Last week, I wrote about Radical Acceptance and Fear, the idea of opening oneself up to the fear in the night rather than fighting and struggling with it. I’ve embraced many ideas of the Radical Acceptance movement.

They are working for me.

Tara Brach, the author of the book Radical Acceptance, writes that we will all know fear for as long as we live. If we resist it – which I have done all my life – or push it aside, “we will miss a powerful opportunity for awakening,” she writes.

Psychologist Margarita Tartakovsky writes on Psch Central that Radical Acceptance doesn’t mean agreeing and submitting to everything that happens. It isn’t about approval. Radical acceptance means acknowledging reality, rather than rejecting or hiding from it.

The fighting of reality, she writes, creates suffering. And while pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.

Only by letting go and accepting the stream of life and loss and death can we get close to freeing ourselves of fear’s bondage. And it is a bondage, for sure, another form of slavery.

This freedom is a great awakening, something I thought impossible just a few years ago.

As a person who has battled fear day and night for decades, I am happy to say that acceptance rather than struggle has helped free me from it, and I am beginning for the first time in my life to experience the night differently.

The night had particular terrors for me as a child, not only as a bed-wetter but as the victim of violent and incestuous abuse. I can say I do not ever expect to be completely free of fear in the night.

That is the reality. There is no cure.  But there is comfort.

I have begun the lifelong training of letting go of the fear.

This morning, I woke up at 3:50 a.m., and I felt the familiar wave of fear and uncertainty that I have known in the night since I have memory. The night has never been restful for me.

I didn’t lecture myself on the fact that the fear isn’t real, I didn’t get up and read, or take a walk, or go downstairs and wrap myself in blankets, or quote yet another mantra or grounding slogan, or take a pill.

I chose instead to relax, to open myself into all of the things that I feel and sense – sights, sounds, tastes, thoughts, memories, moods. I felt like I was opening the door to my soul, to the most vulnerable part of me, and saying, come on in, I love you too. You are me.

Rather than shut these fears and feelings out, I went the other way, I closed my eyes and let them flow through me like a stream, and they did, and in a few minutes, they were fading.

Since they are a part of me, and will always be a part of me, I absorbed the fear and terror into my consciousness, into the flow of thoughts and feelings and emotions that is my consciousness. I felt it moving through me, and receding before my eyes, like any other emotion.

I opened my mind to the fears, rather than push them away or hide from them. Be as I am, I told myself. Be what I am, not what I would like to be, or what I was. Rather than push my fear into the shadows, I let it out into the open. I left it in peace to breathe and go its own way.

I held it in my arms, loved it in a way, embraced it as part of the sacred center of me. I accepted the truth: I can’t control it and have wasted so much energy trying.

As I opened myself to this night fear and stopped trying to bury it, I felt a rush of the confidence that I often show, I felt alive rather than endangered, I felt fulfilled rather than vulnerable. I felt hopeful rather than desperate.

The pain didn’t vanish, but it did become manageable, short-lived, less gripping.

This was something different, something important, something tied to the idea of acceptance, and I wanted to share with those of you who know fear and have followed my writings about it.

I spoke with my fear. I said: Come on, I’m not in your way, I’m not blocking you. Safe passage.  And it did move through me, unchallenged.

Rather than say, how can I make this fear go away, or how can I feel stronger, or how can I be something other than who I am,  I told myself something different: “All right, this fear exists, it is here, how do I wish to handle it? Where do I go from here? How can I be  honest about this?”

This is very different for me; I want to think about it and understand it and practice it. And share it, of course.

(P.S. My Rescue Angel, above,  was in the woodshed, it took me a couple of days and badgering Maria for clues for me to find it.)