CHAPTER 1

Looking for Inner Safety

I’ll never forget one of the scariest experiences I had in the military. I was sixty feet below the surface of the Caribbean Sea, just off the coast of Antigua. I was with a dive team participating in a NATO exercise when we were given orders to do a grid search for a downed military aircraft that had crashed into the sea. We had been searching for about an hour when my air supply began running low. I turned on my reserve air and began to follow my air bubbles up.

But then I heard a most unwelcome sound: a whoosh of air escaping. The incoming air hose had detached from its cradle in my mouthpiece. Instead of air I got a mouthful of saltwater. “Uh-oh!” I thought, “ this is not good.” I did have a very serious problem. I was down far too deep, and carrying too much weight in equipment, to hold my breath for the time I would need to get to the surface.

In that moment of fear, the inner resources of my years of military and martial arts training kicked in. My mind came into a calm focus. My right arm brought the undulating air hose under control as I grabbed the end that had broken away. I was able to guide air from the hose so that it was flowing over my lips. By breathing in gently, my lungs filled with air instead of seawater. And then, with no time to spare, I rose to the surface. I made it, but only just.

In the Grip of Fear

Though it may not be as dramatic as being stuck under the sea with a faulty air hose, all of us experience times when we find ourselves in the cold, hard grip of fear. It can happen to us in our work lives, our home lives, our emotional lives, or our spiritual lives. Sometimes we can see clearly what the challenge is—competition at work, a failing relationship, a serious health problem, a business setback, a conflict with another person. Other times we can’t quite name it. We just carry, everywhere we go, a life-sapping burden of anxiety. Nothing seems right.

Whether the perceived threats are external or internal, it all comes down to having a constant, nagging feeling of being “unsafe,” a feeling that we have lost our bearings, that we are buffeted by other people’s agendas or blindsided by the curveballs life is throwing at us.

The feeling of inner safety can be elusive. Many parts of our world are war torn and violent, and the prospect of peace seems very far away. Crime rates rise in our cities and we worry about the possibility of being assaulted, mugged, stalked, robbed, maybe even murdered. Despite the fact that companies draft and attempt to implement antiharassment policies, we feel under siege in our jobs, either from the stress of the job itself or from all the conflicts and intrigue that go on in most workplaces today. Schools design programs to combat bullying, but just ask students whether they feel safe there. We are frightened of terrorism, terrified of possible epidemics, worried about job loss. We encounter road rage; rude salesclerks; and cold, impersonal bankers.

Competitiveness is the rule in so many areas of life that there seems to be no place where you can just be you. Even your intimate relationships are marked by power struggles and suffer from the psychological residue of your daily struggles “out in the world.” Yet you accept all this stress as just being the way things are. Of course there are external things you can do, such as install an alarm system in your house or car, carry pepper spray in your purse, or triple lock your door at night. But feeling safe involves much more than dependency on external gadgets. What you need to know is that the safety you long for is not external to you. It is inside you.

What Fear Is

One thing that can totally permeate your mind and color all your experiences is the feeling or perception of fear. I cannot tell you what fear is for you. The experience of fear is different for everyone. But I can tell you what fear is in general and what it does to all of us.

Fear is a response to a circumstance in your life that triggers defenses that in turn tell you you’re weak in a certain area. You’re vulnerable. You’re insecure. The situation doesn’t feel safe.

Fear occurs when you’re in a situation where you feel overwhelmed, or outnumbered, or threatened, or intimidated, or not up to a challenge, or anxious because of something new or unexpected in your environment. You have the feeling of “I’m not up to dealing with this,” and your mind is screaming at you to get out of there. You’re in the fight/flight syndrome. You want to leave and get into an environment where you don’t feel quite so vulnerable. Then comes that moment when you realize you can’t leave. You’re there. So what are you going to do about it?

