path—challenges us to shift from fear of uncertainty to trusting life in the face of that which we can’t know and don’t understand. After interviewing many people about what they’d learned on their own spiritual journeys, I discovered that the journey from fear to freedom, which is all about coming into right relationship with uncertainty, is a predictable journey, one that many have traveled before you and many will travel after you. As you read through the five phases, consider where you are on your own journey.

THE JOURNEY FROM FEAR TO FREEDOM

Phase 1: Unconscious Fear of Uncertainty. I stay in my comfort zone and avoid the unknown at all costs. What I don’t know feels dangerous, but I’m not conscious of how uncomfortable I am with uncertainty. I never get close enough to the unknown to really feel it. I do not act without a sense of certainty about the outcome. I expend a lot of energy avoiding risk.

Phase 1 Motto: “Better safe than sorry.”

How to navigate Phase 1: Start becoming aware of how your inclination to cling to certainty limits your freedom. Ask yourself, “Is this working for me? Is staying in my comfort zone really protecting me?”

Phase 2: Conscious Fear of Uncertainty. What I don’t know feels dangerous, but I’m aware of the fear I feel. Situations of uncertainty provoke feelings of anxiety, worry, and fear in me. This leads me to avoid uncertain situations and to try to control my world. But though I prefer certainty, I’m aware of how clinging to it is holding me back. I resist the unknown, but I realize it’s hard to have adventures if you’re always waiting to be sure of the future.

Phase 2 Motto: “The only thing certain in life is uncertainty.”

How to navigate Phase 2: Be gentle with yourself as you recognize how your drive for certainty limits your possibility. Don’t beat yourself up because you resist uncertainty. Pat yourself on the back for being brave enough to admit it. From a place of radical self-compassion, you will naturally begin to shift into Phase 3.

Phase 3: Uncertainty Limbo. I don’t know whether the unknown is dangerous or not. I’m not entirely at ease with what I don’t know, but I’m not resisting it, either. The unknown doesn’t outright scare me, but I don’t seek it out. I’m starting to sense the freedom that comes with making peace with uncertainty, so I’m willing to be cautiously curious and let my fear of the unknown teach me.

Phase 3 Motto: “I’m curious about the unknown, but I have my reservations.”

How to navigate Phase 3: Question everything. Stay open. Be curious. Resist the urge to create artificial certainty in order to ease any discomfort you still feel with the unknown. If you seek out too much certainty during this phase, you’re likely to allow fear to create something not quite in alignment with the full realization of what’s possible. Live in limbo and do what you can to comfort yourself and find your peace.

Phase 4: Uncertainty Seduction. Not only am I not scared by uncertainty, I’m downright attracted to it. I realize there is more to know and the only way to know it is to lean into the unknown and explore it. To me, the unknown is not scary, it’s somewhat seductive. I’m more in touch with discovering, and with the enlivenment that accompanies the discovery process, than I am with knowing. Discovery is sexier than certainty, and I’m at risk of being reckless as uncertainty seduces me. I’m so willing to entertain the unknown, to step into it and see what’s there, that I don’t always practice discernment. I’m willing to become an adventurer, but I have to remember not to yo-yo to the opposite end of the uncertainty spectrum.

Phase 4 Motto: “The flip side of the fear of uncertainty is the excitement of possibility.”

How to navigate Phase 4: The key to Phase 4 is discernment. When the unknown becomes compelling, it can be tempting to leap blindly, but this can get you in trouble. Someone who experiences no fear in the face of the unknown is at risk of becoming reckless. Healthy behavior in Phase 4 allows you to approach uncertainty with discriminating decision making, fueled not by fear, but by the integrity of the soul and the guidance of your intuition.

Phase 5: Surrender. I don’t know, but I trust anyway. I’m not afraid of the unknown, and I’m not seduced by it, either. I practice discernment. I sense that there is an organizing principle I may never fully understand, but I have faith that leaning in this direction is safe. Good things may happen when I lean into the unknown. Bad things may happen too. But regardless of what happens, I trust that I live in a purposeful universe and that there is meaning in all outcomes. I am simply open to wonder, and I value freedom more than I value certainty.

