The only thing to fear is fear itself – and now I just ignore it

AS I write this, I am preparing to fly to Vancouver on my own to attend a practitioner’s training course on Salt Spring Island. It has been something that I have wanted to do for a number of years, to go to the birthplace, if you like, of the psychological understanding that I now share, the original school that was set up by Sydney Banks. And while this is the third time this year I’ve flown solo, has made me reflect even more on the nature of fear.

Fear for many years, was something that I lived with. I ‘‘pushed’’ myself through it, felt the fear and did it anyway; but there were some things where that fear was too much for me, that I couldn’t push through. While I travelled for work, it was mainly by train, I rarely drove – for fear I would have an accident, or I’d be late, or get lost. The thought of flying from one end of the country, while it would save time, was beyond my comprehension. After I burnt out, that fear became more compelling. There were times when I could create a workaround, but many times I just refused to go somewhere, notably even once a friend’s hen do, because the fear of travelling alone abroad was too great.

I feel no judgment towards myself because I felt this way: it was, as they say, what it was, and in many ways it’s a very human way to behave but once we understand how we work, the fear, such as it is starts to fade like the mirage that it is.

I first saw it with my fear of spiders, of all things. I recall being so scared of someone even talking about a spider that it would send a panic that I would have to leave or change the conversation. Such was my fear, or so I thought. However, what I noticed was that in that moment, there was no spider to be scared of, it didn’t exist, so what was I scared of? I was simply scared of my thinking about the spider.

I was scared of a thought in my mind. I was literally creating the fear myself by my own thinking. Now common sense tells us that the very nature of thought is that it really can’t hurt you, it’s completely formless, it only ever exists in our mind.

I began to wonder what else I could apply this to, what else was I literally creating in my mind to be scared of when I didn’t need to? I thought about my fear of flying and travelling on my own. I saw that it was created by a lot of thinking about ‘‘what if ’’. ‘‘What if the plane crashed?’’ ‘‘What if I got lost or went to the wrong place?’’ The list was endless and none of it existed in the now, none of it was real, all of it was created in my own mind.

I started to play with the idea of ‘‘what would happen if I simply didn’t pay attention to it?’’ I had already seen that the nature of thought is that it is transient, it comes and goes, so what would happen if I simply ignore it.

In many ways it was like putting down an overshaken snow globe, my mind began to settle and in place of the noisy, scary, fearful, thinking came an enormous sense of calm and wellbeing. I realised that I simply had no idea what would happen, but also that there had never been a time when I didn’t know what to do, I was always OK, and that having an amazing time was also on the table for me.

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