Fear is only inverted faith; it is faith in evil instead of good.
— FLORENCE SCOVEL SHINN
When we drove into a tunnel on the way to a scenic overlook on Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, my cousin Rebecca and I were feeling very Thelma and Louise in our top-down convertible with our long hair whipping in the summer wind. A short way into the tunnel, we noticed a stopped car blocking the road. Two men were standing behind the car, leaning into the trunk, as if the tire had blown and they were rummaging around for the spare. We braked and slowed to a crawl just as the two men did an about-face and came running toward us, wearing black knit ski masks and flashing shiny pistols. With the rag top down and no easy way to back out of the one-way tunnel, we were fully exposed, totally vulnerable, and trapped. Every cell in my body clenched as the masked men ran the few feet from their car to ours. My heart started pounding, and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears so loud that I almost couldn’t hear their shouting voices screaming at us to give them our purses.
I felt terrified, but some other part of me took over in that moment. I was hyperaware of every nuance of the situation, simultaneously paying attention to the two masked gunmen, to where Rebecca was and how I sensed she was feeling, and to the sensations in my own body. Although I was frightened, there was a strange sense of calm as this … something took me over and guided me through the situation.
When one man asked me for my purse, the calm part of me watched me pull my purse out from under the seat and hand it over. My purse had little of value in it—a few dollar bills, some credit cards, a tube of lipstick. One of the muggers rummaged through my purse with his sausage fingers sporting a big gold ring. He pulled out my driver’s license, shoving it in his pocket. He leaned so close to me that I could smell his boozy breath as he yanked the ponytail holder out of my hair and pulled out the silver barrette I was wearing, leaving my long hair covering my eyes.
I heard one guy bellow to Rebecca, “Get the fuck out of the car!” The calm part of me sent a mental message to her without speaking out loud: Do as you’re told and we won’t get hurt. But Rebecca was arguing with the man who was pocketing her camera.
“Can’t I just keep the film?” she pleaded.
He repeated, “Get the fuck out of the car.” From the corner of my eye I could see the shape of a gun held to her temple. At last she complied, taking her place next to me, our cheeks pressed against the chilly cement wall of the tunnel, our arms raised high.
Just then, I felt the cool barrel of a gun against the back of my skull. I stiffened, but the calm part of me whispered, Just breathe. No sudden moves. With the gun still pressed against my head, I heard the sound of a gunshot, and I felt my body quake. Electric jolts coursed through me, and my stomach turned. I didn’t feel any pain, but I did feel warm liquid coursing down the side of my face. I wiped at it with my hand and looked at it, expecting to see the deep crimson I knew so well as a surgeon. But the wetness wasn’t blood. It must have been sweat.
I assessed the situation, trying to sense with all five senses what was happening. I could smell the gunpowder. I could hear the footsteps on asphalt and the gruff breathing of our assailants. I listened for any other cars on the road but didn’t hear any. I could sense Rebecca next to me, her energy even calmer than mine. The wind picked up and blew my hair into my eyes. I couldn’t see anything, so my other senses were all heightened.
My mind quickly processed the gunshot. What had happened? If I hadn’t been shot, had they shot Rebecca? In a wave of panic, I realized it would be worse to survive my closest friend’s death than to be killed myself. Then Rebecca coughed, and I felt a rush of relief. We were both still alive.
Still wielding guns, the two masked men ordered us to turn around, step behind the convertible, and lie facedown on the hot asphalt. We did as we were told, and one of them yelled, “Now don’t move!” Just then, I heard a smattering of gunshots and felt sharp rocks striking the backs of my bare calves. There was silence, then heavy breathing and a few muffled whispers I couldn’t understand, followed by quick, thumping footsteps. Car doors opened and shut and, finally, an unmuffled engine revved and tires squealed. The car peeled out, and everything got quiet.
I lay there for what felt like a long time, my cheek still hot against the pavement, until I heard a car coming from the direction the gunmen had fled. The engine went silent. Two car doors opened and slammed shut. Then a man’s soft voice said, “You two okay?”
I looked up to see two men in hiking clothes standing over us. “You ladies need any help?”
The danger was over …
WHEN FEAR IS YOUR FRIEND
What my body and mind experienced during the mugging was true fear—the kind of fear our bodies are hardwired to feel when our lives are in danger. My fear triggered the reaction that physiologist Walter Cannon at Harvard many decades ago named the “fight-or-flight” response, or “stress response,” which is a healthy survival mechanism designed to put my body on full alert in case I needed to run away from my attackers or perform some Herculean act of strength that was necessary to save my life or Rebecca’s. When someone has a gun to your head, fear is something to welcome. It’s there to protect you.
