Confronting fear

In your hosts other life his occupation requires that he frequently engage in physical confrontation.

Contrary to popular myth, doing this often does not go very far in reducing the fear associated with physical confrontation. That is to say, every time I must draw the line, I experience the same amount of fear that I faced the first time some 3 decades ago.

I know now that fear is valuable in that it keeps you paying attention when you're about to get hurt.

There are some related differences, though.

One difference is that I know from long experience that if it comes down to it I will stand there and go for it.

I remember the first time I was in the situation and didn't really have the option of running away because I was being paid to be there and if I ran away the income would be discontinued.

I was quaking in my proverbial boots and I was concerned that this might be because I was ultimately a coward or worse.

I stood there and went for it, and came out of it OK.

But that didn't seem to stop the quaking on subsequent occasions.

Sometime later it came to my attention that on the occasions that I was required to run to the scene of confrontation, I didn't experience the quaking, and later still I discovered that if my body was still within the window of elevated readiness that follows physical exertion I wouldn't quake.

Eventually it dawned on me that the fearful quaking wasn't directly a result of the fear but was instead a result of the adrenalin dump that accompanies fear, and if your body is ready for the adrenalin it gets used efficiently (wargasm), but if it isn't it results in random uncontrolable nerve discharges (quaking.)

So I found that two steps could be taken to control this aspect of the fear. Step 1 is to bring my body to adrenalin readiness prior to going to work. Any exercise will do this, but morning tai chi sessions seem to be particularly efficacious, and step two, whenever possible I try to reactivate the readiness by running to the action.

Another difference is that I'm also a lot less squeamish about trying to avoid going beyond threat-level confrontation to physical confrontation when I can even if the unenlightened may chalk it up to fear, not because of any fear aspect so much as because I know how tenuous victory can be and even winning is no guarantee that you will not be walking around in pain for a good long time, if not for the rest of your life.

Also, no matter how justified you are in the confrontation, after the wargasm disipates you inevitably think about the other person(s) involved and ask youself if you couldn't have done more to head the situation off.

Also, having long sense lost any desire to harm, I find that my selection of non-harmful techniques are inherently safer to operate with than techniques used to acheive unambiguous victories through damage to the other parties confrontation suite.

But that isn't the only circumstance that fear arrises in.

For the last couple of weeks I've had to stand up in front of strangers and expound on subjects that I'm familiar with but have no desire to discuss under those circumstances.

Having spoken publicly on a few previous occasions I knew that, as with confrontation, I would stand there and go for it, but that didn't mean that I wouldn't experience the fear associated with public speaking.

I did try to pay attention to the fear aspects while they were happening so that I could share my findings with my guests here at the Heaven Path Diner.

One unforseen, or otherwise purposefully forgotten, effect of the fear on the first engagement was that my voice sounded scared when I started talking. That is to say it was rather quavery. No one seemed to notice, so either it wasn't too bad, or the strangers I was talking to didn't recognize what the quality meant, or my audience was very enlightened and concealed their recognition to allow me to save face (and if this is the case, thank you one and all). Fortunately as soon as I found my stride the problem went away.

On the second occasion I was able to take two effective steps. Step 1 was to begin exercising my vocal cords through single pitch humming for about 10 minutes before I started talking (to prepare them for the adrenalin if nothing else), and second, when I started talking I advised everyone that I been on the phone most of the morning so my voice was already about gone. Turns out the second step wasn't necessary because my earlier problem was apparently based on not having prepared myself to talk at the volume that is required for public (adrenalized) speaking, so the adrenalin effect made my voice quavery.

It is useful to confront your fears. They should be your friends, and by confronting them, and adjusting your behavior to minimally accommodate and harmonize with their foibles, you can make them so.