A lot of people think awakening will be an insight-only path—clean realizations, elegant understandings, maybe a shift into non-duality that resolves the whole thing.
Then fear arrives.
Not the everyday, mentally narrated kind. Something older. Something that lives in the body and in the corridors of the psyche—locked away, often untouched for years. And when it stirs, it doesn’t care how many concepts you can recite.
Existential fear in awakening is gritty. It’s human. And sooner or later, it asks to be met.
Fear Is a Required Exploration in Awakening
One thing that can be surprising to people is the exploration of fear that’s required in this whole awakening process.
At different times it comes in different forms, but I like to point out that at some point you’re going to experience, come into contact with, and have to navigate these really deeply seeded existential fears—human fears.
This isn’t an insight thing. It’s not about no-self realization, non-duality, dependent origination, and all the fancy stuff. It’s not a mystical thing. It’s more of a gritty thing.
More importantly, it’s something locked away in the corridors of your psyche. Something old in you.
As you listen, see if that doesn’t stir something—if you can’t at least access the flavor of what I’m pointing to. These are old energies. These are old fears.
Tracing the Scaffolding Backward Through Your Life
Look at your life as it is right now.
Consider the functionality you have—or lack of functionality in some areas. The things you do day to day. Who you take yourself to be. How your relationships function. What kind of vocation you’re in. Hobbies, talents—whatever.
The whole gamut of your conventional life as it plays out right now.
Notice there are certain personality structures that stabilize all of that. I’m not going to say “identity structures,” but there are personality structures that stabilize it. You know what it is to be an adult in the world you live in. You know what it means for you to be an adult, a mature human, and so forth.
Now back up a little bit.
Feel into what came before that stabilizing into the adult world you live in.
Maybe it’s an adolescent energy—like the platform or scaffolding on which your current way of moving through the world is built. Notice it has a different feel.
It could have rebellion in it, hope, excitement about moving into the world with new-found freedom and autonomy. It could also be laced with pain. Probably is. Maybe a lot of trauma. Who knows.
But that adolescent energy is an earlier stage of development—an earlier stage in the development and propagation of your personality and the way you’ve moved through this world.
Earlier than that, there’s an older child or pre-adolescent platform—the platform on which the others are built, or over which the others are built.
As you feel back through these phases, notice that each phase has a different emotional landscape. Different fears. And how you dealt with those fears plays into what gets built next.
When the Next Stage Isn’t Built Defensively (and Why That’s Rare)
It’s possible that certain fears arose in childhood and, through good parenting or good resources, you learned to navigate those fears with integrity and wholeness.
Through integration. Through actually feeling. Through understanding what goes into the fear. Through having an accurate worldview around what you were fearing.
A healthy approach—such that when you built the next platform, the next stage, it wasn’t built defensively. It wasn’t built as a defense mechanism against the earlier emotional landscape.
Now understand: that’s the exception.
For most people, that’s not the case—certainly not across the board. For all of us, there are some aspects where the next platform, the next stage of life, the next personality structure is used to cover up or avoid the fears of the previous one.
Developmental Fear Layers: From Abandonment to Humiliation
At every stage of development—from being a toddler starting to recognize the “I am” sense, the sense of being anything—then developing the sense of self and other, relationality, communication, theory of mind, realizing other people have an inner world and being able to manipulate that—those are developmental stages in childhood.
Then becoming socially aware in adolescence, and all that.
Each of those stages has fears.
Starting with early fears of abandonment—losing your primary bond.
Then fears in adolescence of humiliation—not fitting in, being ostracized, all of it.
All of those layers of fears, to some degree, don’t get dealt with or even fully felt. They get covered up—swept under the rug—by building a scaffolding over them: the next identity structure.
Sometimes there’s trauma laced throughout all of this, or in certain parts of it. Then we have to go back and visit it. That can feel gritty as hell when we suddenly feel like an angsty teenager again, or a terrified child.