Have you ever noticed that when you’re experiencing fear your breathing seizes up? It gets shallow. Sometimes you even hold your breath. Or you hyperventilate. Fear locks you up. You feel like you can’t move—you’re frozen. But what you need to know is that you can change where your thoughts are focused. You can move them from the chill of fear to a state of having them just be there before you as something you look at within your attentive curiosity, knowing that you do have choices. You’re not stuck without any choice whatsoever. You even have the choice of remaining fearful. When you’re feeling fear, your traditional defenses don’t work. They won’t come to your aid. So when your inner defenses are incapable of helping you, this should be telling you that you should be looking for something else, for another way.

Fear and anxiety often just seem to strike out of the blue. Let’s say you’ve prepared a great marketing proposal and you’re about to present it to your manager or to your company’s CEO. All of a sudden, you have a lump in your throat and butterflies in your gut. That’s your “friend” fear. That’s the time when your mind decides that you should be paralyzed by anxiety and become a bumbling idiot when normally you are a well-spoken individual. Your fear shuts off the brain’s messages to your tongue and you stand there sputtering. You become ensconced in the fear because you don’t understand why it happened. You think, “I’m in a spiral and it’s only going in one direction—downhill!”

You can’t get rid of fear. It’s part of the human condition. It’s your natural response to a perception of threat or vulnerability. And let’s face it, when you’re in front of the brass making that presentation, you are vulnerable—you’re putting yourself on the line.

It can be something as simple as crossing at a stoplight. You see the traffic going by, and as soon as the light turns green for you, you see some guy in his car barreling across the intersection through the red light. Your body goes into the flight response and you immediately jump back. Your heart pounds. In this case, fear is the system warning you that you are in an unsafe situation. But the problem is that you may carry the anxiety about this “near miss” around with you all day, and you might even find yourself a few days later being nervous about crossing at a stoplight on a deserted street. That fear, that nervousness, is interfering with your ability to feel safe inside yourself.

There are so many situations in life in which we are afraid because of something that happened in the past that we may not even remember. That’s how the mind can trick us into a fear state instead of returning us to a state of inner stability.

The bad news is you can’t totally eliminate fear. The good news is you can learn to function despite the fear. The mind must be trained to get us into that peaceful state and to keep us in that state.

What Is Safety?

Many people think safety is lack of risk, but that’s not accurate. All of life is risk. The minute you get out of bed in the morning, you face so many risks. You could fall and sprain your ankle running for a bus. You could come down with a cold that’s been spreading around your workplace. You could make a disaster out of a new recipe.

Safety is the inner knowledge that if you come up against a risky circumstance, you have the good clear thinking that enables you to either back away from that circumstance or deal with it. Being safe is knowing that when you’re called into your manager’s office to do that presentation you can do it, knowing that everything you are contributing is your best effort and that there is no such thing as perfection. Safety is knowing that no matter what you do, you can be comfortable with it because you have the smarts to accept the challenge and you also have the smarts to reject a challenge when necessary, and that you know when to do which.

Now here’s where your mind gets into the act. The minute your mind perceives that a “risk” is putting you in harm’s way, it starts screaming at you, “What are you doing? You’re taking a risk! It’s just too much! Don’t do that!” If the risk in question really is a potentially threatening situation—for example, if your mind tells you that it’s not a good idea to walk through a tough neighborhood in your city alone late at night—then the caution of your mind is serving you well.

But how many times does our mind tell us not to do something, and when we really look at it, it’s not so threatening after all and in fact may be just the thing we need to do? Learning to overcome an unreasonable fear and to get to a place of inner safety is to do it anyway. We need to draw closer to the concept of experience, to what the energy in the situation feels like. Once we connect with the experience, the risk we feel and the fear we feel become an energy. Jumping out of an airplane will be an experience. Doing a presentation at work will be an experience.

