There is no reason to demonize fear, or place it at odds with love. It’s a false dichotomy.
Some fear is healthy and adaptive and propels us to right action, to protect what we love. This is how fear serves love.
Another form of fear is unhelpful and maladaptive, such as fearing what truly isn’t a threat. Identifying what part of our fear is helpful and which is not is the great skill of working with fear.
Love serves fear by honoring that the core emotion of fear is hardwired in us, that we can’t prevent from feeling it, nor would we want to. Compassion for and acceptance of unavoidable fear in ourselves and in others paradoxically allows us close enough to fear, including being able to share and “hold” it with others. This way it doesn’t grow out of hand and inappropriately and become avoidable fear.
To keep fear from getting out of hand, we must constantly work with and interface with it, continue softening into our bodies, breathing deeply, and befriending the inevitability of our mortality. This keeps unhelpful fear at bay. We do not “conquer” our fear of death; we embrace and accept as much as we can and thereby integrate it. Sharing this fear with others helps this way.
The noblest purpose of fear is to protect us from harm. When we label all fear as bad and to be avoided, we avoid the important somatic signals that protect us and foster care. this is but one example of how fear and love are not opposite but intertwined, like Yin and Yang.
So, statements like “I don’t want to live in fear” or “we must choose fear over love” aren’t wise and seem to arise from not actually knowing fear, but rather being afraid of fear. The result is that we are then controlled by a double-dose of fear: our fear of fear manifesting in denial and the fear we never get close to due to our fear of it.
Unfortunately, fear of fear often results in projecting and displacing it onto others, including the planet, via anger, (unconscious) violence, greed, superiority complexes, and generalized othering.
When we are afraid of fear, learning about the importance of fear can help us not be afraid and demonizing of fear. Then we can inch closer to it and whittle it down further by mitigating its excesses, and alas arrive at a very workable and health-promoting embodiment of fear that is integral to our capacity to love and be loved.
Fear is essential to wholeheartedness and survival; let’s try to embrace it. Fear of fear (for the ugly and scary toad it seems to be) is the problem. Get close enough, mindfully enough, to kiss it and see what happens.
A fuller rendering of fear dynamics is here.
