One of the most pervasive experiences in a college community is fear. Coming to campus in the fall, first-years ask, Will this be ok for me? Starting a new semester I ask, Will this work out ok for me? Faced with an important performance (a test question, an unanswered thought hanging over a conference discussion, a face-to-face meeting with your adviser, a lecture to give) we worry, Will I be found out? Will I be discovered to be the inadequate imposter that I think I am?

The thoughts that surround fear are just thoughts, but they are constantly rippling back and forth across the Reed community as if blown by an unseen wind. Unchecked they can quickly convert what were supposed to be opportunities for new experience and growth into soul-sapping dread and terror.

Author David Guy described his personal confrontation with fear and stage fright, and how he slowly learned to deal with it through meditation, in his book, Waste No More Moonlight (excerpted in Summer 2003 Tricycle as “Trying to Speak: A Personal History of Stage Fright”).

Recounting a school episode, Guy writes, “… with a wave of his cigarette, our teacher asked me to begin. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t choke out a single word. I’d been met by a paralyzing wave of stage fright, larger than I’d ever experienced. My face began to flush. My palms began to sweat. My heart beat with such quickness that I couldn’t catch my breath; my chest wouldn’t expand. The harder I tried, the more it closed in on me: the panicky feeling fed on itself.”

His solution for many years was to avoid public performances of all sorts. This was followed by a modestly helpful class in dealing with stage fright. Referring to his experience in this class, he says, “With [the teacher’s] guidance, I learned how to speak loudly and forcefully before an audience. I managed, with some effort, to breathe. But as useful as her instructions were, I still felt terror every time I moved to speak in front of others. The fear—of failure, of public humiliation—remained, and I ran from it instinctively.”

Eventually, his path took him to a local zen meditation group. After sitting calmly for several years with this group and developing friendships with the other members of the group, he was asked one day by the group’s teacher [Pat] to be the chant leader [kokyo]. “I was terrible the first few times. I had strong attacks of stage fright, couldn’t get my breath. My voice cracked and wobbled. I had never shown myself up that way in front of this group. In any other context the solution would have been to find a replacement. But the world of Zen is often ass backwards. You see a problem and wade right into it. “If this is deeply humiliating,” Pat said, “if it really makes you feel miserable, you shouldn’t do it.”

But, as he recounts, he didn’t feel that bad. He was surrounded by friends so he decided to follow his teacher’s suggestions and “wade right into it.” Here are his instructions for wading into fear and anxiety in a mindful manner:

• Feel fear when it arises, not when you would like it to arise. We have no control over what comes up in our body and mind, and no “subject” for [meditation] is better than any other. To brush something aside because it arises at an inconvenient moment is to not value our life as it unfolds. And from a practical standpoint, fear will come up until it is heard. It will grow as strong as it needs to. If it is an hour before the occasion and fear comes up—or two hours, two days—feel it then. Feel it any chance you get.
• The obsessive thinking that accompanies fear is useless. The only way to deal with fear is to allow yourself to feel it, to experience it in all of its discomfort.
• Fear is most workable in its physical manifestation. Let go of thoughts and bring your attention back to bodily sensations. As many times as you get caught in thought, come back to the body. That is the practice. Fear demands to be felt, and it can be felt most readily in the body, as a powerful sensation. It [arises] because of conditions. It is not a wall of emotion, but a constantly changing process. And it finally ends. It has its say and departs.
• The more deeply you can feel fear, the easier it will be to handle. We feel anger up in the chest, sadness in the mid-abdomen, and fear in the deep abdomen. Fear is the deepest feeling in the body and the most basic human feeling. To feel into fear is to look deeply into ourselves.
• The experience of learning to meet fear builds upon itself. It is a skill, and the more we do it, the better we get. Seeing its true symptoms, its beginning as physical energy, takes away some of its mystique. We see not necessarily that we can handle it all the time, but that it is a phenomenon of life, like any other. So fear is not defeated, but doesn’t have to be defeating. We are never finished with it—nevertheless, we don’t have to dread its return. Being free of fear is not a matter of never feeling it, but of not being flattened when we do.