The Difference Between Risk and Danger

Often taking a risk feels like being in danger. What really is danger? You have jumped out of a plane at 10,000 feet, you’re now passing through 7,000 feet—heading into 5,000, then 4,000, then 3,000 feet—and it’s time to pop your chute. You go to put your fingers in the D-ring and you can’t find it. That’s danger! Danger is a situation of imminent disaster. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “liability or exposure to harm or death.” Danger is when you know that the likelihood of something very bad happening is very high. When I was sixty feet under the ocean with a broken air hose, as I described earlier, that’s danger.

But many of us perceive “danger” when we are simply in uncomfortable situations. The lack of comfort translates in our mind to “danger,” and our fear detector goes way up. Public speaking is a great example of this. Some surveys have shown that people fear it more than they fear death. I know a person who every time he gets up to speak in public breaks out into a cold, clammy sweat. He is certain that everyone can see the wet patches under his armpits. He feels like he’s in front of a firing squad.

Risk and danger may be related in the sense that some risks can lead to danger, but they are not the same thing. You know that every time you get into a car, there’s a risk that you could have an accident. But if you’re in the car and another driver is coming straight at you in a skid, that’s danger. There is a continuum on which risk changes into danger, and we all have different places in our mind where we make the jump from the perception of risk to the perception of danger. Some people feel endangered by minor things, and other people are so risk oriented they wouldn’t perceive danger until a bayonet is running them through.

One dictionary definition of risk is “the possibility of meeting danger or suffering harm or loss.” Note the word “possibility.” The possibility exists that almost every circumstance can expose us to risk of some sort, and that’s what gives our mind a field day to really spook us.

Let’s say you have borrowed $100,000 from a bank. The bank wants everything you own as collateral to offset the risk for the bank. The truth is the bank has no risk. You have all the risk. If you fall behind on the payments, the bank may call the loan. So you go into that situation knowing that you have to organize and manage the risk. If you spend all your energy in an anxious state of mind, you won’t be able to devote your energies to making sure that you manage the loan effectively. If you manage the loan effectively and it accomplishes what you need for your business or home renovations or whatever reason you took the loan, then your feeling of inner safety will grow stronger.

Feeling safe is a state of mind. How close do you want to get to that rattlesnake? That’s risk. Being one foot from that rattlesnake and it’s rattling at you and preparing to strike, that’s danger. Safety is knowing that you aren’t getting close to that rattlesnake. And safety is also realizing that the rattlesnake is in fact a garter snake, and not going into the fear reaction reserved for encounters with real rattlesnakes. Don’t let your mind show you “rattlesnakes” in your life situation when those “snakes” are really the harmless garden variety. Maybe they bother you, maybe you don’t like them, but they can’t harm you.

Reminders to Your Warrior Mind

1.Fear is a response to a circumstance in your life that triggers defenses that tell you that you are weak in a certain area. It occurs when you’re in a situation where you feel overwhelmed, outnumbered, threatened, intimidated, not up to a challenge, or anxious because of something new or unexpected in your environment. You cannot get rid of fear. It is part of the human condition. But you can learn to master fear through awareness of the energies in your mind and body.

2.Safety is not lack of risk. Safety is the awareness that when you come up against a risky circumstance, there are ways you can either back away from the risk or learn to deal with it. You need to draw closer to the concept of experience, to what the energy in a situation feels like.

3.There is a difference between risk and danger. Risk is the possibility that something will be either uncomfortable or unsafe, with emphasis on “possibility.” It’s not a definite, merely a possibility. Danger, on the other hand, is a clear and present threat to your safety.

4.There is a continuum on which risk changes into danger, and all of us have different places in our minds where we make the jump from the perception of risk to the perception of danger. Some individuals can feel “endangered” by very minor situations, whereas others are so risk oriented that they don’t perceive danger until they are in a life-and-death situation.

5.When you are in a situation in your life that is making you anxious or uncomfortable, take a look at whether you are feeling that situation as a risk or as a danger. If you conclude that it is a risk, you may decide to take that risk or not, as the case may be. However, avoid calling a risk a “danger.” Ask yourself: Am I really in serious danger here?

6.Feeling safe is a state of mind. Remember the example of the rattlesnake.