Without this kind of fear, you might walk right into oncoming traffic, befriend a rattlesnake, jump out of an airplane without a parachute, walk through a dangerous neighborhood at 2 A.M., or leave your baby unattended near a swimming pool. When appropriate stress responses are triggered, your body’s natural survival mechanisms will help protect you and your loved ones. In this way, the right kind of fear can benefit your health. It can even save your life.
However, it’s rare that life or limb is genuinely threatened. As prehistoric humans, we needed these primordial instincts much more often, given how vulnerable we were to predators, the elements, starvation, and disease. But things have changed. Few people reading this book are at risk of getting eaten by a tiger or starving to death. Most of the fears that plague us today exist only in our imagination. They are not real threats, but the amygdala in the primordial brain can’t tell the difference, so the nervous system gets stuck in unnecessary stress responses. Our warning mechanisms malfunction, and we wind up feeling inappropriately afraid, which harms our health and leads to unnecessary suffering.
If fear can harm you and make you unhappy, you might assume that fear is something you need to get rid of. You might imagine you should add “Cure fear” to your list of New Year’s resolutions, along with “Eat healthy” and “Exercise more.” But that’s not what I’ll be suggesting in this book. Instead, I’d like to invite you to reframe your relationship with fear so fear can cure you instead.
Let that sink in for a moment. What if fear isn’t something to avoid, resist, or feel shame about? What if, instead, fear is here to help you? What if fear is the finger pointing toward everything that stands between you and true well-being? Most of us devote a great deal of energy to organizing our entire lives around avoiding what we fear most. But fear can be a messenger that wakes you up to everything in your life that’s still in need of healing. For example, if there’s still a roof over your head and money in the bank but you’re afraid of going broke, fear might be pointing to patterns you learned in childhood about financial lack. In order to experience the peace of abundance, you might need to address any limiting beliefs about money that keep you from thriving. If you’re afraid of making yourself vulnerable and opening your heart to love, fear may be sending you a message about wounds from unhealed heartbreak in your past that need your tender, loving care. If you’re afraid of getting sick, fear may be signaling you to stop giving so much and start prioritizing your own self-care. Fear carries with it a precious message, and if you’re willing to listen to your fear, rather than run away from it, fear can help you get on the fast track to healing in body, mind, and soul.
In order to befriend fear, you have to know how to respond when fear rears up. When your life is in imminent danger, fear is meant to fuel you into action. But when what you fear exists only in your imagination, that’s when you need to glean the message it is trying to deliver; otherwise the fear can take you over and drive your decisions. Transforming your relationship with fear requires discerning the difference between fear that points to real, present danger and fear that’s trying to teach you about the blind spots and growth edges in your life. But how do you do this?
Psychologists schooled in the branch of psychotherapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) differentiate between “clean pain” and “dirty pain.” Clean pain results from real-life events—loss of a loved one, a broken heart, or injury, for example. Dirty pain results from the mental stories we create and judgments we make about our painful life events. For example, your boyfriend breaks up with you. This causes clean pain. Dirty pain follows when you make up a story about how you’re not sexy enough or smart enough to be worthy of that guy who dumped you, and you then suffer from your self-judgment. Clean pain results when you break your leg playing baseball. Dirty pain results when you convince yourself you’ll get kicked off the baseball team, lose your scholarship, never be able to play baseball again, and wind up worthless.
Feelings of fear divide along similar lines. I was originally inspired by this distinction to discuss what I planned to call “clean fear” and “dirty fear.” But I was concerned that the term dirty fear might trigger feelings of shame in people who are hindered by this kind of feeling. There’s no place for judgment in the process of letting fear cure you. Instead, we’ll talk about “true fear” and “false fear” just so you’re clear how to use the information fear gives you in order to fuel inspired action. True fear is the kind of fear that triggers necessary stress responses that protect you. True fear kicks in when life or limb is threatened, and it signals you to DO SOMETHING, pronto! True fear fuels actions that can save your life and help shield those you love from danger.
False fear, like dirty pain, exists only in your imagination. It’s the voice that says your spouse is having an affair, when in fact there’s no evidence—you’re just primed to suspect it because your father cheated on your mother. It’s your imagination prattling on that your boss is conspiring to fire you, when the truth is you just got a raise. It’s the fear that nobody loves you and you’re going to wind up all alone, when there’s really a roomful of people who would do anything for you. It’s the fear that you’ll wind up a bag lady when, in present time, even if your bank account is dwindling, you can still pay the rent and put food on the table.
