How to Overcome Fear

Fear grows like an insidious virus, first scratching the surface of the polished veneer of your confidence like an innocent itch, then nestling deeper and deeper into your well of courage, until finally, it violently throttles your entire being, restlessly taunting you with nightmares of trainwrecks, snakes, and ghosts.

Or not.

Stopping the spread of fear happens in minute, small increments. Occasionally, you might be able to crack the glass ceiling by hurdling yourself upwards through adversity in one Herculean leap of faith – but more commonly, you’ll take it one step at a time. The changes will be small, barely noticeable, but will create long-lasting results.

The trick to stopping the spread of fear is to recognize the subtle masks that fear wears. Fear in our daily lives does not usually manifest itself as hooded terrorists with machine guns, rapists wielding machetes, or killer viruses that annihilate entire cities in a day. Fear makes its stealthy appearance through the back door with comments disguised as cynicism, sarcasm, and anger.
Perhaps you’ve been told on your birthday that “you’re only a few years from being over the hill.” Or the day after you were married, you were warned that “the honeymoon is now over.” Maybe you have kids now and recall your friends predicting the demise of your romantic life. The tone of cynicism and sarcasm is thick and pervading, and you probably waived off their nauseous comments with a polite smile or even a forced laugh.

Don’t let their heedless jeers sink in though. The moment you are bombarded with petty cynicism and sarcasm, you have a choice: accept the profanity or reject it. Societal standards make it permissable to be victims of thoughtless jokes without realizing that the actual force behind this low-level commentary is fear. It could be fear about growing old, losing physical capabilities, or never being able to experience again the glory days of youth. It could be fear about not being able to sustain a long term relationship, ending in divorce, or defiling your commitment with your wanderlust ways of bachelorhood. Regardless of what the fear is about, recognize that others may attempt to project their unspoken shadows unto you, subtlely taking you down with their sinking ship. Misery likes company.

You can stop fear when you are able to recognize the mask. Cynicism and sarcasm almost always reflect a deeper, hidden anxiety that spews out in random, uncontrolled bursts, like a scalding geyser blowing out  of a narrow fissure. The dramatic eruptions on the surface distract us from the mounting friction below.

Your course of action is non-action. To not react, respond, or partake in the game of cynicism and saracasm is to effectively reject it and reinforce your ability to safeguard your beliefs, your intentions, and your dreams. You become stronger, more confident, and courageous. These qualities do not call forth massive effort, but require you to develop greater awareness so that you can be non-reactive. Where do you encounter cynicism and sarcasm? Perhaps your workplace has a self-appointed comedian whose mission is to slay his colleagues with senseless verbal jabs. The media is also inundated with false alarms, phony pundits, and bogus claims. Look around you with your radar set for cynicism and sarcasm, and you’ll see that this seemingly benign and normal behavior is everywhere.

Anger is a step up in intensity from sarcasm and cynicism but still functions most of the time to hide a deeper fear. This is not the kind of anger that spontaneously erupts in self-preservation – a car swerving toward you, a threatening gesture made against your children, or a stalking figure following you in dark, deserted alley. This is the brewing, simmering kind, the type of anger that maliciously oozes out to incinerate happiness, optimism, and well-being.

Anger begets anger, and the angered becomes the perpetrator. The vengeful cycle is closed and the flames of battle spark while both parties completely miss the point. What is the point? Neither one has realized that the fuel for their anger is fear.

When you recognize that your anger, or another’s anger draws its strength from fear, you diminish the intensity of your rage. Sometimes your anger even  completely disappears. The key to transforming anger is understanding the underlying source of its fiery façade. Beneath the tantrum lies a smaller, frightened, and humbled inner kid, one who might have been picked last in gym class to be on the team, or saw the agonizing collapse of her parents’ marriage. Maybe it was the time she was told that she would amount to nothing, or her first kiss that ended in stony rejection.
Anger is a mask that fear wears. The next time you are faced with a belligerent imbecile, indignant and lewd, stop to wonder what he might be afraid of, not what he’s angry about. Wonder if he was hurt in some way, if his partner left him, if he just lost his job. Wonder if he had alcoholic parents, if he was abused as a child, if he grew up in a tough neighborhood. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong in your hunches; what matters is that you wonder. The more you wonder, the more you develop compassion. The more you embody compassion, the easier it is to accept fear. As you begin to accept fear, it transmutes all by itself and becomes courage. The transmutation of fear begins with understanding, and finishes with courage.

