The Many Faces of Fear

Doing some stumbling around online today I came across this fascinating little list over at PhobiaGuide.Com of all the different shapes and sizes our fears take. Hundreds of different kinds of ways to recoil from the world around us have been written about and catagorized. It seems strange to me that the worlds drug companies haven't invented the 'anti-fear' pill yet. there is a massive market cornered mostly by psychiatrists and self help gurus (not to mention religion) sulking around waiting to be prescribed the cure. Well I for one am still hopeful. Maybe in another couple years, but in the mean time, while I'm waiting for the singularity to hit, we need some practical suggestions on dealing with fear now.

If You're a little bit of a self-improvement junkie like I am, then You've read all kinds of different, and often conflicting views on dealing with fears and keeping life's challenges in a healthy perspective. I break them down into three categories that often overlap, just as a convenient way to organize the different schools of thought.

1. YOU CAN DO IT.!.!

The Idea:
This could also be called the 'be afraid and do it anyway' camp. Characterized by the lack of mental technique besides focusing of awareness, pushing your body through the activity in question with brute force and will-power. RAWGH


This is the school of thought represented by former gym coaches of mine and my parents growing up. Just power your way through. The way to conquer fears is by getting through them. afraid of heights? go skydiving. afraid of sharks? scuba dive. Basic. However when it comes to some more extreme cases, or the existential fears many of us deal with as we come of age. This kind of simple solution might not be enough. "Have a fear of death? try dieing." just doesn't cut it.
This kind of 'right attitude' is an important fundamental building block toward a more fearless self but some fears are going to take something more.


2. Body Language/NLP

The Idea
If you've never heard of NLP, its really a large topic that would take up more than just one article. For the purposes of dealing with fears though, there are a few interesting things that NLP has to suggest we might find useful. I should say that before I get too into it, I am not a diehard NLP fan, the deeper one gets into NLP the loftier and more difficult to falsify the ideas become. However, I find some of the general principles and ideas underlying NLP to be useful. Tony Robbins is quoted as saying:

'there is no body, only mind' interchangeably with 'there is no mind only body'

which is a fancy zennerific way of saying the mind and body are linked. This point seems obvious but many think its a one way street.
We all know that the way we feel and think influences our immune system, our blood pressure, and our brains. We know that when a person is in a bad mood they will display that in their body language and posture. Could it also work the other way around?


Try this experiment: note the way depressed or scared people hold their shoulders, where they cast their gaze, the tone and pacing of their voice. Make a mental note of these. Repeat this process with someone who you know to be genuinely happy, fearless or content in their life. Note their voice, body language, facial expressions etc. Now, whenever you get a moment alone (you don't want to do this with anyone around who might think you're starting to loose it) mimic the body language of the sad person. Maybe say hello or read a bit out loud to yourself in the subjects tone of voice. After about five minutes as this 'character' try being the 'happy person' for a while. Notice the differences made in how you feel, simply by changing your body. For many people its a big suprise to discover that your body responds to how you feel, but how you feel can also be changed by what you do with your body. If you had success at this, try 'modeling' the physical actions of other humans who exhibit fearlessness and joy, whatever that means to you.

Another central technique in NLP for dealing with phobias and irrational fears is identifying the specific sensory modalities at work in a persons mind when they're afraid. For instance, Pete is afraid of flying, he simply can't set foot on a plane. After asking him specifically what goes through his head when the fear hits him, we discover that he envisions the plane divebombing toward the ground and being pinned in his seat as he plummets to his death. Gruesome to be sure.
Now we ask Pete to close his eyes and visualize the plane divebombing, only to consciously do it in black and white, and instead of the noise of the plane or people screaming, were going to ask him to imagine hearing some kind of absurd music, like polka playing in the background. Now if he can hold all this together we see what else Pete can do to basically to scramble the relationship his mind has to these particular images/sounds/feelings that are causing him fear. Another tid bit of information that some NLPers find important is to imagine ones self in the third person when trying to scramble a fear, as opposed to reliving the fear seeing through your own eyes. Again, the peer reviewed research may not back up the totality of the claims made by NLP, but I have found this technique personally useful for simple phobias and basic fears.


3. Mindfulness/Meditation
The last technique I want to discuss comes from a more contemplative/mindfulness based perspective. I hope to go deeper into the philisophical background of meditation, specifically zazen When it comes to dealing with some of the deeper emotional fears in life, i.e. fears over losing a loved one, children, fears of dieing, fears of failure etc. I find mindfulness based awareness to be the most effective way to truly resolve the problem at the root.

