Oomph Blog

I am amazed at how fear has become such a powerful part of our lives… and how often we are unaware of the ways it affects us.

There are so many things in life right now that cause us to live in fear. Whether personally, professionally, spiritually, emotionally, or just overall identity, that we often live in fear and aren’t aware of it. We don’t see the many ways that fear pervades how we live, think, and know life.

I have come to believe that fear lives so powerfully in our lives because it has become part of the fabric of our world. We have gotten conditioned, used to it, and it has become far too normal. We are a people who are driven to succeed and achieve. We live in a modern world and reality that is so often about; getting ahead, staying afloat, the next deal, contract, success, or dodged bullet. We are upsizing, downsizing, and moving at warp speed to survive, much less thrive in the current state of things.

In simple terms, I believe that fear has become a veiled and unconscious fuel and a foundation of our faith – our very beliefs and motivations of life. It drives us in far too many ways.

Faith & Fear in the Modern World

Indeed, we live in an unpredictable and shakily changing world. Not only in terms of economics, but even more, I have come to also believe, in the arenas of faith. People in recent decades are leaving their home communities, cultural traditions, religion/spiritual practices, and connection with nature at a rate that we have never seen before. It’s kind of an oxymoron that at the very time we desperately need guidance, connection, and support, we are finding ourselves in an evermore fractured, spiritually devoid reality.

This has had a powerful impact on how we live and the quality of our lives. In fact, in my personal experience, talking publicly about faith and spirituality very often brings raised eyebrows, polite dismissals, demeaning retorts, and reserved, fidgety responses. There are many reasons for this, but the point for now is that we seem to have relegated faith to a place that is separate from our ordinary lives. And a lack of faith leaves us with a limited set of resources that sustain, grow, and help us to thrive.

It’s telling to note that fear, on the other hand, is common in our language and usually elicits responses of understanding, shared experience, and a ready acceptance.

Fear is one of the most basic human feelings we have. It both challenges and protects us. Fear comes as an innate response to real or perceived threats, uncertainty, danger, change, and experiences of all kinds that we feel are beyond our control or will bring harm. And living in a world where things are uncertain, where natural disasters and economic downsides loom, where media feeds us countless stories to fear on a daily basis, we find ourselves perpetually being challenged to manage our fear.

We need fear to keep us safe. It’s the good old human alarm button that gets pressed to alert us, like all animals, that something is happening and we need to pay attention. But the question becomes, how often do we feel and hold onto fear in ways that make life more about survival, pain, dread, apathy, and an array of other emotions and beliefs that affect our freedom and joy of life? And how often do we truly recognize fear for what it most often is, an alert to change, a soulful calling to explore the greater story of what life is bringing?

And how, in all of this, can faith sustain and guide us? Well, faith too is innate to human nature. We need and are wired to have things we believe in so that we can order and make sense of life, especially in times of struggle. So, faith and fear really do go together.

Another Perspective on Fear & Human Nature

In the Indigenous Maya Tz’tujil (pronounced Tzoo-too-hil) Traditions that I live much of my faith through, there are countless stories of how we need fear, but that we must also know fear. In these traditions fear is most often talked about as fright. This is different from fear in some powerfully important ways.

Fright is a temporary state. It is a way of experiencing a situation or event that calls you to pay attention, to look, to seek the truths, to engage the challenge, and realities of why you feel afraid. Fear only comes, then, when one holds onto their fright. And therefore, most often, fear is not necessary as a lasting or defining reality. It is meant to be a temporary state of being. Only when it is left unattended or consumes us does it seed and create fear.

This perspective has been powerful for me in many ways. Most of all I have found it empowering to know fear and fright as being different things. It allows us to see our responses to life’s fright and fear more truly for what they are, and are not.  The truths of life that set off those alarm bells cause us fright. This is natural. What we do with that fright greatly determines how fear will or will not impact our lives.

In these same stories there are also countless examples of how our lives as human beings are part of nature. And nature means that change, growing, dying, seasons, hardship, and abundance are all just part of life. Change, in essence, is not relegated to good or bad. It is not defined as being a positive or a negative. It’s just reality. It must happen the same way it does in nature.