And we often don’t want to go back to that. We don’t want to feel like that terrified child.
If we’re really traumatized, a lot of times fear is the one thing we learned to turn off completely—to dissociate from.
You’re Not Beyond Childhood Fear—It’s Just Covered Over
Anyone can relate to the fact that, to some degree, we build new identity or personality structures over the previous ones.
Whereas the fears of a child—darkness, sounds at night, being abandoned—we think we’re beyond those fears.
We’re not actually beyond them.
We’ve just built scaffoldings over them and moved into new structures such that we ignore them. We have ways of ignoring deeper fears.
They’re still there, until they’re not.
And we can still access them. To the degree we don’t want to see this, we have the potential to go unconscious—to enter unconscious behavior patterns.
Because the point is: they are there. They do get triggered. They do express.
But if they express in a way that’s discordant with who we think we are—what we think we are—then we overlook it. We don’t notice it.
So it leaks out.
This is why it’s important to go back for this stuff.
Awakening Dismantles the Scaffolding—and Brings the Basement Upstairs
What awakening does—deeper realization and so forth—is it starts to dismantle the whole scaffolding.
That might sound great, but you can’t hide from this stuff now.
Everything in the basement is up in the living room. It’s all here, and you’ve got to work through it. You’ve got to work with it and deal with it.
That’s why I talk about trauma work a lot. That’s why I talk about shadow work. That’s why I talk about deep shadow process, circling, various modalities.
Because you have to do it. You’re going to be compelled to do it one way or another.
Two Root Fears Beneath the Layers
When it comes to fear, what I find is that in those earlier stages there are a couple of fears that are most prominent—maybe the root of other fears.
Root Fear #1: Losing Resources—Starting With the Primary Bond
One fear is the fear of not having any resources you need.
And the first resource you need is a bond—a bond with a person who’s going to take care of you.
Without that bond, you will die.
A brand new baby, a newborn, without the primary bond in some form or another, will die. It won’t be able to regulate its nervous system. It won’t be able to keep warm. It won’t be able to eat. It won’t have protection in nature.
So that primary bond is the first thing you need.
That becomes a psychological need in the adult, but for the infant it is a true physical, somatic need: the need for a primary bond.
So the first fear we have, in some sense, is the fear of losing that bond—the fear of abandonment.
It comes in other forms later, more complex forms.
None of us would be here if we had no bond at a young age. If no one took care of us at all, the baby won’t live. We’ve all lived through that.
But we may have had that bond disrupted at a very young age. That’s very difficult traumatically, and it takes a lot of work to restructure and reconnect those pathways. It can be done.
And the older we get, the more conscious those abandonment injuries become, because we’re forming memories and so forth. Often what came before may have been stability, so it may not be quite as damaging of an injury—but this is mostly trauma I’m talking about.
The point is: all of us have a fear of losing that bond. All of us have a fear of abandonment at those ages. Every single one.
As long as you know yourself or believe you’re a self—feel separate, feel like a one, feel like a me—as long as that feels true, there will be a recognition that the other (mother, father, primary caretaker) could not be here.
And you see it because sometimes they’re not there. Mom can’t always be there. Dad can’t always be there.
So you feel unregulated, cold, scared, lonely, hungry, and there’s no one there to take care of you.
You can extrapolate: “What if they don’t come back? What if they disappear altogether?”
Or it happens. You may be abandoned by one parent. One parent is killed, lost, leaves. This happens to many people.
In some form or another, we all perceive the possibility of abandonment. And it becomes a wound. It becomes a fear.
Pretty quickly, we usually learn to dissociate from that because of the complexity of consciousness. We can use imagination to dissociate.
One stable way we dissociate—the way I talk about all the time—is through thought identification, mind identification. The world of mind identification, which is the world of human nature, which is the madness you see around you oftentimes in the human population.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Scaffoldings over scaffoldings of identity structures built to avoid these deep fears—number one: fear of abandonment.