Every human on earth experiences both true and false fear, and both can help you. True fear protects you in a literal sense when you’re in danger, or when someone you love is, but false fear can help you too, if you’re willing to let it be your teacher. In this book, you’ll discover how to unearth your natural courage so false fear can help you grow, rather than ruling your life, undermining your health, and robbing you of joy. Instead of taking your marching orders from false fear thoughts, you’ll learn how to filter the messages of fear by letting the part of you I call your “Inner Pilot Light” translate.
YOUR INNER PILOT LIGHT
Your Inner Pilot Light is that ever-radiant, always-twinkling, 100 percent authentic divine spark that lies at the core of you. Call it your soul, your spirit, the real you, your Christ consciousness, your Buddha nature, your highest self, or your inner healer—this part of you is pure consciousness. The minute the very idea of you was ignited, this spark was lit, and it has been glowing away ever since.
Your Inner Pilot Light, which is the birthplace of courage, has the power to transform all the scary, courage-diminishing thoughts of your false fear into messages meant to heal you from your core. The voice of this wise part of you shows up as intuition, and unlike the thoughts fueled by false fear, it can always be trusted to guide your actions. When you learn to hear this voice and abide by its guidance, you become impossibly brave. In his book Unlearning Back to God, philosopher Mark Nepo describes this part of you beautifully as the original, incorruptible center of your self. He writes, “Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace.”
You don’t have to be religious or even particularly spiritual in order to align with the guidance of your Inner Pilot Light. You just have to be willing to remember the truth of who you really are. Your Inner Pilot Light never burns out, even at the darkest times of your life, but it can grow dim—and when you lose touch with this essential part of who you are, you’re likely to let false fears run your life. When you’re not tapped into your Inner Pilot Light, you can’t hear the messages false fears are trying to give you, so it’s impossible to let fear cure you. Instead, fear not only winds up making you unhappy, but as I’ll prove to you later in this book, it can make you sick or even kill you.
This is what happened to me after I was held up at gunpoint.
HOW FALSE FEAR CAUSED ME TO SUFFER
After the incident in Colorado Springs, I had nightmares of looking over and seeing Rebecca on that black asphalt, lying in a pool of blood or feeling the gun pressed against my skull, hearing the shot, and feeling warm liquid coursing down my face that, when I touched it, stained my hand red. For over a year, I woke up multiple times during the night with my heart pounding, electric tingles zipping through me, and blood rushing in my ears.
On night call as an OB-GYN resident, I would be walking down the hospital hallway, pushing a patient on a gurney, and suddenly, with no obvious trigger, I would flash back to the scene. While my cognitive mind knew I was safe, my body flipped into panic mode. As a busy medical resident working 16-hour days, I didn’t seek out professional help like I should have. Instead, I blundered through the aftermath of the holdup, which coincided with the dissolution of my marriage.
Before the Colorado Springs incident, I had already been burdened by countless fears. I was afraid of getting raped when I took public transportation to the hospital at 4 A.M. I was terrified of screwing up in the hospital and having someone die. I was scared of letting down my parents. I worried that I’d never be a good enough doctor. I was afraid of winding up alone after my divorce. I was even scared of roaches. I walked on eggshells to make sure nobody saw through the mask of perfection I wore in the hopes that others would love and accept me, in spite of my many flaws.
But after Colorado Springs, I was afraid of everything—the dark, loud noises, tunnels, scenic overlooks, convertibles, airplanes, strangers in the park, losing someone I love, daring to fall in love again. I was even afraid to talk to anyone about the panic that arose in the wake of the incident, afraid I would come across as weak, afraid it would hurt my professional reputation, afraid someone might prescribe Xanax and then I’d get hooked and wind up in rehab, or even worse, laced into a white straitjacket and locked away.
When I had a gun to my head, the fear I felt was true fear. My life really was in danger. But all the fears that followed were false. They existed only in my imagination, and none of the things I was afraid of ever came true. These false fears were trying desperately to shake me awake and show me the truth about the post-traumatic stress disorder I was experiencing. They were begging me to seek help, but I was still fast asleep back then, out of touch with my Inner Pilot Light and unaware of how fear could cure me, if only I was open to it. Instead, these false fears created so much unnecessary suffering in my life. With the cacophony of false fear voices screaming in my mind, I wound up feeling lost, disconnected, and at the mercy of a dangerous world.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that in the midst of all this, during a routine physical my doctor noticed that my blood pressure was alarmingly high. A referral to a cardiologist revealed more pathology—a heart murmur, a cardiac arrhythmia, and even higher blood pressures. The cardiologist worked me up for other secondary causes of hypertension that might spike up my blood pressure—renal artery stenosis, an adrenal gland tumor, hyperthyroidism, Cushing’s syndrome—but everything else came back normal.
