I’ve been writing about my lifelong encounter with fear and panic for five or six years now, and there is a lot going on with me and fear at the moment, I want to share some of it with you in the hope that it will be helpful. I’ve worked at dealing with fear every day because I came to see how it was affecting, damaging, nearly destroying the best parts of the life I had and wanted. I was on anxiety medications for 30 years, saw therapists, analysts, homeopaths, spiritual counselors, shamans.

In the past months, several things relating to fear have changed for me. The panic that often interrupted my sleep, shadowed my days, affected my decisions, demeanor, choices is mostly gone. I go to sleep quickly, I wake up a few times, and then go back to sleep. I am experiencing periods of calm and peace for the first time in my life, and they are expanding. I have come to see fear not only as a geography, a space to cross, but as a habit, a tradition, a way of thinking that can be altered. This has taken a great deal of work but I do want to say I believe it can be done if someone really – really – wants to do it.

What has been working for me recently? I think all of the previous work – the therapists, counselors, shrinks – have helped me, moved me along. But in the last few months I have found a spiritual counselor who connects with me, who has challenged and educated me, who has helped me see fear as an entrenched habit. She has helped me detach myself from it, and see fear as separate from the reality of life. She has helped me learn to trust myself, my decisions, my competence and my skills. To stand in my truth, find my voice, and to speak it. Pam White has also helped me to use meditation in the most profoundly significant way, to see my mind at work and move through the fear to a more authentic voice.

Fear smothers hope and creativity and it blocks authenticity as well. The last few months have been difficult – sometimes terrifying – but I almost literally felt a poison passing through my body. I think of this encounter with fear as an exorcism.

I also have to say that my experience with a shamanic soul retriever – her name is Carol Tunney – was, to my surprise, mind-altering. Maria was the first to notice that I returned from these experiences different, changed. Soul retrievers go back in time to find the lost and damaged pieces of one’s soul and return them – this practice is many thousands of years old. It is not something I would have tried or believed in for most of my life. But I can’t deny the impact it had on me. I was shocked by the impact it had on me and some of my most entrenched and debilitating fears.

Then, there is Maria, who has spent many nights  – and says – of her life talking to me, calming me, listening to me, guiding me back to land. I could not have made this progress without here.  Is it not so that love is the most powerful medicine in the world?  It isn’t that any single one of these things magically transformed me. They are all of a piece. I am transforming me, and am not done yet, if I will ever be done. Piece by piece, day by day, insight by insight. Every burst of fear a gift, another illumination of our soul. Habits are hard to change, especially old ones acquired early in life.

I have always believed I could get there, always seen fear as something I was determined to move past. I have no illusions that it will disappear totally or forever – that seems myopic to me. But it is moving into its right place, a nasty habit in the corner of my mind, a shadow on the soul. It is not running my life anymore. It will never run my life again. I am clear in saying that because finally, and after so many years of wanting this, it is beginning to happen.