“What lies beyond fear. A crazy thing happened — the very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear.” ~ Shonda Rhimes 

I remember driving to my first gathering of ecstatic dance class many years ago, alone in my car, my heart beating fast, my breath quickening and my head aching. 

My body was buzzing, my hands were a little wet on the wheel and I nearly turned around. Something about moving together with strangers that felt vulnerable; the prospect of this kind of intimate movement and contact, being in close proximity to others, bodies touching, made me feel uneasy, and yet at the same time interested me, as I have always loved dance and movement, and this practice intrigued me. It had been something I had wanted to try for years and I had ‘finally’ mustered up the courage to go.

I bet you have probably encountered this feeling too… moving towards your growing edge and feeling the mix of fear and excitement.

Can you remember the last time you felt it?

Maybe it was a first date after years of being alone.. or submitting a piece of writing to a publication, or walking into a room where you knew no one.

In situations like these, some of us let fear take over. It stops us from taking action or risks and moving towards what we actually desire, because fear is overwhelming and the system does what it knows how to do… it braces and stops us.

But fear is not a stop sign. The exact opposite in fact. It is a doorway, and if you can learn to tell the difference between the two kinds of doors it’s standing in front of, everything about how you relate to your own edges begins to change.

#1 – When something is new.

The fear that arrives when you’re doing something genuinely new.

Like jumping out of a plane, taking on an adventure holiday, starting a job with responsibilities you’ve never held before, or like me, walking into an intimidating dance class for the first time. 

Your nervous system has no reference point for this yet, and because there are so many unknowns, it lights up. Fear arrives, often coupled with excitement and almost indistinguishable at first, because physiologically they are much the same.

Scared and excited.

Both are inner aliveness meeting the unfamiliar. When it’s this kind of fear, underneath it there’s usually a kind of yes. We lean forward even though there is a part of us that trembles at it.

Then there’s a different fear.

#2 – The fear of hurt or pain.

This doesn’t arrive partnered with excitement, instead it comes connected to something old showing up as something new.

This kind of fear is linked to the possibility of rejection, criticism, of being abandoned or hurt, or humiliated in some way that is related to a wound formed long ago. This fear doesn’t feel like excitement underneath at all, it feels like contraction. Like your whole system is saying no, not this again… even when the situation in front of you has nothing to do with what actually happened before.

I think of a client who felt overwhelmed and fearful at work – not feeling good enough and worthy of her job. Every time she received a new work assignment, she pushed it off – she felt her throat close and her stomach drop, the exact sensation she had as a small girl trying to get her mother’s attention and being waved away. The moment that was in front of her had almost nothing to do with the fear moving through her. The fear was old and it was just showing up as something new.

Fear of survival, or simply unfamiliar territory?

These two fears are different physiologically and are processed in fundamentally different ways.

Fear of the new arises because the system has no reference point yet, it is simply assessing an unknown, and once you encounter that unknown and survive it, the system updates and the fear tends to settle. There is no old material underneath it that keeps feeding the fear, just the unfamiliar or unknown meeting a nervous system that is built to be cautious around something it doesn’t have a map for yet.

Fear of an old wound works differently, and for several compounding reasons it registers as far more serious to the system.

Rejection and social pain activate the same regions involved in physical pain, including the regions that process the sensory intensity of an injury rather than just its unpleasantness, so an old rejection can be processed by the body as an actual physical wound rather than a passing discomfort.

Once someone has been significantly hurt or rejected, the nervous system can become primed to expect it again, reading neutral or even safe situations as threatening and reacting far out of proportion to what is actually happening.

Underneath both of these is the most fundamental difference of all; fear f an old wound is tied to survival in a way the fear of novelty never is. In our early years attachment to caregivers was required to stay alive, meaning anything that threatened that connection, was dangerous. The drive to maintain that closeness is built into the nervous system as a survival response, and shows up whenever we are confronted with the possibility of rejection, humiliation etc.

So while the fear of something new is the system saying “this is unfamiliar.. be careful”.. the fear of something old is the system saying “this could mean the loss of the very thing I once needed to survive” and that is why it so often feels harder, and far less willing to settle without support.

Two very different presentations of fear.
Both of these are asking you to grow.

The first kind is asking you to expand your capacity in the external world by taking on something new. To develop new skills, hold new roles, take up more space in your life than you have before. It’s an invitation to grow what you can do externally.

Your outer growing edge.

The second kind is asking something a little more subtle and a lot harder.

It’s asking you to expand your relationship with your inner world by meeting something old.

To meet and befriend the part of you that’s still bracing against the past in some way, and to welcome that part rather than running from it. It isn’t asking for you to meet fear to become more capable out there, but to meet fear so that you can become more available in here, inside of you, to your own emotions, sensations and inner experiences, the places in you that for most of your life, you have run away from.

Your inner growing edge.

Which edge are you standing at?

Stepping into the places that scare you within, expands your capacity internally to be with discomfort, which then allows you to take more risks externally, without overriding your system or pushing through.

This is where freedom lies.

To build enough internal capacity that we can be with what’s uncomfortable (and sometimes fear is very, very, very uncomfortable) and not contract around it, abandoning ourselves in the process.

The need for safety and courage.

There are two things that need to be in place before we can meet either of these fears, safety and courage, and safety always has to come first.

We don’t act with courage from a system that doesn’t yet feel safe enough to risk it, safety is what makes courage possible at all.

When we confront a fear of something new, the safety we need is largely (though not entirely) external. We assess our own risk tolerance, we build structure around us, a plan, a support person, an exit strategy if it happens to go wrong, and once that scaffolding is in place we can meet it with courage. It’s a safety we can mostly build in the world around us, before we take the risk.

The safety the inner fear asks for is nothing like that. This safety has to be built inside the nervous system itself, in the body versus any external structure, and in trust in the present moment. This has to be built before the system will ever agree to go there.

Both ask for courage aimed in different directions.

One asking you to risk failing in the world, the other asking you to risk staying present.

Staying present in and with your body while an old fear moves through it or staying present when every old pattern in you wants to flee or fix. That kind of courage is invisible to the observer, it is the image of someone meeting a racing heart, and choosing not to abandon themselves in the middle of it.

It is a much slower, less rewarded kind of bravery that is what actually rewires the old wound rather than just outrunning it again.

When that inner safety develops, that is when you cultivate room to take real risks in your outer life too, from a nervous system that trusts itself to survive the feeling, whichever kind of fear it turns out to be.

Next time fear arises in you, before you brace against it or run away, pause and check which kind of fear it is. Is it one that requires your courage to move forward, or one that asks you to stop and stay with what’s actually there.

Both of these fears ask you to step into the unknown.
That is the most sacred work.