The doctors diagnosed me with “essential chronic hypertension” and dosed me up on three drugs. But my blood pressure wasn’t responding. My doctors told me my condition was chronic, that I’d have to take drugs for the rest of my life, and that I would likely die young of heart disease, given the severity of my high blood pressure and my youth at the time of diagnosis. None of my doctors ever once asked me what else was going on in my life, and because I had been brainwashed into the mind-body dissociation common in the medical establishment, it never occurred to me, either, to question whether my high blood pressure and heart conditions might be related to my countless fears.
It wasn’t until almost 15 years later, when I was researching my book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, that I fully understood how fear had hijacked not only my mind, but my body. I wasn’t just suffering from the emotional and spiritual aftermath of what had happened in my personal and professional life, from the robbery to my divorce to the stress of my grueling job. My nervous system had been completely jacked up, and it was affecting every cell in my body through a complicated series of hormonal reactions that were making me sick.
Had I not woken up to the many ways that a repeatedly triggered stress response was contributing not just to my high blood pressure and cardiac issues, but also to a whole host of other health conditions that plagued me, I’d probably still be taking the seven medications doctors wound up prescribing for me. Fortunately, I did wake up. I began to understand how, if we’re out of touch with our Inner Pilot Light, false fear leads us to deny what is true for ourselves, and how this betrayal of our personal integrity predisposes the body to disease. The shocking truth of what I learned flew in the face of everything I had been taught in 12 years of medical education—and sent me into an ego meltdown as everything I thought I knew about medicine was thrown into question.
THE PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF ILLNESS
I didn’t realize at the time that this shift in my awareness about what it really means to be “healthy” would not only transform my physical body; it would also thrust me onto a path of profound spiritual inquiry and discovery. While I am still very much a student of what makes the body wholly healthy, one thing I have realized after my own personal experience, as well as years of working with patients, is that it’s futile to approach the prevention and treatment of disease without also learning to transform the false fears that predispose us to illness if we don’t learn how to let them cure us.
While many physicians and other health care providers are also waking up to this truth, and while an increasing number of empowered patients are embracing the idea that fear and disease might be linked, this still seems radical to others within the medical establishment. Attention still focuses primarily on the biochemical causes of disease, without much consideration of the psycho-spiritual factors that have been proven to affect the body’s biochemistry. While growing interest in the field of integrative medicine has raised awareness of the benefits of such health boosters as diet, exercise, natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals, complementary and alternative medicine, and stress management tools like meditation and yoga, far too little attention has been paid to the spiritual roots of disease and the diagnostic and treatment tools that have been employed by healers for millennia to tend to the health of the soul. This poorly explored area of medicine, where science and spirituality intersect, has become the object of my deep inquiry, both professionally and personally.
My passion for this aspect of medicine has not just fueled my own self-healing journey; it has also spawned Dr. Lissa Rankin’s Whole Health Medicine Institute, a training program for physicians and other health care providers, which has included pioneering physician guest faculty such as Rachel Naomi Remen, Bernie Siegel, Larry Dossey, Christiane Northrup, Aviva Romm, Sara Gottfried, and Pamela Wible, as well as other revolutionaries including life coach Martha Beck, cell biologist Bruce Lipton, Whole Body Intelligence therapist Steve Sisgold, Mayan shaman Martín Prechtel, and movement medicine expert and Nia founder Debbie Rosas. Together, along with the visionary healers who participate in the program, we are on a mission to heal health care by reuniting medicine with its heart and soul, while inspiring patients to improve their health by finding the courage to let fear fuel growth, guided by the wisdom and courage of your Inner Pilot Light. When you let your Inner Pilot Light take the lead in your life, you not only free yourself from unnecessary suffering; you also pave the way for optimal health.
THE MASKS THAT FEAR WEARS
As long as fear lives in the shadows, hidden by shame, ignored out of ignorance, and unexamined by your Inner Pilot Light, it tends to poison you. You may not even be aware of how much fear influences your life. This is partly because, in our culture, fear tends to masquerade as a lot of other emotions. Perhaps because the word stress refers more to a physical reaction than to an emotion, we seem to be more willing to admit that stress is what plagues us, rather than worry, anxiety, or fear. In fact, for many, being stressed out is practically a badge of honor. We parade our stress as proof that we’re busy, productive, valuable people leaving our mark on the world. But for many people, being “stressed out” is just code for being really, really scared.