There is much less to fear when we remember that things like change, ups, downs, struggles, and successes are equally part of life. The hard parts of this suck to go through and the good parts are really fun! But, I thin, in terms of faith and belief we’ve also gotten a bit spoiled by our eases and successes in previous years and that we are well served to be reminded that life must have balance, that life has its own nature. We have to have both…

As with nature, living in fear will only feed and create more fear. What we seed and live is what we will grow. And if we live in fear it is what we will both know as our personal reality and what we will pass on as our lineage for the future.

Finding Your Fears & Your Faith

Fear is a funny, rather wily little monster that often lurks below the surface, cloaked in other beliefs, perceptions, or emotions. That’s why we often don’t see it for what it is. It becomes so normal and veiled that it can be hard to know it is there. While my faith and practices live largely in the Indigenous Maya traditions, which is foreign to most, I am also a very practical person who hails from the Midwest United States.

So, following are some questions that I have found helpful in bridging what may seem a great divide between the spiritual and the useful. Simply take some time to really ask these questions and answer them from your heart, not your head. Be an observer, if you will, of your self as you pose these:

How often do you feel like you are being unfairly challenged?

Do you question or believe that you are being punished?

Do you feel like life is being done to you?

Do you feel that you have to fight, struggle, or protect your self and your wellbeing?

Do you feel bored or apathetic about life?

Do you avoid conflict, confrontation, or emotional situations?

Do you feel that you are surviving rather than living happily and with freedom?

Are you angry about the state of your life?

Do you feel powerless or persecuted?

Do you see yourself as strong and resilient in ways that keep you from feeling or living fully?

If you can answer yes to any or all of these, you are probably living with more fear than you are aware of. Why? Because if you did not have some emotion or experience of fear – a feeling of threat or harm – you would not answer “yes” to these very questions. Again, remember that fear is normal. It’s a matter of what we do with it.

If you have answered “yes” to these questions the next thing to do is explore. To look further and deeper into your own stories, beliefs and perceptions of your self and life so that you understand, so that you know your fear. In knowing your fear for what it is you begin the process of healing, of transforming it because in that awareness fear is no longer controlling you. In naming and having a conscious relationship with it you take back your power and free will. It can no longer drive you from that unconscious, unseen place that it so often lives.

This is where faith comes back into the picture. Faith is about trust, belief, stories, teachers, wisdom, and traditions that guide us in the spiritual nature of being human. It is what gives us the larger stories and perspectives through which we can know our own stories and selves more fully.

In simple terms, it’s really hard to see your own stuff, your own patterns, because you live them. They are normal to you. Just like fear. Living without faith, without beliefs and wisdoms which help us to navigate our very human nature, means we are left adrift, unaware, and alone in so many ways. It’s like we are orphans, seeking something more and we don’t have the road maps to find the very things we are looking for. And being alone in these simple and sacred ways makes us afraid…

Where the rubber meats the road…

I know that I am putting out some rather deep, heavy, and maybe overwhelming things in a relatively short space. But take what fits and toss the rest. The point is this. The proverbial rubber of life meets the road of our journeys through awareness. Fear and faith are both innate to our human existence. So, it’s good to take a look at them as we navigate our present and our future lives.

This is also where fear, faith, and the future all come together. If we live in fear we are limited. If we do not find faith, in whatever way that lives for each of us, then we are left with only our personal stories and experiences. And in this we are pretty assured that we will repeat our same stories, our same fears, in the future. We cannot change what we do not know is there. And we are hard pressed to do this without a greater spiritual perspective – a road map of a larger faith which helps to guide us.

So, in whatever ways faith can enrich your life and your world seek and find it. Ask and answer questions of your self. Whether through the stories of others, groups, spiritual traditions, religions, nature, books, mythology, elders, and each other, its just good practice. Bringing the spiritual to the every day is about being human and knowing life as something larger than our personal selves. It’s about living well. And it’s about having more joy, less fear, and knowing ever more of who we are.