I had a mole that my doctor said needed removal, only I had to wait a few weeks before I could get back in for an appointment.  During that time, I panicked and contemplated, panicked and contemplated, panicked and contemplated. I’ll spare you guys the full panic details (do I have skin cancer? Am I dying? Again? I was just dying of something else last week…) and share a bit of the contemplations because they ended-up being the thoughts that really sunk a nail in the coffin of my constant, daily,  fear of death and disease.

I was in a yoga class and came to a particularly challenging upside down pose. I had practiced for a while, worked-up to it, but I was afraid. My teacher came over and said, “don’t be afraid, just breath”. It worked, I got up in the pose and focused on breathing instead of fear. After class I was thinking, that hippy dippy advice had some value; I always believed fear was a fixed part of the experiences I was afraid of. That it was built into the situation (instead of my perception of it). But when I breathed and wasn’t afraid it showed me fear is not fixed it can come and go, it is not built into the situations where I am afraid.

My life was a series of fearful moments. I jumped from one situation to the next worrying that something was killing me. If I was lucky I got a few weeks off before the next bout of imaginary cancer, ebola, killer bee invasions, etc. This was a horrible way to live, but I did it anyway. I thought it was normal. I thought I had no choice. But if the fear was not fixed, not built-in to the situations, a few conclusions followed:

1. Just because I will die, it does not mean I need to constantly worry about it. In any situation I may die, I may not, my death in fact will occur whether I worry about it or not. If situations don’t have fear built in, I don’t have to fear any given situation. Moreover, since my fear won’t necessarily impact the outcome (death or no death), I am suffering for free with all this paranoia.
2. Impermanence is not necessarily negative — it is not the enemy to be fought. I fear change, decay, like its something unnatural. Like its after me. Like there is something real and fixed in my body, something I can be attached to and that I can protect and preserve from that enemy impermanence. But really, is there some fixed, unchanging Alana I can really keep safe and preserve? If Alana was so unchanging how could I be afraid of a yoga pose one minute and then not afraid the next. That’s change right? And, it was change for the better in this case.
3. I was choosing fear. On some level, I believed that fear was practical, that it functioned to serve me and protect me.  That it was my weapon against that enemy impermanence. But if fear really worked, staved-off the horrible outcomes I worried about, then why did bad things sometimes happen when I was afraid of them? Why when I worried I was coming down with a cold did I sometimes get a cold? Why when I worried about failing a test did I sometimes fail the test? Not such a great weapon after all huh?

Because this was such a biggie contemplation, I’ll write-out my major take away concepts from my notebook. i.e. the big picture wrong views that I identified during this contemplation:

Wrong View 1: Change, impermanence is bad/  it has  a specific value —  negative. change, particularly in regards to me is bad, that there is a solid, real Alana. That changes to that Alana, particularly bodily changes, are problematic in that they erode that Alana self.

Correct View 1: Change is a universal truth. I, like all other things in this world am subject to it. It is not negative or positive, but I, especially when the change involves me or my body, view it as negative. In reality though, even in my body, changes I view as positive take place: I heal from illness, bad haircuts grow out and I don’t still walk like a 2 year old. Moreover, there is no unchanging Alana self or I would still look like an infant, act like an infant. Change is inevitable whether I view it as positive or negative.

Wrong View 2: That emotions can be ingrained into an experience, that all experiences of a similar type always trigger the same emotional response.

Correct View 2: Just like with the yoga pose, it is my perception that interprets a situation as scary/not scary –if the pose were scary by its own nature, I would have never been able to do it without fear. Fear would have always remained part of the pose.More evidence is the dentist, I used to believe it was scary and then was OK with it. When I went away to college at first I was scared, then excited. As a kid I was afraid of the dark and now I find it relaxing. I have changed, my sense has changed. When  something goes from scary to not scary or not scary to scary, it is my perception that causes the shift.

Wrong View 3: That anything I do or say can avert nature, the laws of karma and impermanence. That I can battle impermanence and win,  that any given situation, especially the scary ones, are in my control.

Correct View 3: My control is limited, not ultimate. Just like with the airplane, I can take steps I believe help keep me safe, but in the end, if my plane is going to crash my fear, my prayers, my superstitions, my standing over the pilot’s shoulder and seeing it happen are not going to save me. Using fear to motivate some action that will give me absolute control is crazy because, in the end, nothing gives me absolute control. I get all the negatives of fear and no secret weapon of immortality.

Plus, look at the costs of living this way, how much I worried, how often my controlling had unwanted side effects (peeing myself), how I stressed out the people around me that I love and care about, how I close-down and think only about myself when I’m afraid.
The biopsy results came back negative. No skin cancer. After the Dr. called to tell me,  I started collecting evidence in my head, thinking about my life and experiences.  That’s when I saw it —the TRUTH — There is absolutely no necessary relationship between the things/ experiences that I fear and their actual outcome.  I was afraid of the mole, but it was not skin cancer. I was afraid of stomach cancer, but it was hemorrhoids and IBS, I was afraid on each flight my plane would drop from the sky, hasn’t happened yet. Clearly, just because I fear something it doesn’t mean it comes true. Then I considered all the stuff I was never afraid off, my new cell phone breaking, pain after my dentist appointments, getting run down by a Rhino in Kenya (long story), getting food poisoning in Italy when I had managed Mexico, China and 1000 other places problem free. Obviously, not worrying about something did not mean that something bad wouldn’t happen. Sure, sometime I worry about something bad and sure enough, sh** happens. And surely there are all sorts of perils lurking that I don’t worry about and never result in something bad (we have all watched that horror movie..the killer is behind the shrubs, the well dressed lady walking by, and the killer never jumps out, and the lady walks away).

That then is the full story — my worry and certain outcomes are really only linked in my head. In reality, there is no causal relationship between my fear and bad things happening. I was, finally, free in one small but tremendously significant way, crazy insomnia Alana is dead.