When we’re stressed at work, are we not actually just afraid? Afraid of making mistakes, of disappointing our bosses, of harming someone we’re responsible for helping, of being perceived as “unprofessional,” of speaking up for what we believe is right, of killing the patient / losing the case / failing to get the bid / letting the deal slip through our fingers? Aren’t we afraid of getting passed over for the promotion, losing our relevance, getting demoted, being fired, and winding up unable to support the family? Aren’t we afraid to demand shorter hours, ask if we can take time off work to attend school plays and soccer games, and insist that self-care is as valuable as work? Don’t we fear admitting we’re burned out and need a sabbatical, or setting boundaries with those we work with by unplugging from e-mail on weekends or turning off our cell phones after hours? Aren’t we terrified others will discover that we’re vulnerable and imperfect, when we expend so much energy trying to prove that we’re professional superheroes?
Many of us wear work stress as the most acceptable badge of honor, but we also liberally admit that relationships are stressful. Parents are stressed with the kids. Spouses are stressed by each other. We’re stressed out about whether to get married or have kids or break up, and we’re really stressed when we’re hopelessly in love with someone who doesn’t love us back.
But what do we really mean when we say relationships are stressful? Don’t we mean that we’re afraid our loved ones won’t stick around if they find out who we really are? Aren’t we truly afraid of betrayal, rejection, infidelity, divorce, getting our hearts broken, losing the ones we love, or winding up alone? Aren’t we afraid to admit that we want more affection, more connection, more help with the kids, less criticism, less judgment, more time, more sex, more space, more freedom? Don’t we fear the vulnerability of fully opening our hearts—and the abject loneliness if we don’t?
We’re stressed about money, too, but money is just a piece of paper that sits in the bank. Aren’t we really afraid of the loss of power, comfort, and safety we think money provides? Aren’t we afraid we won’t be able to pay the rent, get food on the table, keep a car, or cover our health care costs? Don’t we fear being unable to save money for our children’s education or fund our own retirement? Aren’t we afraid we won’t have enough of a safety net, should life’s uncertainties thwack us upside the head like a cosmic two-by-four?
Even shame can be a mask for fear. When we feel shame—about our failures, our bodies, our sexuality, our addictions, our parenting styles, how we show up at work—what we’re really feeling is fear: fear of being “outed” as imperfect, fear of rejection, fear of not deserving the love and belonging we all crave. Just as we hide our fear under the veil of “stress,” we hide our shame in the shroud of arrogance, judgment, and contempt. But underneath our grown-up masks, we all have within us a frightened little kid, afraid that nobody will accept us for who we really are.
Fear can be sneaky, showing up in a variety of disguises that leave you unaware of how it’s ruling your life. Many people feel uncomfortable even admitting that fear is causing problems. We see it as a weakness, something we should hide from others and overcome by ourselves. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. True fear is a natural survival mechanism, here to protect you, and false fear is an important teaching tool, here to enlighten you. Fear affects every one of us. It’s nothing to hide. On the contrary, it is worth examining so it can point you toward a better way to live, a way that aligns you with your natural courage and supports you in optimal health.
THE ROAD TO COURAGE
What is courage, anyway? Dictionary.com defines courage as “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear.” But courage is not about being “fearless.” Some of the most celebrated heroes and heroines have stood quaking in their fuzzy slippers while engaging in acts of wild courage. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “the ability to do something that you know is difficult or dangerous.” But while the ability to do difficult, dangerous things may require courage, sometimes it’s more courageous to avoid difficult, dangerous actions.
In spite of what Hollywood might lead you to believe, courage is not necessarily glamorous or sexy. It doesn’t require fanfare or uniforms or medals or adoring fans cheering in the stands. It’s not about weapons or car chases or daring stunts. Sometimes courage is an internal journey you take on your own—and everyone’s journey is different. For some, just getting out of bed in the morning is unspeakably brave.
Courage is not about being reckless. It’s not the daredevil parachuting off a cliff when there are sharp rocks below or walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers in the middle of a tornado. It’s not the single woman walking into a dark alley at night when her intuition screams that she’s at risk of being raped. It’s not the single mother of four who quits her less-than-ideal job and winds up unable to feed the kids. It’s not about getting into a ring with a bull that’s out to make you into a horn ornament.
Courage is also not about doing something scary just because someone else pressures you to do so. It’s not the soldier shouldering his gun and following orders that compromise his personal integrity. It’s not the stockbroker who ignores his instincts and invests all his client’s money in a risky venture because his boss thinks he should. It’s not the gang initiate who holds up a bank teller, or the drug dealer who sneaks ten pounds of cocaine across the border for the mob boss, or the teenager who tries to ski a black diamond tree run just because his buddies tell him he’s a pussy if he doesn’t.