When you are able to do this with someone else, try it on yourself. While it is easy to point fingers, the conclusive test is whether or not you can see your own fear through your anger.
So stopping the spread of fear is not really about stopping anything. It’s about developing awareness of the different masks that fear wears, and then choosing non-action or compassion. Either way both paths are more efficient, use less energy, and transmute fear.

2 Ways to Face the Fear of Dying

A little more than 2 years ago, I had a brush with death. As an acrobat, you get accustomed to the idea of danger – breaking your arm, tearing a ligament, knocking a tooth out – but you never get used to the idea of dying. This brush was by far the closest I ever got to being seriously injured or dead.

I’m not trying to be dramatic or sensational. I am emphasizing the fact that we all think about death probably more than we like to admit. Perhaps on the car ride home, going rock climbing, crossing the street, as we grow older, as we fight illness.

There’s an awful lot of false bravado in our culture that also limits our expression on death. The “brave ones” seem fearless and beyond the silly concerns of mortal life. We are bombarded with images of heroics in media and entertainment that show shirtless men racing into walls of fire and enemy bullets. There is the image – and then there is reality.

Two years ago, I felt nothing less than sheer terror as I realized I was falling to my potential death. It was as pure as fear could get. It also stuck with me until recently. What happened and how did I get over it?

I was performing in a very large, mechanically technical show. One of the pieces of equipment was a giant 90 ton moving stage that tilted, rotated, lifted, expanded, spun, and generally made for a heart-stopping, audience-thrilling acrobatic number. I was part of that act.

As we performed complex choreography on this massive apparatus, the artists would, on cue, dive off the stage into giant airbags below, disappearing from the audience’s view. It was breathtaking.

On this fateful day, I missed a handhold, and slid off the stage unexpected, falling over 20 feet into a crack between the airbags. My fall was absorbed partially by a net but my head squarely hit the concrete.

I didn’t hear a cracking noise so much as I felt a powerful, resounding thump echo through my skull. It’s the kind of moment that makes you realize that everything in your life will change forever.

I didn’t lose consciousness. Instead the moment of total helplessness and fear was replaced by a raging anger. What happened? Why hadn’t the airbags function as they were supposed to? Why am I being strapped to a body board and carried off?

In the months of recovery that followed, I remained resolutely angry. There were the politics of the accident to deal with, the rehabilitation, the drop in income, the stigma of being the injured one. All of these issues were plenty to keep me focused on being angry and forgetting the true source of unease underneath.

I’ve come to discover that beneath all anger lies a deeper fear. My fear happened to now be free falling from any height into a mat or airbag.

You might say that it is a reasonable fear to have – absolutely. If I never jumped off another ledge in my life, the world would not stop. The difference was that MY world was slowly stopping, as I unconsciously succumbed to the fear of heights. Like an insidious virus, it planted a seed of doubt within and began to grow over the months like a black cancer. Fear begets fear and I faintly became aware that my confidence as an acrobat – and as a person – was ebbing.

Truthfully I didn’t have a fear of heights or of falling. I had a fear of hitting the ground, which is to say I had a fear of hitting the ground AND dying. Which is to say, I now had a fear of dying.

Here is the first way to face the fear of dying: feel the fear. Fear of dying is such an intense emotion that it is quickly replaced by another state – rage, depression, denial, false joy. Learn to hone into your fear gently, like a bird gliding in circles, first sailing in wide arcs, then turning your awareness inward, ever tighter and more focused.

Which is exactly what happened to me. Many months after the accident, I was treated by my good friend Karen, an osteopath. Through her subtle cranial manipulations, I re-entered a state of deep relaxation that allowed me to “get in touch” with the hellish last 10-feet before I hit the concrete. I finally had a good cry.

