Fearlessness: No Longer Running From Yourself

Fear and Discomfort, Fearlessness and Awareness

Written By: Balraj Persaud

This article approaches fear not as a passive affliction that happens to us, but as an active, defensive posture we instinctively adopt to protect our own vulnerability. It explores how cultivating awareness shifts our relationship to fear—moving us away from the exhausting pursuit of invulnerability and toward a conscious recognition of our own agency. Ultimately, it reveals that true fearlessness is not the mastery or elimination of fear, but the space that emerges when we finally stop running from our own discomfort.

The Passive (and Active) Experiencing of Fear

Before there is even a choice to be made, fear has usually already decided something: what the situation is, what’s at stake, what it would even mean to survive it well. Fear doesn’t just react to a threat; it is what allows some things to show up and others to not—it is how something comes to appear as a threat in the first place. Part of what fear discloses is a future that hasn’t happened yet that appears as one that has already been (unfavourably) decided.

Long before any single thing/person/situation presents itself as frightening, we are already attuned to the world in a particular way—attuned by our discomfort and by what we’ve already decided, without deciding, can/must never happen again—i.e., what could never be survived, tolerated, etc.. It is this attunement that determines what stands out as risky/costly/to-be-avoided—whereas other features of the same experience simply recede into the background unnoticed, never really registering at all. This attunement is what allows this situation—as this situation—to show up at all, a situation with fear already build into how it appears. There is no neutral instant in which something first arrives as plain, uncoloured information, to which we add fear. The (so-called) “colouring” and the arriving are the same event; the event shows up as coloured, as already infused with fear. This, of course, doesn’t mean that without our fear, the event wouldn’t happen or that “we would experience nothing”. It means the event wouldn’t show up as a threat. The raw event would still occur, but wouldn’t arrive as a crisis; the underlying attunement is what gathers those details and organizes them into a danger.

This is why fear can feel sudden even though it was never actually completely absent. When fear “arrives”, so to speak, what changes is not that a hitherto neutral world suddenly acquired a threat where there was non present; rather, our way of finding things threatening, which was already standing ready, found an occasion. Fear doesn’t wait for permission from a triggering event to exist; the triggering event is simply where an already-primed sensitivity finally has something to land on.

So when we speak of fear “disclosing” a threat, we don’t mean that fear correctly identifies a danger that was sitting there all along, waiting to be seen. We mean something closer to the opposite: fear is partly what manufactures the very shape of the danger, deciding in advance what would count as bad, what would count as failure, what would count as unbearable—so that by the time we feel afraid, the terms of the situation have already been set, and set by something that arrived before we had any say in the matter.

This means that fear is not just an emotion we experience; it is, rather, an active organizer of our reality. It dictates what shows up and what doesn’t. And crucially, this organizing power extends to how we view fear itself. When we decide that our fear is a problem that must be “solved”, “overcome”, or “mastered”, fear has already done its work. The very framing of fear as an obstacle standing between us and our ideal (invulnerable) self is simply fear operating at a meta-level; the desire to secure ourselves against fear (once and for all) is still the pursuit of invulnerability. When we demand a final solution to our discomfort, the terms of that demand were set by fear itself.

We are, in a sense, inherently insecure—our existence is subject to forces (events, other people, history, embodiment, etc.) that we do not (and could never) fully control. Situations involving risk foreground our vulnerability in different ways, and though we imagine threatening situations as those in which we lose our agency and are overpowered by circumstance and reduced to passive/instinctive reflex, this is the primary arena where we are forced to experience our own agency, where we can no longer rely solely on preexisting norms and/or for the risky situation to simply resolve itself.

Whether we like it or not, we are actively involved—we are bringing something of our self/history to a situation—even if our reaction is not one we want to own. Because the situation demands that we navigate it, we must take up some posture toward it; we cannot simply opt out. When the naked exposure of our insecurity feels like too much to bear, fear is the specific way we take up our agency. In other words, our fear is an active structuring of reality, not (or not just) a passive affliction. We do not fall back into passivity—rather, we actively, albeit instinctively, adopt a fearful, defensive, or aggressive stance to manage the risk. In other words, fear isn’t the absence or loss of agency; it is, rather, the habituated shape our agency takes when it attempts to protect itself from its own vulnerability. In instances of psychological fear, when you face a risk and your vulnerability is suddenly exposed, you are compelled to do something about it, so you brace yourself, or you withdraw, or you lash out, or you desperately try to control the situation, etc. The active bracing/withdrawing/controlling is not a reaction to fear; it is the very form that our “fear” takes. We do not first feel a private emotion called “fear” and then, as a second and separate event, decide to brace ourselves against the world. The feeling and the bracing arrive together.