Courage is not about oversharing your vulnerabilities or indiscriminately exposing your heart. It’s not the guy who keeps professing his undying love to women he barely knows. It’s not the blogger who writes about her eating disorder, her drug addiction, and her romantic exploits, not because she’s hoping to make others feel less alone, but because she’s hurting inside and seeking attention in all the wrong places. It’s not the woman who overshares details about her childhood sexual abuse as a way to jump-start intimacy. It’s not the reality TV star who invites cameras into his bedroom while he fights with his wife in front of a million people. It’s not the bullied child who grows up and opens fire on those who bullied him. It’s not the abused wife who stabs her husband in his sleep.
Then what do we mean when we talk about cultivating courage? Here’s how I define it:
Courage is not about being fearless; it’s about letting fear transform you so you come into right relationship with uncertainty, make peace with impermanence, and wake up to who you really are.
This kind of courage helps you make choices that strengthen rather than diminish you. Instead of allowing your choices to be ruled by false fear and the emotions that ride shotgun with it—anger, resentment, hatred, intolerance, depression, anxiety, and unresolved grief—courage stems from inner peace, and it empowers you to live in alignment with your soul’s values.
WHAT INSPIRED THIS BOOK?
I researched and wrote my last book, Mind Over Medicine, because I was inspired by the brave patients who were willing to look at the root causes of their illness, write The Prescription for their own care, and make their bodies ripe for miracles. With many of these patients who made life changes that reduced stress responses in their bodies, thereby activating the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms, I was blessed to witness spontaneous remissions. But in other patients, I observed a more concerning pattern. Some of my patients seemed so stuck in fear-based reactivity that they were paralyzed into inaction and couldn’t make the changes they knew they needed to make in order to optimize their health. It was as if their souls got stuck inside cages locked by fear, and they spent much of their time and energy shoring up the bars of the soul cage so danger couldn’t get in. What they didn’t realize is that the soul yearns to be free of cages, and the very thing that locks us in the soul cage prison in the first place—fear—can be the key to let us out. For these patients, getting imprisoned by fear not only prevented them from embarking upon a self-healing journey; it also seemed to make them sicker.
I became curious as to whether there was scientific data linking fear to disease, and when I began researching it, I was shocked by the voluminous data proving without a doubt that the two are linked. Then I felt stuck. If fear predisposes the body to illness and I was going to shine a light on this truth, surely I couldn’t just leave people more frightened without offering solutions. I knew that if I was going to share this data about the link between fear and disease, I also needed to offer hope for relief from fear’s grip. And who was I to do this? I am a medical doctor, not a therapist or a psychologist, and while I often write about spiritual matters, I have no formal training that qualifies me to teach about them.
I tried to talk myself out of writing this book, but I was haunted by the data indicating that fear is one of the leading predisposing factors of disease in our culture. If fear could be argued to be as much of a health risk as a poor diet or smoking, as a doctor, wasn’t it my responsibility to help patients address this very real health problem? What ensued was a deep dive into the body of knowledge about fear and courage, not as an expert, but as a curious student interested in doing whatever I could to counterbalance the disease-inducing ravages of fear with courage-cultivating solutions.
In the process of researching this book, I read hundreds of academic articles about fear in the mainstream psychology literature. I also read dozens of popular books about fear. Some, like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers and The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner, address fear from the psychological perspective, offering up practical fear-freeing tips. Others, like The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, make the case for why fear is good for you, how it protects you from predatory criminals and life-threateningly dangerous situations. Still others, such as Pema Chodron’s The Places that Scare You, Adyashanti’s Falling into Grace, Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, and Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love, address fear from a spiritual perspective.
I researched books and articles written about what helps us be brave, such as Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, Debbie Ford’s Courage, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis’s The Courage to Heal, and Elizabeth Lesser’s Broken Open. I also read a panoply of books addressing specific psychiatric conditions associated with fear and anxiety, including phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. I even read a handful of memoirs, such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, written by people who overcame a fear-driven life in order to make courageous choices. In addition to reading a library’s worth of academic articles and books, I also interviewed over a hundred individuals about how they overcame fear and chose courage instead, and I became fascinated (okay, obsessed) with what makes one individual resilient and brave while another gets trapped in a fear-based existence.