You probably don’t need to have your skull re-adjusted to know fear. Just sit with it and ask yourself in what ways do you bypass this emotion? Is it working late, being angry, zoning out on TV? When you finally experience uninterrupted fear, you don’t do or say anything. It’s simply so awe-some that you sit in reverence of its potency. That’s a good place to be in.

Once you feel it, completely and utterly, then you can move on to step two, reclaiming your power. Usually that means doing something that scares the poop out of you.

Have you ever had an “oh shit” moment? This is the time to have it. Your barometer for doing something that will adequately reclaim your power is measured by how many times you feel like doing it and balking.

If you do it without any hesitation and get it on the first try, it probably wasn’t deep enough. Keep digging.

If, on the other hand, you have to work up your courage to even think about attempting it, you probably found it.

Considering I had a fear of falling, hitting the ground, splitting my brain open AND dying, suddenly anything to do with heights pushed my inner panic button like no tomorrow.

So when my friend and colleague Ted encouraged me to come up with a big trick to close the Kid’s Faculty Show at circus camp this July, I knew I had been handed an opportunity.

That opportunity was to create the biggest “oh shit” moment I could and reclaim my power.

For the grand finale, I committed myself to doing a back tuck off a 15-foot high wall. It’s not so high that it’s ludicrous. But it’s not so low that I couldn’t get hurt. It was definitely my moment to cringe – there was a forceful wave of doubt that nearly caused me to back out of that flip ten times that day.

I didn’t, and with the encouragement of Ted and my wife Jaime, I did my flip, which is to say, I DIDN’T hit the ground, split my brain open, and of course, die. Which is to say, I faced my fear, reclaimed my power, and stopped dead (pun intended) in its tracks the cancerous fear that had begun to spread.

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I would love to hear from you. I always respond to every email I receive personally, so this is what I want to learn from you:

How do YOU deal with the fear of dying?

SuperCircusGuy’s 15-Foot Back Flip

This is a short video of a improvised kid’s show that we put on this summer at the Van Lodostov Circus Camp in Vermont. It’s significant because it’s the first time I did a back flip out of safety lines from this height after a serious concussion I had two years ago. That was “my impossible”.

Also, the striped tights were not my idea…

Overcoming Your Fears

I love writing and talking about fear because it’s an emotion I’ve had a chance to face so many times – in acrobatics and in daily life too. I think the way you deal with fear transcends the content, the situation, the person. That’s because I believe that fear is a catalyst for change – and anyone or anything can be a catalyst.

If you are stuck in the rut of fear, know that you’re probably on your way out. Why is that, if you feel stuck? If you can think of a situation that makes you scared AND you know you’re stuck, it means that you have already risen a level of consciousness. In other words, you are not only afraid and stuck but unaware that you are stuck. Make sense?

The transformation of fear is the process of increasing awareness and then being able to execute conscious choice. Responding (able to respond) versus reacting (doing whatever the hell first comes to mind) is the difference, and the goal. I don’t believe in such a thing as “no fear” – unless you’re dead. If you have a pulse, then at some point in your life, you’ll be scared.

I’ve seen plenty of professional acrobats walk away from a jump, turn down a good chance to flip, and save the big move for another day. That includes me. You would think if there was one fearless group of people in this world, it would be an acrobat or a Navy Seal. I don’t have any Navy Seal friends, but all my acrobat friends have had their moments. That leads me to believe that no one is fearless (without fear completely).

What does this mean for you? It means you can jettison the emotional obligation of living up to a fictitious idol and breathe a sigh of relief as you acknowledge all your fears as normal, natural, and, get this, healthy. Why healthy of all things? Because fear is a great protector, a built in response to protect you from something that you perceive is dangerous.

Maybe you’re scared of a spider. You might say, I know spiders are harmless, so what is my fear protecting me from? I didn’t say that fears were rational or logical, but the mechanism is sound – protection. Rejoice in that! Be grateful that an emotion in you is there to serve you despite how silly it might be.

There’s more to say, but in the next post, I’ll reveal the fears I’ve had, the fears I have, and what I did or am doing about them

In Health and Love,

Alvin.