Of course, none of this means that we invented the fear (or meaningfulness) of the event out of thin air, but rather reveals that we are the kind of thing that is (and can be) vulnerable to fear/meaning, just as a steep cliff is not objectively a falling hazard to a bird. The cliff solicits/elicits fear/flinching in a human because it is the kind of thing whose safety is vulnerable to falling. Similarly, an event (say, something that could call our reputation into question) solicits/elicits fear in the person for whom reputation is important and whose standing is not fully under one’s control—striking a nerve, so to speak, that is already exposed.

Cultivating awareness doesn’t mean realizing we “chose” our fear (or to fear); rather, it means recognizing fear as an active posture, which is precisely what creates the space for a conscious choice to finally emerge. Understanding this changes what it means to be fearless: it means recognizing that if fear is simply one way we enact our agency, we can cultivate the awareness to recognize (and no longer deny) our agency. It means waking up to the fact that (and how) we were already deciding—seeing how our patterns, instincts, preferences, interpretations, and assumptions shaped our choices before we even realized it.

ocean wave fearlessness self-awareness.jpg

Fearlessness begins the moment we stop running from our unwanted thoughts and uncomfortable emotions. Fearlessness begins the moment we stop running from ourselves. (And you don’t need fearlessness in order to stop running—you need awareness, including... awareness of our pre-occupation with the unbearable.)

Becoming Fearless: the Cultivation of Awareness

Fearlessness begins the moment we stop running from our unwanted thoughts and uncomfortable emotions. Fearlessness begins the moment we stop running from ourselves. (And you don’t need fearlessness in order to stop running—you need awareness, including—perhaps especially—awareness of our pre-occupation with the unbearable.)

There are areas of our lives and situations where fear is welcome and even necessary—including our basic survival instincts—and in some instances unavoidable; for those facing abuse, life-threatening danger, displacement, extreme poverty, systemic neglect, fear isn’t just psychological but is a necessary response to real harm and to conditions that demand change. Similarly, taking up our agency does not mean we must always (mindlessly or mindfully) confront what scares us; sometimes, a conscious assessment of risk leads to the entirely appropriate choice to avoid or walk away from a situation—even those in which we may later change our response. But when fearlessness is sought as a path to personal progress or growth—whether material, mental-emotional, spiritual—it is undermined by our instinctive (and unexamined, conditioned) avoidance of discomfort.

When our primary goal is to eliminate discomfort (as opposed to, say, pursue some meaningful project—even if it means confronting fear), our lives become determined by fear. In this state, we experience two contradictory demands. On the one hand, fear issues a universal imperative to not act—to avoid risk, to stay small enough to avoid risk, to hide—because owning up to our agency threatens to expose us to the very discomfort we are avoiding. On the other hand, fear demands that we constantly act—to serve it, appease it, to manage it—to manage our reputation, fix our flaws, and endlessly labor to secure our invulnerability, to eliminate fear (and the attending gnawing/haunting sense that things aren’t yet “fully settled”) once and for all. We become exhausted by keeping ourselves safe. Fearlessness is the refusal to let the threat of discomfort dictate the terms of our existence.*

Fearlessness isn’t the absence or negation of fear (or an act of bravado or defiance)—it isn’t something to be pursued and possessed. Fearlessness is a result of no longer resisting our discomfort—of no longer turning away from ourselves.

Fearlessness isn’t passivity, nor is it the forced absence of fear. In fact, we are less concerned with the elimination of fear (you are free to eliminate what you can) and more concerned with the mindless pursuit of fearlessness—we are more concerned with awareness; fearlessness is not about elimination or confrontation; it is about seeing beyond the reflex. Cultivating the capacity to become aware of the discomfort of fear (before becoming consumed by it) gives us choice—instead of reacting with instinctual avoidance or impulsive confrontation (even if we ultimately decide that fear is appropriate); it allows us to reclaim the agency that risk was forcing us to experience (and that fear had been managing for us). In other words, this capacity—to remain with our anxieties so that our lives aren’t dictated by the instinct to avoid them or to possess their opposite—gives us choice, a moment to intervene in instinctive recoil (even if we ultimately decide that recoil is appropriate).

