This week’s podcast is all about fear, or more specifically, the surprising amount of fear I felt two weeks ago after signing up for a week of volunteering in rural Oaxaca, Mexico with a charity called All Hands and Hearts. As someone who spends most of his days “working” behind a computer, the idea of a week of hard manual labour was intimidating to say the least, especially in a rural and dangerous area of Mexico.
But the upside is that it provided me with a rare and insightful opportunity to explore an emotion that I don’t get to feel that often, that intensely, or for that long: fear! It wasn’t the sudden jump scare of fear, it was the slow burn of impending doom. And as the logistics of my volunteering trip began to crystallize, I became increasingly unsure if I could actually go through with it.
As I stewed and agonized over it, my mother sent me the following quote about fear by Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa:
“Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath the veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle.
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You might think that, when you experience fearlessness you will hear the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way. Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.”
As I thought about this quote, I realized that it really did feel like my fear was actually a form of sadness, but like sadness in fast forward. In fact, the more I reflected on the feelings I was having, the more it seemed like my fear had 3 distinct components:
- A negative interpretation of events
- My instinctual flight reflex
- Sadness
First of all, I realized that if I interpreted my impending volunteering trip in a more positive and optimistic way, I wouldn’t have any reason to be afraid. As I discovered in episode 33 (when I ate dinner in the dark and assumed the restaurant must be seedy just because I couldn’t see it), I have a bias that automatically interprets new experiences, lack of information, and the unknown as negative and dangerous. This bias was in full effect here and it’s something that I want to work on in the future, strengthening my sense of trust and optimism.
Secondly, when I realized that this whole experience of fear was really my instinctual flight reflex but in slow motion, I recognized that my panicked brain wasn’t actually trying to help me solve the problem, it was just trying to convince me not to go through with it, in order to “protect” itself from those negative assumptions noted above. Ultimately, I had to tune out those misguided impulses so that I could get to work figuring out the logistics of the trip.
And lastly, when I recognized that my fear was really a form of sadness, I was able to just sit with that feeling and accept it. I needed to grieve over the sense of safety and contentment that I had to sacrifice in order to go on this new adventure, which was a worthwhile trade-off once I saw it for what it was. This gentle introspection and acceptance of sadness is, as Chögyam pointed out, the true path to fearlessness.
In the end, my experience with All Hands and Hearts was great and the video above proves that I actually made it (though you have to look very carefully to see me pouring concrete from a wheelbarrow). I highly recommend anyone interested in a volunteering adventure join one of their projects (it’s not that scary after all, I swear!) or you can just donate money. They are one of the few charities that will accept, house, and train unskilled volunteers without any charge (sometimes they even cover travel). I’ll definitely be going back, and probably for more than a week next time!