Phase 5 Motto: “The only way to experience life’s richness is to surrender to the unknown.”

How to navigate Phase 5: Enjoy! Phase 5 tends to be very peaceful, but you don’t usually land there and stay there. Remaining in Phase 5 is a constant practice. If you find yourself slipping back into fear in the face of the unknown, remind yourself to trust that there are unseen forces guiding you in ways you may not understand until you look back.

Keep in mind that your journey through these five phases may not be linear. You may leap forward from one phase to the next, only to find that you regress in times of loss or trauma. Because we’re often more comfortable with uncertainty in some areas of our lives than in others, you may not be in the same phase in all aspects of your life. For example, you may be in Phase 4 in your professional life and Phase 2 in your love life. Be sure not to judge yourself based on where you are. There is no “right” or “wrong” phase, and you have to trust your own timing. The reason to identify where you are on your journey is not to trigger your “not good enough” story, but simply to help guide you as you walk your own path in your own timing. Be extra gentle and compassionate with yourself as you navigate this journey from fear to freedom. As Rachel Naomi Remen says, “You can’t make a rosebud open by hitting it with a hammer.” Trust the process and indulge yourself with radical self-care. Know that wherever you are, you are in the right place.

Consider your own relationship to uncertainty. Are you willing to let life be your teacher? Are you willing to make decisions that have no certain outcome, or is fear holding you back? Are you willing to let your fear of the unknown point a finger at everything you’re clinging to and need to release? Is it time to take a risk and go back to school after all these years? Is it time to take a risk in your marriage that may grow the relationship but might also threaten it? Is there enough trust in your relationship to take a risk that might deepen your sexual intimacy? Is it time to invest your money in fulfilling a lifelong dream, even though you might lose your financial security? Are you ready to finally find the courage to heal from childhood traumas? Is it time to move to the place that feels like the heart of your soul?

Life is full of opportunities to take leaps of faith. But can you be comfortable with the uncertainty that accompanies such leaps? Is it the right time? Can you make peace with—and even love—all the question marks in your life?

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

COURAGE-CULTIVATING EXERCISE #4

Practice Uncertainty

Like strengthening your biceps, changing your relationship with uncertainty requires exercise. Try a bench press for your uncertainty muscles. Push the limits of your comfort zone with activities loaded with built-in uncertainty.

Rejection Therapy. Do you fear the uncertainty of facing possible rejection? Set yourself up to get rejected. Entrepreneur and professional “fearbuster” Jia Jiang was afraid of rejection, so he challenged himself with 100 Days of Rejection, during which he challenged himself to ask for things for which he expected a no. Put yourself in situations where you expect to get turned down. Notice that even when your fear of being rejected happens, you can handle it.
Get Lost. Afraid of the uncertainty of an unplanned road trip? Challenge yourself to get in your car and just keep turning left. I once went on a first date with a guy who did this. We wound up eating frozen lemonade at a Little League baseball game among strangers before having to stop at a gas station to ask for directions back to where we came from. Be willing to experiment. Get adventurous. See where you end up.
Open Yourself to Failure. Afraid of not knowing whether or not you’ll succeed? Put yourself in situations where your success is uncertain. Take a class to learn an obscure skill you’ve never tried. Be willing to put yourself out there and fail. Discover that you’re not good at everything, and that this is okay. Laugh at your failures. Celebrate how brave you were for trying. Think about how much fun you have if you go bowling when you don’t know how to bowl. Imagine someone roller-skating for the first time. We don’t expect children to be good at something the first time they do it, but somehow we expect this of ourselves. Try not to take yourself so seriously. Be willing to fail miserably—or not so miserably! Rather than fixating on mastery, learn to relish the excitement of trying something new.