I have had two extreme examples of the fear that lived inside me for all of my life, I was aware of them and could describe them, but I never really understood where they came from or how to live with them. Until I did that – I call it extreme awareness – I could never be the sovereign of my body and mind.

I dealt with fear primarily in two ways: regular and deep meditation and acknowledgment of the fears whenever they appeared and wishing them well.

I understood that anger and fear are both acts of violence against my body and mind.

One of my most persistent signs of extreme anxiety was that I have always woken up in terror as if I am about to die or something awful is about to happen. This happens roughly at 5:30 a.m. every morning. No medication, therapy, or spiritual counseling could stop this or take it away.

Quite often, I wake up shivering in a terrible sweat; no doctor could account for it or help me make it go away. And I did try a lot of medications and a lot of therapy. Sometimes, Maria senses or hears my fear and rushes to help. I always tell her I’m fine, even if I’m not. I don’t do that anymore. I acknowledge what I feel and work to relax my body and mind. The fear drifts away like a tire losing air.

The second symptom was that every time I approached a kitchen sink to do the dishes or get a glass of water, an image popped up in my head of my being arrested, taken to jail, brought to court, and condemned to death. This was not a dream; it was a sequence that ran in my head every night before bedtime.

Some brutal regime had taken over the country and arrested me for what I wrote. I was the hero of every fantasy.

In the sequence, I was brave, honest, and unwilling to save myself and refused to turn in my friends or family, even if it cost me my life. I remember creating this fantasy in childhood to make me feel brave and strong. It never really worked, but it somehow became embedded in my consciousness.

It didn’t seem dangerous to me, and it didn’t last long. And I wasn’t terrified. Neither did I think about how unhealthy it was to have fantasies like that bouncing around in my head, every night the same as every other. I didn’t know much about it; this image had been with me all my life, as had the morning terror.

Throughout the day, fear and sometimes panic could be triggered by numerous things.

In recent weeks, and mainly due to studying the writing and teaching of the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, I came to see that I had always looked outside of myself to deal with my fear rather than where it lives: deep inside of me.

This made sense to me, but I was not open enough and strong enough to take a face-to-face look at my fear.

It was time to go inside, to seek awareness and consciousness not just of what I felt but why I thought it and where the anxiety came from. That was perhaps the bravest thing I have ever done. I guess you do it when you are ready.

I practice never telling other people what they should do or try. I don’t make decisions for others, as they often try to make decisions for me. I can only say what I have done and how it worked for me. You must take it or leave it.

I got my expectations in check. There was no getting rid of fear; I finally understood that. It was a part of me. But it didn’t have to run me and threaten my mind and body.

There was this new idea of acknowledging it, putting it in its place, and no longer letting it control me or influence my life and decisions. I made the worst decisions of my life out of fear and in fear. Fear gets in the way of life if you let it.

I understood that fear spawns anger, and panic is the mother of bad choices and mistakes. Every bad mistake I’ve made came from fear, from giving my money away or moving all over the country to writing books I didn’t always want to write.

The blog is a spirit to me; it guides and keeps me honest. It challenges me to understand myself and gives me a way to share what I have learned.

I liked Hanh’s idea of using awareness and what he called “deep relaxation” of the body and the mind as powerful tools to accept fear and transform it into something else, such as love, peace of mind, and a kind of fearlessness. It was worth a try. Nothing else has worked.

To my amazement, it has worked.

Fear, he wrote, accumulates in the body. It comes to use very early in life; it is present in all babies and infants, and their primary and only survival tool is crying and shouting for help. Hanh says the same thing as famed Child Psychiatrist John Bowlby, who wrote that a baby is born in fear and early on desperately needs assurance that someone was there who understood what they felt and calms them.

If that doesn’t happen or can’t happen, anxiety is born in the child and grows and deepens as they get older. Anxiety is the birth of anger and fear.

I tried what Hanh suggested, and these symptoms have considerably receded or gone away completely. I can live with them. I am the sovereign of my consciousness. It is shocking not to feel these things so sharply. I took some of his suggestions and not others.

