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Medical Intuitive Looks at Cancer – Part II: Healing Fear

Healing fear that has been locked away for a long time is a process involving much of the body’s energy.

The root of fear is a perceived loss of self. It is the imagined loss of connection to our basic sense of "I am." You can’t solve fear by accumulating money. There is no strategy to absolutely protect you from fear except relationship with fear itself. You can evaluate the cause of the fear, and the fear will lessen, however you can’t ultimately defeat fear without having a relationship to something much larger. If you have a relationship to fear, it is because at a deeper, usually pre-conscious level you sense the wholeness of the universe or have faith in something—God—more than the fear that you feel.

You may not consciously know you have this faith, yet the encounter with fear helps bring you to faith. When I learned to open to fear in the way I described, it taught me that fear is energy in a particular configuration, and this configuration grows out of who I subconsciously imagine myself to be. Healing takes place when awareness turns inward toward the central place in your body and being where you feel that fear and meet it, instead of running away trying to avoid it or change the cause of it.

Entering into relationship with fear gradually challenges the sense of who you believe yourself to be. For a devoted mother, an illness that weakens her ability to mother can cause crippling fear and guilt. To relate to fear is to be challenged at every level of personal identity until we can let go to something more fundamental- a profound self-realization. It’s like God revealing Himself to Moses through the burning bush. When Moses asked, "How will I say who you are?" The bush responded, "Tell them that I Am.” "I Am" is the core—that’s who we really are.

Most people who think they aren’t afraid, it’s because they live inside narrow boundaries. Those boundaries are threatened by the diagnosis of cancer or any other sudden illness which changes everything you imagined your life would be about.

Rilke said,” What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us." Understandably, fear is a difficult energy to love.

Cultivating wisdom in working with fear requires gentle perseverance and being awakened to what is. Through this practice of moment to moment attention, we begin to understand fear on deeper levels than the personal. A helpful investigative tool is "mental noting". Making a soft mental note when experiencing fear can increase our ability to recognize and acknowledge the experience of fear. This is a big step to take because so much of our experience of fear goes unacknowledged. It operates just below the conscious level, yet affects us in profound ways. Anxiety and worry are common forms of fear that often do not get recognized, yet they condition so much of our approach to life.

Mental noting is not meant to create distance from the experience of fear, but rather to bring us more into the present, while helping us to recognize fear as a conditioned process that is not part of our core being. Seeing the impermanence of fear as it arises and passes away, frees us gradually from the constrictive hold of identifying with it.

With this gradual freedom from the bonds of fear, our body’s energies are expanded, opened, and cleared for a new flowing of the energy that is healing.

© 2005 Christopher Stewart

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