The Jungle, the fear and the joy of living

“Above all, liberation is blocked by the refusal to let go of the pursuit of security. ‘Letting go’ means (…) giving up the desire for security; it could be called breaking free, shaking off fear (…): We discover that the locks of our chains have disappeared, raise our arms – and our shackles fall off.
But – they cannot fall if we are still attached to them to the extent that we are afraid without them. Perhaps the chains are no longer attached to us, but we are still attached to them. Freeing ourselves from our attachment to the chains that bind us is the real task.”

Dr. Ernest Kurtz, 1935-2015

The Jungle

There is a positive side to fear. Fear is very human in the sense of a natural bodily reaction, it can make us wide awake, think ahead and stimulate creativity.

Roughly speaking, fear is therefore a very old reaction and it is the ability of humans to react to danger, and is generated quickly and directly in our nervous system.
All physical systems are put on alert. The three most typical reactions are FFF – Flight, Fight and Freeze.

Our world is incredibly full of fears, most of them unjustified, talked into and unfounded.

One wonders where our so-called civilization may have taken a wrong turn.

Is this really what life and evolution had in mind for humans?

Maybe we could sit in a time machine, travel back a few thousand years and see what people did differently back then and work out what the differences are to today?

Jean Liedloff (1926-2011) was an American psychotherapist, publicist and author. She did just that. She visited the Yequana Indians in the Venezuelan jungle several times. She wondered why they almost without exception still have a natural authenticity and connection, and why fear for them occurs practically only in the “natural” form – that is, as a protective mechanism for humans in the face of immediate threats to life.

When reading her book “The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost”, first published in the mid-1970s, you are virtually thrown from one insight into the next.

Fear and the question of how fear arises

So how does fear really arise, what are its roots?

A few years after the publication of Liedloff’s book and based, among other things, on Jean Liedloff’s findings, the psychotherapist Rainer Taëni addressed the topic in detail. He describes two stages:

As with other animals, humans also have an “expectation continuum”, i.e. the firmly anchored expectation of having certain instinctual needs met at a very specific time. Anxiety arises in this first stage when these instinctual needs of the young child are not met (in time). These needs are as follows:

=> Total, unconditional acceptance
=> Comprehensive physical contact (with all senses)
=> Freedom for creative exploration and playful experimentation with the environment
=> Unimpeded expression of all feelings
=> Own growth rhythm in which self-responsibility can be increasingly practiced.

Other independent urges that also need to be satisfied are the social drive – recognition and goodwill from the environment – the cuddle drive – which manifests itself later in adult life as the sex drive – the play drive – creative curiosity and the desire to experiment for its own sake – the urge for self-expression – i.e. the urge for self-expression, i.e. the direct and spontaneous expression of feelings, and finally the emancipatory urge, i.e. the need for self-determination.

If these urges and needs are not satisfied, or not satisfied at the right time, if these connections that are expected to be necessary for life do not come about, then in the case of a helpless and abandoned toddler, the feeling remains incomplete. The resulting pain is largely suppressed.

The second stage is then latent fear. And a general blockade that arises within ourselves.

This is how patterns and programs for warding off fear arise, along with numerous compensations in one’s own behavior; and if all of this does not yet help, then there’s the hope that psychopharmaceutical drugs will (these can be useful, but are now prescribed far too quickly).

Ultimately, it is a desperate search for healing or relief from the constant internal tension.
Making yourself small and also the inability to believe in yourself are ultimately a form of defense.

The resulting defense strategies are the real core of the problem and they permanently reinforce the toxic cycle of fear.

Fear has become a taboo and it is the fear of fear that strangles our life energy and leads to permanent underlying suffering.

But, no, life was not meant to be an event in which we suffer continuously.

Regaining the joy of life

We can regain our freedom.

We have to face what fear – or the fear of fear – tries to protect us from.
Over long periods of time, fear has also become neurologically ingrained in us and regularly triggers an alarm in the nervous system via the so-called amygdala (a kind of pre-filter unit in the brain), which can even lead to panic attacks.

Approaches and methods such as the so-called EmotionsCode and Introvision, but especially EMDR and Vivian Dittmar’s Wave Riding, are very well suited to getting to the core of all this, stopping the alarm and bringing to the surface the reasons for the fear of fear.
At last there’s room for “I can see clearly now” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0cAWgTPiwM Johnny Nash, 1972).

Two further things can then develop (again):

… the confidence to solve problems and issues in one’s own life;
… and secondly to do so in harmony with all parts; this is how “coherence” arises.

This is created when thinking, feeling and acting are well aligned and well connected. The German neuro-scientist Dr. Gerald Huether put it this way:

It is important to rediscover our ‘coherence restoration competence’.

That is the very way out of fear and its defense mechanisms as well as the tendency to worry too much –
the direct path towards more serenity and a more balanced life.
On the other hand, courageously facing fear leads to an unprecedented clarity and presence.

Real life is an event with compulsory attendance, and the regained sense of connection leads
to awareness and mindfulness.

So – to return to Dr. Ernest Kurtz – This is how we manage to free ourselves from the attachment to the chains that bind us. And then a pure zest for life may arise, without reason.