I don’t even think of taking any medications anymore.

When I feel the terror rise at night, I think not of what I feel but why I feel that way. I dig down in silence and meditation to understand who I am and why I need or am hiding behind all that fear and anger. I pause, rest, and let my body and mind get the space and attention they need to heal.

And they will heal, especially if I am not in denial of what is happening.

I stop and pause and focus on my breathing – I say in my mind, “I breathe in, I breath out,” and following my breath takes me away from fear and softens it. I don’t understand how this works and don’t need to.

I can’t break myself to tell the fear I love it, as Hanh suggests, but I can speak to it peacefully and gently and say things like, “I accept you, we will always live together, you will always be inside of me, but you will never rule me or take me over.”

I have conversations with fear whenever it pops up, but the space between these visits is getting longer. And my sense of living a life without fear is more robust all the time. Mindfulness and self-awareness are potent tools for healing the inside of me. I’ll leave the western doctors to keep my heart ticking.

The experience of opening my life and drawing critics and angry people onto my blog ever since 2016 and the cruel comments there were beneficial. The process of challenging them and confronting them – sometimes I overdid it – helped me become more robust and see that the anger and fear at the bottom of all this were always frightening me and nourishing the fear.

Somehow it made me stronger enough to ignore them and get on with my life.

It was as if I was embracing violence in my heart and soul, and the more I saw that the less it happened. It has mostly gone away, at least in the old way. I need to see it, recognize and give it respect.

Hanh wrote – so did Bowlby – that fear, trauma, and anxiety accumulate in our body, causing a kind of violence to the self. I saw that rest was an absolute precondition for healing. Like animals in the forest, I had to stop when I was wounded, lie down, and rest until I felt better.

For me, this was a miracle cure. I stopped going to a therapist whenever I was f frightened or thinking of medicine. I embraced the wisdom of stopping running around, making fearful decisions, and acting out anger and resentment.

In many ways, I realized I was going the opposite way of much of the country, which is increasingly frantic, angry, distracted, and disconnected. People were going the other way, getting angrier and more fearsome.

Every day, I found a quiet space to rest, meditate, and understand my feelings and why. I lived with these things for a lifetime, yet I rarely took the time to know that they were just feelings.

I went more profound than ever before and learned more than ever before, and as I did, the execution images vanished utterly – I just had never thought much about them – and the morning bursts of terror were brief and shorter and less jarring. I believe one day soon they will be gone away.

When I feel the terror, I think about it, feel where it is in my body, and thank it and acknowledge it. I am almost embarrassed to say how well this has worked for me.

I can do this form of deep relaxation and self-awareness anywhere – in bed at night or in the morning, in the living room, outside in a lawn chair, on the porch steps, early in the morning, or late at night. Sometimes I sit in the car or do it while walking Zinnia.

I do it every day for at least 20 minutes and pay attention to my breathing; it keeps me from descending into the old darkness.

Lying awake now in the dark, I bathe in the knowledge that this deep relaxation can help, and it helps my fear diminish, and some mornings, it even disappears. I am finally breathing in and out, practicing it; it allows me to relax and, often, even go back to sleep.

I have heard of this kind of meditation and breathing for years, but I never could entirely accept it or bear it.

I’ve learned that there are many beautiful things modern medicine can do and many important things it can’t. It doesn’t need to be one or the other.

Easing fear in a safe, natural, and personal way is one of those things they are still learning to do but can’t do without pills most of the time.

The big idea for me was awareness. To truly understand where these emotions came from and acknowledge them. And talk to them. Somehow, it makes them shrink.

When challenged by cruelty or anger, I feel a fearlessness I have never felt before. I will never be fearless, but it is empowering to touch it once in a while.

This deep relaxation practice is making the dreams and the nightmare go away, and I am freer all the time to see the beauty and joy of the world. I am becoming the King of my inner self.

This is all a miracle to me, and I wanted to share it.