What's the deal with existential fear?

asked my younger, naive self

[I put the podcast episode above ⬆️​ if you prefer to listen to this piece rather than read it! My podcast ‘Conscious | Unconscious’ is here on the Substack app and also on Spotify, Apple and a few more.]

Once upon a time, I imagined that existential fear was a sort of philosophical exercise that left a residue of anxious curiosity. Of mildish discomfort. A faint tremor, perhaps, when contemplating the infinitude of the Universe, or the prospect of old age. Until in my mid-forties, Terror appeared like a tornado on the horizon and tore a path of destruction through my nervous system.

So few actually speak about the existential terror that is, for many, a natural stage of awakening. In its throes, I struggled to find resources. I didn’t understand how the experiences of mid-life hormonal changes (menopause) could support the process, or indeed in some ways trigger it.

So I’m going to talk about it now. This might be a post to save for later, just in case.

I began life trusting the parameters of my reality. As a child, I fearlessly roller-skated down steep hills, laughed off the rare nightmare and traveled far in my sleep, soaring over cities and tackling dream-monsters. As a teenager, I thought nothing of fast cars or staying out too late in dodgy parts of town.

Even death did not rattle me.

My grandfather passed away when I was 17 and I remember sitting with his body at the viewing and talking to his spirit, filled with love and grief even as I experienced that he and I were merely physical emanations of life’s inescapable laws. Like balls on Newton’s pendulums, motion as a counterpoint to stillness: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As my grandfather’s soul fled his body, mine was just settling in for the ride. I missed him, but I was not afraid.

Until around age 45, as my self-inquiry process deepened, I was beset by panic attacks and night terrors that slowly became day terrors and then five-times-a-day-terrors.

At first I thought that it might just be perimenopause. So I had my blood tested. All was well. Signs of hormonal change, for sure, but nothing was especially alarming; my thyroid was normal. Everything was—normal. The doctor asked if I had a history of psychosis, depression, or panic attacks? No.

I admitted to a friend in my meditation group that I was experiencing terror, as in panic tinged with an intense fear that I was trapped in a coffin and dying. I asked if it was something that she experienced with perimenopause. She looked at me sideways and said, “Um, that sounds pretty intense and not normal.”

I checked in with my other perimenopausal friends. When I tried to describe the contours of my terror, they seemed a bit uncomfortable. Clearly, whatever I was experiencing was definitely an order of magnitude worse than the anxiety they endured.

I saw a naturopath. She said that without the soothing qualities of estrogen, the bodymind has less capacity to smooth over the rough edges of discontent. I attended a workshop by the menopause educator Jane Hardwicke Collings. She refers to estrogen as the ‘hormone of accomodation,’ and says that with less of it, women are no longer willing to put ourselves last, or even second. There is a rawness that arises. The unresolved trauma of the past is freed from a dysregulated nervous system, ready to be seen.

I had the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, hormonal change was providing an opening to fears residing at the very core of my being. Fears that had to be released if I were ever to surrender in trust to the Divine in a process of awakening.

It looked like this >

Imagine one moment you’re staring at a wall and the next you feel like the world is going to end and there’s no place to go, like you’re trapped in a coffin and no one hears your screams.

In one particularly challenging period, waves of heat rushed across my body twenty or more times a day, leaving perspiration and foreboding. What if I wake up and forget who I am? my inner voice asked me. I had weird nightmares about sudden onset dementia which morphed into a generalized daytime fear — it felt like a background hum that said I might cease to exist, that I might have no identity, that I might suddenly float away into the blackness of outer space alone, forever, like those astronauts in the film Gravity.

These kinds of intangible, irrational fears prickled on the nape of my neck with every hot flush, and across this thin, fiery line a psychotic breakdown lay in wait, I was certain. It was incredible, improbable, that I could be terrified by nothing tangible. By an idea. That my nervous system could react as if I were literally being buried alive, then and there, trapped in darkness, oxygen fast disappearing.

I had had clients with PTSD for years, because something had happened. But in my life, nothing had happened. I was terrified of concepts. My academic mind struggled to make sense of the senseless.

I began to read Bonnie Greenwell obsessively. Her descriptions of kundalini, fear and awakening soothed me (I list some resources below). I told myself it was a process I could survive, only I didn’t know how.