We skilfully cultivate the capacity to remain with the discomfort of fear so that our experience is not dictated by the instinctive compulsion to extinguish it—and/or by the instinctive compulsion to acquire its opposite. After all, the stronger our desire for fearlessness, the stronger our awareness of fear—just as a stronger desire for money, fame, or status produces a stronger awareness of lack, obscurity, or powerlessness.

Fearlessness is not blindly replacing instinctive avoidance with instinctive confrontation (as if fearlessness were just action), but is to see beyond the reflex—and perhaps into the habits of self-preservation that shape both the fears that undermine our efforts at progress and the very impulse to seek it.

To be sure, we don’t want to embrace discomfort as a rule; we want to be mindful of not creating new compulsions—including a compulsion to ‘embrace discomfort’—lest we become trapped by them (e.g., mistaking discomfort for progress, instinctively rejecting ease or comfort—even in our relationships, etc.). This can reinforce the same craving-avoidance loops we were hoping to escape (i.e., if our pursuit was reactively based on an assumption that ‘enough’ progress will finally eliminate all personal discomfort).

Cultivating the capacity to remain with discomfort allows us to cultivate awareness and choice. We become aware of how our attention, thoughts, feelings, and actions are automatically preoccupied—most powerfully by discomfort or craving—and this awareness gives us more space to engage with these patterns (such as fear) more skilfully, allowing for greater choice. (What we do with this awareness is ultimately up to us.)

Of course, some fears are necessary—instinctive fear protects us from immediate physical harm. But in most situations concerning fear and personal growth, the stakes are rarely physical danger but are, rather, social and psychological—reputation, judgement, relationships. To the question, “how does one know when to fear or when to be fearless?”—there is no pre-defined formula. Awareness doesn’t look to replace uncertainty with certainty, but rather unconscious reaction with conscious choice. This doesn’t mean that we will know the outcome beforehand, or that we won’t make choices we later regret. Awareness doesn’t prescribe action, or eliminate uncertainty. It doesn’t tell us what is “right” or provide a rule for decision-making. It doesn’t make a decision for us but, again, reveals how we were already deciding.

In the case of fear, awareness allows us to see how it was already shaping our experience—including what strikes us as urgent or risky or necessary, what we see as possible, what outcomes are acceptable, and what we think making the “right” decision even means.

...we are no longer bound by fear in the same way, not because the fear, or its source, is gone, but because it no longer pre-defines our response—we are no longer blindly avoiding or obeying it. This doesn’t mean we reach some neutral state where emotions or circumstances no longer shape us, but rather that we see how they already do, including how the need to manage fear keeps fear alive. And in seeing this, we engage with them more freely, similar to when we become undistracted the moment we notice we’re distracted.

Becoming Fear-less: the Pursuit of Invulnerability

And so fearlessness isn’t a separate quality to be pursued or acquired—it’s simply what remains when we stop avoiding the discomfort of fear. In this space, we are no longer bound by fear in the same way, not because the fear, or its source, is gone, but because it no longer pre-defines our response—we are no longer blindly avoiding or obeying it. This doesn’t mean we reach some neutral state where emotions or circumstances no longer shape us, but rather that we see how they already do, including how the need to manage fear keeps fear alive. And in seeing this, we engage with them more freely, similar to when we become undistracted the moment we notice we’re distracted.

Fearlessness, in the end, is not a new relationship to fear that finally masters fear. It is, rather what remains once we’ve stopped running from ourselves—including running from the version of ourselves that hasn’t yet mastered fear.

And, of course, the moment we try to fix (once and for all) our relationship to fear—to finally master it, to arrive at the “correct” understanding/stance of it (which allows us to master it), etc.—we have ceased simply noticing fear. Instead, we begin to manage our performing not being afraid, which is quite possibly another incarnation of fear. We are still actively enacting our agency, but we are doing so in a way that attempts to conceal this very fact from ourselves. The more desperately we want to be (and/or seem) fearless, the more things remind us of our fear—the more we are attuned to what threatens us (and/or to what might make us appear to be fearful). In other words, the discomfort of fear gets replaced by the more persistent discomfort of not yet being someone who has mastered it. In yet other words, becoming known—privately or publicly—for being fearless can be fear’s most sophisticated disguise, precisely because it doesn’t look like fear anymore; rather, it looks like the solution to fear.

Notes & Further Reading

*For more on these contradictions in our experiences related to fear, see John Russon’s Adult Life: Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness (2020, SUNY, see p.44) for his account of risk and agency, and his Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (2004, IUP, see pp.82-3) for his account of the contradictory demands inherent in the experience of fear.

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