The Idea:
Find a comfortable place where you can sit upright, preferably in a position that minimizes the potential for sleep.When practicing meditation or mindfulness, the idea is not to repress thoughts or ideas, but to let them go, simply noticing that you are having a thought but you are not that thought. Noticing the fear arising, and just being with the fear while it stays, then eventually watching the fear as it goes. Where is the fear in your body? is it in the stomach? the chest? do you maybe feel a twitch or some discomfort somewhere? go into these feelings. Don't judge yourself or give yourself a hard time for not being able to hold the mind still. Thats the nature of mind. Just notice the fear, notice it in your body, and hold your focus there just being with the bare sensation of that fear, watching it change with every in breath and out breath. Watching fears come and go, watching joys come and go, but noticing the whole time how your awareness itself is fundamentally unchanged.
This kind of non-grasping awareness takes time and practice, at least twenty minutes a day, but if you can get the hang of it releasing your problems and fears will only be the beginning of your path as a meditator. Here's a great final clip on mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Hope you guys found some of this useful in your path to fearlessness.

A few people who are definitely NOT afraid of heights.

A great method for motivating myself day to day is to spend a little time watching and listening to individuals who have conquered much bigger obstacles and taken far more serious risks than I encounter regularly. Many people will call these performers/artists/athletes madmen or insane, but watching someone stare death in the eyes and take their lives into their own hands, trusting their own skills and knowledge to keep them alive, I can't help but find that a little inspiring.

I dont really know the story behind this one but I showed it to a few people at work and we all agreed, its fucking crazy. Most people are quick to dismiss these guys as absolutely nuts, but its not everyday you meet people who do things that require this much gravitas. They have to be in a totally different headspace. I'm guessing that after hanging off a building doing a few pull ups with a 70+ story plunge beneath you the next traffic jam or long line at the bank won't stress you out too much. It reminds me of the line from fight club about fighting 'turning the volume down' on the rest of your life. These dudes have to be on mute.


The epic Alain Robert. This guy is truely amazing. Imagine having already made a name for yourself in rock climbing, then going on to free hand climb more than eighty of the worlds tallest buildings, each time risking guarenteed death if you make one mistake. Now, while were pretending, imagine you also have permanent vertigo from a near 50 foot fall from when you were twenty. Thats life for Alain Robert. Massive fearlessness.


This is Greg Gasson. He's jumping out of a plane... holding a parachute... not wearing a parachute... holding it. Just watching this makes some kind of little muscles twitch in the back of my neck, just a little slip and it would be a huge fall... with plenty of time to think about what you had just done. It looks like he works as a stuntman now, and skydiving cameraman. Not too suprised to find he bailed out of the computer programming industry. Doesn't quite seem his speed.


Now, we have Dean Potter, walking the Lost Arrow Spire. Located in Yosemite National Park. Its about 3,000 feet up and 55 feet across. No safety line. Slacklining is a great activity for cultivating some mind/body balancing. You can do it two feet off the ground or three thousand. Anyway, Dean Potter is a total pro and as a double bonus, a clip of him doing a fusion of base jumping and highlining that he calls 'baselining'. Breath-taking.

A critical look at Goji Marketing.

If you're a regular health food store shopper, or someone working in the health food industry, you're probably already familiar with the goji berry. It was a little over a year ago, when I began a new job at a health food store, that I first encountered the little bright red raison looking berries myself. I can remember clearly my bikey vegan health nut friend telling me in no uncertain terms that goji is one of the healthiest foods in the world bar none. I didn't give it much thought at the time, considering it another flash in the pan fad. Then in the last year, the shelves have been exploding with more goji related product than you can shake a stick at. Going over a mental inventory right now I can count no less than ten different products we sell that include goji berries or goji juice as a main ingredient, three or four different brands of pure goji berries in a package, and who knows how many supplements contain or are solely composed of goji. With this kind of interest building and more and more goji products hitting the shelves each month, its easy to see why its expected to be an important part of a multi-billion dollar super-fruits market by 2011.

A staple in Traditional Chinese Medicine its no wonder that its caught on in the west, where anything with a long winding mountain path on the box, or an ancient buddhist temple hidden amidst the fog, is enough to ensure its place in the immortality regime of todays 'alternate health practitioners'. It plays a central role in some of the super-longevity myths so often quoted by eastern inspired longevity herbalists. However the stories of taoist masters and moutain mystics living well into their two hundreds and beyond is far from substantiated to say the least.

Goji, or Wolf Berry is the name given to the berry harvested from either the Lycium Barbarum or the Lycium Chinense shrub, both of which are members of the Solanacae or Nightshade family. The benefits attributed to Goji include everything from strengthening the immune system, to gaining more sexual vitality, to healthy skin, hair, and teeth, you name it and TCM believes goji will enhance it. While the research may likely show that goji berries do have some beneficial properties, the over-zealous and infomercialesque market campaigns behind alot of the products are worth raising a real skeptical brow over:

While reading some of the material on the web about goji, 95% of which seems to be put there by people involved in MLM or other kinds of gimmicky marketing ploys to sell the goji juice itself, I happened upon a piece of writing by Dr. Ralph Moss called "A Friendly Skeptic Looks at Goji Juice". In the article Dr. Moss uses the PubMed open database to check out the peer reviewed information and research surrounding Goji. After finding a single clinical trial study the Doctor highlights the fact that, though the findings are positive, some key questions about the study's methodology are left out of the abstract. He rightly concludes that it may very well be an important finding but with such little evidence to go on it seems a bit hasty to start making the kinds of ultra-bold claims of the goji peddlers:

Dr. Moss article seemed sensible and well written, he backed up his points with foot-notes and generally remained 'friendly' as he said he would. The fact that he acknowledges that there may very well be benefits is a very important point to make. Seperate from whether or not Goji does have such amazing benefits, the problem is not whether it works or not but the kind of claims being made about it well overstating any kind of evidence we have at this point. Returning to the google search page I clicked the link just beneath it entitled

'Letter to All the Goji Juice GoChi Skeptics Out There!' from an anonymous author and website selling... thats right you guessed it, himalayan goji juice.

Suffice it to say the writer disagrees with Dr. Moss and makes his case, conveniently ignoring all the information brought to the table in the first article. But it is statements like this:

First let me say this and I'm not necessarily trying to lump this friendly goji skeptic in with these people, however I just wanted to bring to light some additional insight about skeptics in general.

That immediately set off huckster alarms right off the bat. I believe there are two kinds of skeptics, those who see skepticism as a type of world view, a priori dictating what is and isn't bullshit, and those who use skepticism as a method of inquiry. An intellectual strategy starting with the almost universally recognized fact that humans are best at fooling themselves. Because of our predisposition to believing what we want, as opposed to what the evidence tells us, we use the scientific method as the closest possible way to make meaningful objective functional statements about reality. Any time I see someone playing up the importance of personal anecdotes and subjective experience in place of peer-reviewed research, I assume they want the issue to remain muddy. Its this type of response to critical thinking that needs to be addressed no just in the goji berry marketing, but in health-food and supplement marketing in general.

I want to repeat that this isn't to say I think the goji berry is 'unhealthy' . I think its highly likely we will find that its a great addition to a healthy diverse diet. At this point, its too early to tell if its really the fountain of youth its been billed as. I happen to eat them simply because I enjoy their flavor, mixed with mulberries, golden raisons, nuts and raw cacao, its called the 'go take a hike' mix, and its significantly less expensive than the supplement/juice so my wallet isn't hurting. This post isn't to bash the noble goji berry, oh no, merely to highlight the marketing that happens to come along with the product, and how that marketing plays into the already confusing, dishonest and unverified health claims spread so casually in the health food industry today.

Loren Cordain speech on MS

The paleolithic diet, is a dietary protocol mimicking the types of food that our ancestor, paleolithic man ate, millions of years ago. The central premise of this diet is the idea that our genome hasn't significantly changed since the paleolithic period, well before the age of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, and the addition of animal milks, grains, lentils and refined sugars. Before this epic shift in the eating patterns of the human species, all humans world wide subsisted on the same basic groups of food: fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and meat. 

Its argued by researchers like Loren Cordain, and people like Arthur DeVany that eating a modern diet, which either drastically limits or removes entirely dairy and grain products, sticking to the food of our ancestors, we can reduce our risks significantly of getting any of the metabolic diseases so common among middle aged and older people in the developed world.

I plan on writing a more in depth blog post on the paleo-diet in the next few days, but in the mean time, I really wanted to post this video series of Loren Cordain speaking about the relationship between the Paleo-Diet and Multiple sclerosis. The first part of the presentation serves as a decent introduction to Cordain's ideas and the Paleo-Diet in general.

Follow the links to 2/7- 7/7

-Chris

My Top Five Hang Drum Videos

  The hang drum. If you haven't encountered the spacey melodic sound of the hang drum on you-tube or google video by now, you might be in for a delightful surprise. Its this half bongo, half pan drum made by a couple artists in switzerland who call themselves 'PANart'. The word hang, (pronounced hong) apparently is a Bernese-German word for 'hand'. The 'drum' is notoriously hard to aquire, with the instrument-makers personally making each one themselves in their small workshop in Berne. There is a long waiting list involved and currently, according to the wiki, the production of further drums is temporarily on hold, which is only driving the price of used hang's up and up. Below I've thrown up my top five hang videos for your listening and viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

1. Manu Delago
     Be sure to check out the rest of Manu's videos and swing by his site, really one of the top              players I've seen online.



2. Kind of shitty video quality here but a great explanation of how the instrument works and            some of the vocabulary.



3. Not the best playing in the world, in fact kind of bad, but I added it simply because three              hippies huddled around a hang drum is funny to me for some reason. Less is more.



4. Davide Swarup
     Definitely one of my favorites by far. He has a c.d. out which I haven't had the chance to hear,      but the look on the faces of
     passer-bys when he's street performing says everything about his skills.



5. Last but not least, a great setting for a hang session and a great jam to boot.