Healing through the Dark Emotions by Miriam Greenspan

Author:Miriam Greenspan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

7 From Fear to Joy

Courage is mastery of fear—not absence of fear.

—MARK TWAIN, Pudd’nhead Wilson

Where there is fear, there is power.

—STARHAWK, Dreaming the Dark

The Landscape of Fear in the Age of Anxiety

I am troubled by shapeless fears. My God, these anxieties! Who can live in the modern world without catching his share of them?

—VINCENT VAN GOGH

FEARLESS JACK IS A FOLKTALE HERO with an odd affliction: He can’t feel fear. Because he is fearless, he is also joyless. He can’t be happy until he is capable of trembling with fear.

So Jack sets off on a journey to find fear. He travels to a land where the king has promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who will spend three nights in the enchanted castle full of horrible creatures. No problem for Jack. The first night, his sleep is interrupted by three huge, ferocious cats. He drives them away and returns to a sound slumber. The second night, he is confronted by a man with his torso cut in half. The two of them play a game of skittles with the bones of two skeletons. Jack wins the game and chases the halved man out of the castle. On the third night, he matches wits with a giant who threatens to kill him, pinning the giant to an anvil with his own ax. Jack sleeps like a log and emerges the next morning, having cleansed the castle of its monsters.

Success in his mission earns Jack the hand of the beautiful princess. But he is still unhappy, because he has not yet learned to feel fear. So the princess consults with the local wise woman, who knows just what to do. She instructs the princess to rise before dawn and draw some water from the fountain in a golden jug. When Jack is asleep, she is to throw the water at him, catching him off guard so that he’ll awaken in a fright.

This is how the story ends: The princess does as she is told. Jack wakes up, trembling with fear. From that day on, he is completely happy!

Fearless Jack is not a popular folk story. It’s virtually unknown. I found it in a children’s book of folktales years ago, and I’ve never met anyone who ever heard of it. It’s not a tale that has stuck with us because Fearless Jack is not exactly your typical male hero. His journey in search of fear, in our culture, would be regarded as singularly unmasculine. Why would a man want to find and feel fear? How can fearlessness be an obstacle to joy? The story seems to have it backward. In a fear-negating culture, we think of fear as the obstacle and fearlessness as the solution. Having no fear is the quintessential mark of courage.

But the courage in this story is not about fearlessly killing monsters; it’s about breaking through emotional numbness and recovering the capacity to feel. Killing monsters is no problem for Jack, because he is numb. And being numb is a problem for anyone who wants to live with joy.

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