I realized that fear lives deep in the shadows for most people. We try not to talk about it. We certainly don’t cop to most of our deepest fears in mixed company. Talking about fear at a dinner party isn’t likely to make you popular. Yet we all struggle with it. As I interviewed more and more people about how they faced their fears and made brave choices in spite of them, I marveled at the ways in which different people handle adversity. Most of us do everything we can to avoid situations we don’t want—divorce, the death of a loved one, bankruptcy, a cancer diagnosis, sexual abuse—and yet, time and time again, the most courageous people I interviewed told me that these events were the best thing that ever happened to them. I was baffled. How could such traumas be cast in such a positive light? And why were these particular people transformed in a deeply meaningful way when others experiencing similar adversity lost their spirit and shut down? Why were some people driven to protect themselves so fiercely that they wound up living only half a life, while others let fear act as the key that unlocked the soul cage? Most importantly, what might we learn from those who arose from the ashes and made the choice to live courageous lives? How might we unlock the soul cage ourselves?
I realized that fear can be a blessing, not only because it can protect you from danger, but because it can wake you up. If we can stay awake in the midst of scary, uncertain life experiences, the blinders that keep us from seeing our lives clearly may be lifted, and we may be blessed to know the truth about ourselves, how the world works, and why we are here. 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. As Christopher Hansard wrote in The Tibetan Art of Serenity, “Fear is just unrealized serenity.” That’s why The Fear Cure is not so much about curing fear; it’s more about letting fear cure you.
But how does this happen? If fear leads one person to contract while another expands, what lessons or practices can we adopt that will help fear be medicine rather than poison? Is there something we can call upon when fear is gripping us, not just as a way to protect our health, but as a way to live more authentically, more soulfully, and with more joy?
What I concluded after all of my research is that there is no single “one size fits all” prescription that will help fear liberate you, rather than locking you in a soul cage. For one person, therapy is the solution. For another, it’s a monthlong silent retreat or a pilgrimage. The prescription may be belly dancing or skydiving or signing up for an art class. It may be the practice of meditation, prayer, or EFT. Some people will require all of the above. One thing all the courageous individuals I interviewed shared in common was the ability to hear, interpret, and act upon guidance from their Inner Pilot Lights. Those unmistakable voices prescribed what they needed in order to let fear catalyze growth, and they were committed enough to listen and follow through.
The courageous steps the Inner Pilot Light prescribes to let fear cure you are outer actions that facilitate an inner process, because at its root, The Fear Cure is an inside job. It is about coming into right relationship with uncertainty and making peace with impermanence. This requires a shift in consciousness as you move from identifying with your limited self-image and its thoughts, beliefs, and feelings to fully realizing your unlimited true nature. The purpose of this book is to help you learn how to free yourself by making this shift. Ultimately, The Fear Cure is a journey of transformation, and it’s yours to take, if you’re ready and willing.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book consists of three parts meant to speak to different parts of you. Part One delivers a message to your cognitive mind, in case you’re the kind of person who gets motivated by scientific evidence, that fear is not just a painful emotion that exists in your mind and makes you unhappy, but a life-threatening force that lives in the cells of your body and has the power to kill you. In the first chapter of Part One, I’ll share with you the neuroscience and physiology of fear, explaining the mechanism of how a fearful thought translates into physiologic changes throughout the body. We’ll also discuss how your nervous system can get hijacked by fear and trauma in such a way that stress responses are triggered automatically, bypassing the cognitive mind and hooking right into the limbic system, leading to phobias, post-traumatic stress, and other psychological disorders that may require professional help to overcome.
In the second chapter of Part One, I’ll walk you through all the scientific data proving that fear increases your risk of almost every disease, especially the modern world’s number one killer—heart disease. You’ll discover that fear decreases your longevity and leads to physical suffering if left unchecked. The data I’ll be presenting to you in Part One is not meant to scare you more; it’s meant to educate and empower you, putting responsibility for your health back into your own hands, rather than leaving you feeling helpless, at the mercy of forces you think you can’t control. Knowing how unchecked fear predisposes you to disease can motivate you to make healthy choices about how you might transform fear into medicine for the body, mind, and soul.
While Part One is intended to satisfy your cognitive mind’s need to understand why you should stop letting false fear run your life and start letting it transform you instead, Part Two speaks not to your cognitive mind, but to your intuition, showing you that there’s another way to live, and it’s within your power to begin to live this way. In Part Two, we’ll move from science toward the realm of spirituality, exploring where the two intersect. You’ll learn the Four Fearful Assumptions, four limiting beliefs that lie at the root of many false fears. We’ll discuss how to turn those four limiting beliefs around into the Four Courage-Cultivating Truths. At the end of each chapter in Part Two, you’ll be given Courage-Cultivating Exercises intended to help you put these truths into practice in daily life. When you shift your worldview away from the common cultural worldview that’s dominated by the Four Fearful Assumptions, trading them out for the Four Courage-Cultivating Truths, you pave the way for coming into right relationship with uncertainty and developing a healthy relationship with loss, such that uncertainty is full of possibility and loss can be the gateway to growth. Therein lies the real medicine.