And I would broaden that to the fear of losing or not having the resources you need.
This is important. I’m not going to get into a lot of detail, but also: the states you think you need—emotional states—which are the somatic links to the resources.
So those are the things we’re afraid of losing: resources, what we need and what we think we need, what nourishes us, and the states we associate with all of that.
That’s one fear.
Root Fear #2: Being Stuck—In Body, Sensation, Emotion, and Pain
The other side is something more like a fear of being stuck.
Being stuck in a body. Being stuck in a situation. Being stuck in a circumstance. Being stuck in sensations. Being stuck in emotions. Being stuck in pain and physicality.
We have a strong resistance to this.
This one is interesting. I think it probably forms before we form an identity. This may be the older one, but I don’t know for sure.
[Possible clarification needed: the claim that this fear forms before identity is presented as a hunch; confirm if intended as theory or observation.]
They’re kind of opposites.
One is, “I don’t have the resources I need.” It causes us to cling, look outward, grasp, hold on, not be able to let go.
The other is, “I want to push it away. I want to get away. I want to go into my inner world.”
Both of them involve using an inner world to escape, for sure. But this one is more like: “I want to back away from experience. I don’t want to feel. I want to push emotion away. I want to push pain away. I want to push thought away. I want to imagine that’s not there. I want to think of all the ways to get rid of it.”
This comes in forms like obsession about the way people eat, obsession about the way people exercise, body obsession, dissociation into weird dream worlds—where you can become invincible somehow by the way you eat, eating natural products all the time, and all this stuff.
It’s delusion.
We want to ignore the fact that we are in this body, supposedly. It seems like we are.
Whatever we’re perceiving as “I” is seemingly linked to this body-mind, and it’s going to grow old, decompose, die, rot in its grave, change forms, and so forth.
We don’t want to see that. We don’t want to digest it.
We also don’t want to acknowledge, feel, and ultimately let go of control around the fact that being in this body comes with certain experiences—pains, sensations, and so on.
How These Fears Become Push–Pull Reactivity
You could say these two types of fears and the reactions to them are like the push and pull: desire and aversion.
But these are fundamental fears, and at some point we have to come back and experience them—come back and navigate them:
- the fear of not having the resources you need, the states you think you need, and
- the fear of being stuck in a body—stuck in sensations, emotions—and ultimately stuck in conditions that compel you to see and recognize that the body will collapse, break down, decay, die, and so forth.
It’s like one is the fear of life and one is the fear of death: fear of living without the resources we need to live, and fear of losing all resources and feeling the pain of that loss.
[Possible clarification needed: “fear of life/fear of death” is used as a shorthand—confirm intended meaning aligns with the two fears as described.]
This Is Heavy, But It’s Not Insurmountable
This could sound heavy and insurmountable, but it’s actually not.
You can go back through all of it and address these two fundamental fears.
A big part of that is to feel the fear.
It may have been a long time since you’ve actually felt fear—not psychological fear, but physical, physiologic, full-on fear. It may surprise you how intense it is.
Some people have felt it recently, certainly. But many people live so dissociated that they don’t feel a lot of what their body is experiencing. Instead there’s an ongoing low-level anxiety because of that.
So you’re going to have to go back and feel this—and then see what the implications are of all the coping mechanisms you’ve built around not feeling it.
It’s not just feeling the fears, not just feeling the emotions. It’s also seeing the coping mechanisms tied into not wanting to feel them. Those will be dismantled at some point.
That may sound like an insanely difficult project, but it’s not. It takes work, but it’s doable—for you, in this life—in a reasonably short time, meaning a few years, a handful of years.
[Possible clarification needed: “few years/handful of years” appears as a general estimate, not a guarantee—confirm intent.]
It’s not going to happen with one awakening, I’ll tell you that.
It’s also not going to happen with non-dual awakening either.
But non-dual awakening with a bunch of shadow work is really the key to this.