About Fear and Prayer

What if the major reason we come into life - into the body - is to experience fear, to learn about it? There seems to be some agreement in every spiritual system that, wherever it is that we came from before we came here, and wherever we go after here, fear doesn’t exist. It is only here. Love and wonder exist here too, but we say that love and wonder exist in the before and after realms as well.

Life in the body offers us unending varieties of fear.  So, it seems clear that we are offered this opportunity to learn to overcome it. Not overcome, meaning we will be totally free of fear, because we won’t be. But overcome its ownership of our life, of our decision-making. I see all spiritual paths as united in at least one thing: fear wants to own us, and it does so by remaining hidden in the unconscious, making decisions for us before we are even aware of what it is doing.

Biology tells us fear is our teacher of survival, our antidote to naiveté that will get us killed. In nature, when you become fearful, you enter a tight focus – you stop, fall silent, stare at that shadowy movement or that noise lurking about in the underbrush. Or you forget everything else for a moment – your history, your opinions your dreams - and focus on sending all of your energy into your legs to run, or into your arms to fight.

If we step into fear over money or love, our focus likewise tightens down; and we perseverate all day on that person or that number.  

In culture, fear is used to ensure obedience. Obedience thrives on urging you into that same tight perspective and focused awareness. When teachers, governments, priests, lovers, parents, or advertisers use fear as a motivator, it always involves shrinking your awareness down into some kind of tunnel vision, accompanied by some level of fight/flight/freeze energy.

A searing and tragic example of this in religion is the biblical phrase, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10) Countless people have been shrunken by the idea that fear of the creator – the most expansive thing we can imagine – is the entrance to wisdom. This is absolutely true, if your goal is to live a terribly small life of obedience to people who do not want you to live fully.

The western world has several millennia of the Fear of the Lord imprinted in our energy field. When and when I look out at the battle between the two sides who call each other crazy, I see a struggle between those who want everyone to fear the Creator and people who decline to.

It turns out that the $34,000 I spent on that seminary degree does have some benefit: A simple look at the original Hebrew text in Proverbs 9:10 opens the awareness of how so many people have been so sadly duped. I’ll spare you the levels of linguistic investigation and get right to a more accurate translation of that phrase from Proverbs:

“The energy that flows from the belly of the creator is the beginning of intimate relationship with life and the ability to discern what is good for you and what isn’t.” (Reference).

The Celtic shamans might put it like this:

The beginning of wisdom:

The eye that sees what is.

The heart that feels what is.

And the boldness that dares to follow them.

As we are taught to shrink the ancient texts through translation, we have also been taught to pray from inside that same shrunkenness.

We are afraid of something, and we cry out for some great power to take away the sensation of fear so that we don’t have to feel it anymore. We plead with the great power to kill the enemy, to withdraw its punishment (I’ll be good from now on, I promise), or to make us rich (money makes all problems go away.) We pray to the great power to make these uncomfortable feelings go away by delivering magic to us. That is prayer-making from a small and powerless place inside us – a place in which, we are taught, good and devout people live. When people think prayer is stupid, fantasy, childish, this is what they are thinking about. They reject all prayer because they been taught only about praying from shrunkenness.

Here is a secret: a teacher interested in your fullness as a human being will not teach you to pray like that. A tyrant will promise to deliver on all of those kinds of prayers (but will rarely or never actually deliver).

When we envision Spirit as a judging king or father (or a judging Mother Earth, for that matter) we are committing ourselves to making small prayers. Shamanism teaches us to, first of all, open our shrunkeness, to step out of it, and step into a vast universe of helping powers.

One of my teachers is fond of saying that Spirit answers every single prayer we make. A second secret, which shamanism teaches: If you pray to have a fear magically removed rather than pray to learn from the fear, you are actually making an unconscious prayer for Spirt to deliver more fear to you. That is a difficult idea, but I have come to see it as true.  

This is how shamanism teaches you to work with fear through prayer:

Begin by asking Spirit to make you open, receptive and trusting. Remember that you are not essentially made of fear, but of wonder and curiosity. That’s why you came here – to explore this strange thing called fear. (A digression: a few years ago, in one of my morning astral travels, I went to a place where everyone could fly, but most of them chose to walk. A group of people called me over to talk to them. They  sheepishly, with great care, asked me: "Is it true that you come from a place where people actually fear death?” I said yes, and they all burst into gasps of sheer wonder.)

So, begin by remembering that you are made of Spirit, and one definition of Spirit is “boundless wonder and unending possibility.”

Ask “the flowing energy from the belly of the universe” to enter into you, in order to expand you out of any shrunkenness, so that you can learn what that current fear has to teach you – in other words to open wisdom (the intimacy with the life force that gives you the ability to discern what is really happening, and what is good for you and what isn’t). As Jesus might say, Spirit doesn’t give you a fish; it teaches you to fish.

Here is a simple prayer to try when are feeling powerless and afraid. (By the way, feeling an ambient sadness is often – not always, but can be - a kind of mis-translation of the feeling of fear.)

“Spirit, I know you will deliver the power to help me sink into this fear with strength and clarity, and learn from it. Deliver that power to me right now.” Imagine what “the flowing energy from the belly of the universe” looks like as it flows into you. Open, and bring it in. Let it shimmer throughout your body. Because you need this support (and you always, always have it) in order to do your best work with fear.

After filling yourself with universe-belly-energy, sink into the current fear, and aggressively ask yourself what is the more daunting fear under the lid of this current fear I’m feeling?  You may find yourself sinking down layer after layer, always protected and supported by the universe-belly-energy.

In shamanism, the way out of fear is not to plead for the fear to be whisked away by delivering something nice, but to ask the power of the universe to support you as you learn what that fear wants to teach you about life. This kind of work is not easy. 

Here is a good little prayer you can make in the morning to support this process:

Spirit, I am ready to work with you

to dissolve my fears ownership over my life.

I am ready to grow my power.

Come, Spirit, and work with me right now.

Pour your shimmering into me.

Help me see you shimmering in every cell.

Help me step into the next level of 

love, truth and energy. 

Thank you, Spirit.