For various reasons, this was at about the same time that I was learning how to surf, an experience which opened a Pandora’s box of amygdala overreaction. Terror in the sea. Freezing and dissociation when I should be paddling for the docile, yet to me terrifying two foot wave.

What with the terror and the surfing and the perimenopause, I did all the conventional things to support my nervous system. Nothing really helped. At one point I started working with a spiritual teacher. I felt validated at least, but it also forced me to confront the reality that this was my path, and I needed to find my way to the eye of the storm, rather than constantly switch off in fight or flight.

A few years in, I made a decision that I would become a student of my own fear, willing to accept all of its manifestations.

I decided that the ocean would be a place to engage with fear consciously, since I was going in all the time anyway.

I cried every time I went into the ocean for about two years. Yet I showed up again and again, shuddering my way into the shore break, talking myself into facing my fear of annihilation.

I kept reading Bonnie Greenwell and her descriptions of spiritual awakening. I also read Thích Nhất Hanh and Gaylon Ferguson. I watched Shar Jason on YouTube. I prayed. I allowed, and allowed, and allowed.

At first, it grew worse.

My two eldest children grew up and moved out. I could hear the onrush of silence that would one day deafen, the emptiness of my home and the inevitable redefining of mymotherself as someotherself. The obvious fact of life’s transitions shifted from theoretical to embodied. For months during one particularly painful episode of fear and anxiety, my neurons seemed to fire with the single thought that I am ageing, that I am dying, that there will be loss of loved ones and that chapters of my life will soon close permanently.

Words like “impermanence,” “change,” and “loss of control” were no longer theoretical, but lived experiences with frightening physiological responses. Any kind of body-felt fear triggers the body’s survival instincts, invoking its defence mechanisms: immobilize, fight or flight, or tend and befriend. I cycled through each response.

Where was the girl who sat with the carapace which once housed her grandfather’s soul, and lovingly whispered her goodbyes with all her faith in immortality?

She was there in me still, but she - I - had dropped into a much deeper place, to the ground of being, to that part of me which understood the ephemeral nature not just of Michelle’s body, but of her very ego and personality. I dropped into that place where there was not even a self to be found; a much more terrifying place to be.

To be clear, I did not know this at the time. I just lived the fear. I didn’t understand anything until it had passed.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on UnsplashLimits of the Mind

From all of my study, and from working with mentors and teachers, I understood that when the mind reaches the limit of its capacity to understand non-dual reality, it is naturally triggered into fear states.

My nervous system, my very physiological reality supported this process — what with waning estrogen and a much reduced capacity to bullshit myself or anyone else for that matter. Looking back, I can see that perimenopause was perfectly timed to create an opening in my psyche so that this material could pour through.

Again, I was not aware consciously that I had reached this place; only that I feared something horrifying. That’s one of the most surreal aspects of awakening — that there is a conscious process and an unconscious process, and the conscious mind is not always aware of what is happening unconsciously.

To experience our consciousness as an ocean that we both are, and are simultaneously a part of, emanating as waves of being in ego form, is not how our brains are wired to experience reality. The human mind cannot comprehend the vastness of itself; it perceives through the body with all its physical limitations. Death, soul, and other consciousness states are not the purview of the body-mind’s survival-mode set up. Humans perceive reality in a subject-object framework, no matter what the double slit experiment has proven otherwise.

My mind was short-circuiting as another part of me attempted to expand beyond itself. But because it was my mind, it couldn’t possibly understand what the other part of me was up to. It was just panicking, and my physiology allowed the full depth and breadth.

The Resolution

Thích Nhất Hanh described this process in his book Fear:

Concentration has the power to burn away afflictions, just like the sunlight focused by a lens can burn a piece of paper underneath. In the same way, concentration — looking deeply into our fear, anger, delusion, and despair — can burn them away, leaving insight.

I tried my best to follow this wisdom.

In liminal states during meditation, I was able to allow feelings of fear to arise and be, whilst a larger part of my being (the Witness, Awareness) was able to look at it directly without being caught in its traps of suffering. It took a LOT of practice because it was so terrifying to come so close to it. I used various breathing techniques as well.