In Part Three, you will be invited to marry your cognitive mind with your intuition so you can make this journey of transformation personal. You’ll be creating your own Fear Cure, mapping your own courage-cultivating path, learning the Six Steps to Cultivating Courage, and letting your Inner Pilot Light write your Prescription for Courage so you can start blessing the world with your luminous light.
What’s important to understand is that there are many paths to such freedom. Western psychology offers one approach. Eastern philosophies offer another. A Course in Miracles employs its own methods. Organized religions all offer their own faith-based guidelines for how to “fear not.” Although this book is not in any way about any specific organized religion, I will draw upon some of the fear solutions offered by religious traditions such as the Christian mystics, the Jewish mystical branch of Kabbalah, the Islamic mystical branch of Sufism, Buddhism, and the Hindu tradition of yoga. All of these approaches are valid, and any of them might wind up being part of your own Prescription for Courage.
This process isn’t a quick fix; it’s a spiritual journey that requires time, practice, commitment, support, courage, faith, and radical acts of compassion, both for yourself and for the other fearful beings you encounter on your way. But what it offers is not a mere Band-Aid; it’s real healing. By the end of the book, you’ll discover that you’ve always had within you all that you need in order to look beyond your fear and find your brave.
WHY IT’S WORTH THE JOURNEY
If you’ve faced adversity in your life—and let’s face it, who hasn’t?—fear may have disconnected you from the voice of your Inner Pilot Light, causing you to compromise the integrity of your true self. These “sellouts” may be big, or they may be subtle, but over time, they grind away at the soul like sandpaper. Maybe, as I was, you’re in medicine and you’re asked to see 40 patients a day when you know that to be a true healer, you need more time. Maybe you’re in advertising and you’re asked to try to sell a product you don’t fully support. Maybe you’re a teacher and you’re not allowed to hug the child you know just needs to be held. Maybe you’re a banker and the powers that be won’t let you lend the money to the small business owner who is going to lose his business if he doesn’t get the loan you just know he’ll pay back. Maybe you’re a lawyer asked to defend the client with the most money, rather than standing up for what’s fair. Maybe you’re the politician who got into politics to be the voice for the people, only now you’ve sold out to special interests because you can’t help the people unless you get reelected.
Maybe it’s not about your job. Maybe you didn’t speak up when someone was excluded from your social group because she didn’t wear the right shoes or drive the right car, even though her heart was pure. Maybe you stayed silent on the church committee when they started talking about why they didn’t want a gay preacher. Maybe you didn’t stand up for your own needs when you were asked to sacrifice your own self-care for your family. Maybe you said yes when your Inner Pilot Light begged you to say NO.
Every day, your integrity is tested in a thousand ways, and every day, you have a choice. Fear will dish up all kinds of arguments for selling out. It will rationalize that you need security, safety, certainty, acceptance, and a paycheck. But what price are you paying when you systematically betray your truth, day after day after day? In this way, fear can be a blessing because it is always pointing toward those slips in integrity that need to be addressed. Even if the sellouts are subtle, and you’re barely aware of what you’re doing, compromise your integrity enough and your Inner Pilot Light starts to grow dim. It becomes harder and harder to hear its guiding voice. Every time you betray your true self, a little piece of you withers away, taking with it your health, vitality, and happiness.
When you commit to aligning with your Inner Pilot Light 100 percent of the time, you’re asked to do challenging, scary things. People you love may not support you, because you’re no longer ruled by the fears most people use to control one another, and your new unpredictability makes them wary. You may start to trigger reactions in others, especially the ones who have rationalized why they’re selling out their own truth every day. You become a mirror that those who sell out can’t stand to look in.
But the ones who long to live in alignment with their own Inner Pilot Lights start flocking to you. Your changing vibration attracts your true soul community to you. And as a sort of thank-you for aligning with your true self, the Universe often draws into your life more and more true joy, unconditional love, professional vitality, physical health, and a sense of connection with the Divine. You may lose some, or much, of what makes up your comfort zone. But what you’ll gain when you commit to this journey is priceless. The prize for your commitment is FREEDOM.
Are you willing to let fear cure you and explore how courageous you really are?
I dare you.