Walking Through Fear

What does it take to move through fear? Why is it so hard to say no? Why is fear of embarrassment so paralyzing? How do we move through the dark places in our lives and come out the other side – more whole?

I came across a thoughtful interview with Frances Moore Lappé , author of Hope’s Edge and Diet for a Small Planet. Written by Sarah Ruth van Gelder and published ages ago in YES! Magazine, the theme of how to embrace our inner demons seems as relevant now as ever.

As a big believer in naming, feeling, and not personalizing painful patterns as they arise in order to release them, I especially appreciated Lappé’s sensory perspective: “Sometimes [fear] was so tight it hurt, my mouth was often dry, and I felt awful pressure in my upper chest.”

Enjoy this excerpt:

Frances Moore Lappé: …we are living in a culture increasingly dominated by fear where many feel blocked. But fear doesn’t have to stop us. I learned this when my world came apart. I was living a life-long dream of a family life combined with an organization to promote living democracy—all on a gorgeous 45-acre compound in rural Vermont. I’d spent a decade building my dream, and then it started to crumble, piece by piece—my marriage, my organization, my confidence.

Sarah Ruth van Gelder: How did you respond? What did you do?

Frances: The first words that come to mind are those of Wangari Mathai, a woman my daughter Anna and I met in Kenya, who suffered terribly during her divorce, and she came through it to found the Green Belt Movement. Her refrain to us was basically, “I just kept walking.”

I thought about her during this time when fear seemed to grab me by the throat. Sometimes it was so tight it hurt, my mouth was often dry, and I felt awful pressure in my upper chest.

Then my children threw me a life line: ‘Return to your roots—food—and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet.’ I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving. For me, just showing up for the traveling and writing gave me the power to overcome my fear of fear…

Sarah: You mentioned in your book that one of the greatest fears people have is the fear of embarrassment. People avoid venturing out of accepted roles or suggesting a better way, because doing so might subject them to ridicule or humiliation.

Frances: I think that fear of embarrassment is the essence of the human challenge. On the one hand, our social nature is our greatest beauty—it means that we have natural empathy and sympathy. But our social nature also means that we may let ourselves be controlled by the judgments of others, precisely because we care so much about our status in community. Few of us can go it alone, but we can choose who we bring into our lives. We can choose who will reinforce our risk taking. That’s what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.

Sarah: You and Jeffrey Perkins suggest that sometimes we think fear is telling us to stop when it actually means “go!”

Frances: I think we are at a new evolutionary stage. We evolved in tight-knit tribes in which we faced death if we didn’t have the support of the rest of the tribe. So little wonder that it can seem unthinkable to say “no, thanks” to the modern-day equivalent of our tribe—our fear-driven culture. The problem is that our whole tribe—if you will, the larger community of humanity itself—is on a death march ecologically and in terms of the intensification of violence and conflict. So breaking with the pack may be exactly what we should be doing. Saying “no” to the dominant culture that is trapping us in destructive ways of living might be the most life-serving thing we can do. Fear doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to stop. It doesn’t mean that we are failures. It doesn’t mean that we are cowards. It means that we are human beings walking into the unknown, and that we are risking breaking with others for something we believe in.”

–Excerpted from “Walking Through Fear: An Interview with Frances Moore Lappé by Sarah Ruth van Gelder.” YES! Magazine Summer 2004: What is the Good Life. [Note: I tried to find the link to the original article on the Web, but sadly that page no longer exists.]

p.s. Update. Link does exist as it turns out!  Right under my nose. Thank you Sarah from YES! : Walking Through Fear.