I’ll be honest. Nine out of ten times I failed, and ended up shaking it off, unable to go deeper. I literally had to move my body, run somewhere, do jumping jacks, anything.

I kept remembering a former client from years earlier, whose PTSD was so intense that he would wake in the middle of the night with night terrors and, surging on adrenaline, go running through the woods near his house, as if trying to outrun his own fear.

That was me now, running from concepts, thoughts, ideas that were like energetic templates of my being encountering, for the first time, an earthquake determined to set me free.

With time and practice, I was able to be with the fear, just enough. I gently, ever so gently, probed the outer layers until I could safely — and very briefly — reside in it.

Whether I was trembling on my surfboard beneath the looming crest of foam, or waking to a two am panic attack, as I confronted my mortal limits, there was the same black quality of being cast adrift for eternity. I sat in it long enough to be able to name it: right at the very centre of my being was a fear of abandonment.

Then, on an ordinary day and for no particular reason, as I sat at my computer, and the fear arrived, I pushed myself into it, sweating and panting in a simultaneous effort to escape from it even as another part of me pushed its way in and finally—

I dropped even further until I felt its message, conveyed in a small, pitiful voice that said: God has abandoned you.

I knew at once that this fear was nothing to do with family history; it pre-dated my identity as Michelle. It was something core in me. The separation wound.

Separation from Source.

The truth of this realisation was more painful than I could ever have anticipated, because logically I thought it couldn’t possibly be true. I felt betrayed by my own ‘self-assured ego,’ the one that said, God abandons no one! My being, however, felt it was true. I was devastated to realize that I really did feel this way, abandoned by God. I fell to the floor and wept for minutes, hours, I don’t even know.

In any case, this was the beginning of my healing - the eventual resolution of my fear, and it heralded the next stage of my awakening. From the moment of this realization, as I allowed it to fully express through me, the fear lost its hard edges, and dialled down to mild anxiety. The night terrors stopped instantly. The hot flushes also dialled down in intensity and abated within weeks. Over this period of integration, I used some modalities like energy healing and breathwork to process out the fear.

It’s absolutely true (and still a miracle to me) that my menopausal symptoms disappeared, just like that.

Photo by Paul Volkmer on Unsplash

One drop of that ocean is hope, the rest is fear. ~Rumi

Richard Rudd, the Gene Keys founder, said once in a talk that “even fear is safe.” I remember having to write that down, as it seemed so counterintuitive at the time. Yet that is exactly where I landed after I understood the core of my fear, into the safety of my true nature. Fear was just fear, and could do no harm. I was never in danger, as it turns out. I had never been abandoned, after all.

I now have an unprecedented level of trust in the Divine and in life. I also feel more peace with my humanness than ever before, and I feel better equipped to navigate the ups and downs of human life knowing that I am completely held and safe.

This fear experience - this is also what the spiritual awakening process looks like for many people!

Kahlil Gibran said it best when he wrote about the fear of consciousness meeting itself.

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

The ocean has been a phenomenal teacher, but so have all the hormonal changes. I am left with the sense that menopause can be an opportunity for deep spiritual growth and also for the healing of past traumas, if we can shift our mindset around the unpleasant symptoms and be more present for whatever unresolved material our bodies hold.

Thanks for reading everybody xx

*it has been about eight months and I have not had a recurrence of the existential fear, and I continue to feel held and at peace. I sometimes still experience anxiety. I am only recently official menopausal.

*All unattributed images thanks to Dall-E: “image of existential terror as an oil painting.”

Suggested Reading [if you have recommendations, please comment and I will add them!]

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Bravery: Fear and Fearlessness as a Direct Path of Awakening, Shambhala, 2016

Bonnie L Greenwell, Ph.D. The Awakening Guide: A Companion for the Inward Journey, Volume 2: Consciousness. Shakti River Press, Ashland, OR, 2014.

Bonnie L Greenwell, Ph.D. The Kundalini Guide: A Companion for the Inward Journey, Volume 1: Energy. Shakti River Press, Ashland, OR, 2014.

Bonnie L Greenwell, Ph.D. When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening. Non-Duality Press, Oakland, CA, 2018.

Thích Nhất Hanh, Fear, Penguin Random House, 2012