What Lives in the Dark: A Spiritual Guide to Working with What Frightens You
Fear is a normal part of life. In fact, fear is part of who we are. We’ve all felt it, and in some instances, it has likely kept you alive. But even though we know fear is to be expected, that it’s part of life, most of us avoid it if we can. While on the surface it might seem obvious why, lately I’ve been asking myself: why do I fear fear?
In my own spiritual and self-care practices, fear comes up often. The same is true in my work with clients. Fear, anger, grief, and sadness are probably the most common emotional experiences that arise in both my personal and professional life — so I wasn’t surprised when a client asked me to explore fear in my public content. It’s her request that prompted this deeper dive, and in considering how to approach the topic of fear, I reflected on teachings I was already familiar with. I also considered how fear has been approached by spiritual teachers and thinkers across time. There’s a lot to cover. Let’s get into it.
Throughout history, humanity’s deepest wisdom traditions have reframed fear not as an enemy to be conquered, but as a sacred landscape to be explored. In Eastern philosophies, fear is viewed as a gateway to profound awakening. Thích Nhất Hạnh embodied this most directly in terms of spiritual teachings that I’m familiar with. The late Vietnamese Zen monk and global peace activist revolutionized Western mindfulness by teaching that fear is an intrinsic energy that cannot be suppressed. Instead of fighting it, he advised treating fear like a crying baby, generating a field of mindfulness to mentally hold it while whispering, “Hello, my fear, I know you are there, and I will take care of you.”
This compassionate care pairs naturally with the teachings of Pema Chödrön, the prominent American Tibetan Buddhist nun and author of When Things Fall Apart. Chödrön takes this gentleness a step further into radical intimacy, urging us to “lean in” to our sharpest anxieties. She teaches that the raw, uncomfortable presence of fear is not a sign of failure, but a compass pointing directly toward our inherent courage and breaking our illusion of false security.
To understand why fear holds such a tight grip on our minds, Western and modern thinkers look at the mechanics of thought itself. Famed spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle explains in The Power of Now that psychological fear is a creation of the human ego, which cannot survive in the present moment. Because the ego relies on time, fear is always about what might happen in an imagined future, dissolving entirely when our attention is pulled firmly into the absolute “Now.”
The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti deepened this insight by demonstrating that fear is simply thought operating across time. The mind remembers past pain and projects it forward, but by practicing “choiceless awareness” — observing fear directly in the body without naming or judging it — we break this mental timeline. Martin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, argued that deep, objectless anxiety (Angst) is a vital wake-up call. While everyday fears make us run toward social conformity, confronting our deepest anxieties strips away worldly illusions, forcing us to take responsibility for our short lives and transforming fear into an engine for authentic, purposeful living.
However one chooses to relate to their fear, the fact is, we all have it. Maybe your fear sounds like: I’m afraid of dying. I’m afraid of losing someone I love. I’m afraid no one will ever truly love me. I’m afraid of being abandoned, left, outgrown, or simply not chosen. I’m afraid that even the people closest to me don’t really see me — and that if they did, they might not stay. These are not small fears. They are not irrational. They are some of the most human fears there are.
The Biology of Fear
Threat detection is an old and elegant system designed to keep us alive. The amygdala (the brain’s threat detection center) can begin responding to perceived danger in as little as 170 to 200 milliseconds, before conscious awareness even registers what’s happening. Fear is literally faster than thought.
Avoidance is the biological point of fear. Our threat detection system is designed to make fear uncomfortable, and that discomfort compels us to move — to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. When fear arises, a strong physiological response follows. The challenge emerges when that system becomes our baseline state: when we’re always running, always in that low-grade hum of go, go, go, not because danger is present, but because our nervous system hasn’t learned that it’s safe to stop.
When fear activates, your body responds in a predictable sequence: heart rate spikes, stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline flood your system, vision narrows, and the brain’s capacity for reflection essentially goes offline — because in that moment, your body isn’t interested in nuance. It’s interested in survival. The thing is, this same cascade can fire in response to an email from your boss, a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding, or even a thought about something that hasn’t happened yet.
Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a genuine threat and a perceived one. Which means you can find yourself in full physiological fight-or-flight over something you know logically poses no real danger.
Think of it this way: your body is still running ancient survival software, calibrated for the brutal and unpredictable environments your ancestors had to navigate. That system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do — keep you alive.
Your Fear Inventory
I want to invite you into an exercise — one I hope will help you begin exploring your own relationship to fear.
Start simply: what are you afraid of right now? Write it down if you can. Don’t edit. Don’t explain. Just name it.
If your list feels abstract or blank, try these as a starting place: Am I afraid of dying — or of watching someone I love die? Am I afraid of being abandoned, of being left or outgrown or simply not chosen? Am I afraid that even the people closest to me don’t see me — and that if they did, they might not stay? Am I afraid of getting sick, or of not being enough?
As you write or think, notice what happens in your body. Where do you feel it? The chest? The stomach? The jaw? The breath? There are no wrong answers. Fear lives in the body before it lives anywhere else.
Now look at your list. Can you trace any of these fears? Do they have a story — a specific moment, a particular loss, a relationship that taught you something was dangerous? Or do some of them feel present without explanation?
A few more questions to sit with:
When have you been afraid? Not just the fears present now, but a memory of being afraid. Where were you? How old? Was anyone with you?
What happened to that fear — did it move through you, or did it stay?
How were you supported — or not supported — when you were experiencing it?
Was a younger version of you managing fear entirely alone?
Where Fear Comes From
This is where it gets interesting. Some of our fears are logical and traceable — they make complete sense given what we’ve lived. Others arrived without our permission: inherited, absorbed, imprinted before we were old enough to examine them.
There’s epigenetic research that backs this up. Epigenetics is the study of how behaviors and environmental factors cause changes that affect how genes are expressed — not by altering the underlying DNA sequence, but by switching genes on or off. A 2014 study by Dias and Ressler, published in Nature Neuroscience, showed that fear responses associated with specific scents were passed to mouse offspring who had never encountered the original threat. The fear conditioned in one generation showed up in the nervous systems of the next — carried in the sperm cells of the conditioned fathers.
It’s likely that some of what you carry was not yours to begin with. And yet your nervous system carries it as if it happened to you. Because in a real sense, it did.
This is a topic I’m deeply interested in for personal reasons. I was raised by a parent who had a very traumatic childhood. I’m not going to go into detail — this parent is still living, and I’m not sure it’s my story to tell right now. But for the purposes of this piece, I want to name that much of the fear I carry feels like it was passed down to me. I didn’t know that for a long time. I’m still uncovering fear sensations that, when I sit with them, don’t feel like mine. Working through this with skilled practitioners has been one of the most valuable things I’ve done for my health and well-being.
The tools that have helped me most are ancestral lineage work and Internal Family Systems, or IFS. Combined with my development as an evidential psychic medium, these modalities have been genuinely profound. If you’re curious about what this work might look like, I recommend Listening When Parts Speak by Tamala Floyd, which weaves IFS and ancestral wisdom together beautifully.
In IFS and in many ancestral healing traditions, there’s a distinction made between two kinds of burdens we carry: personal burdens and legacy burdens.
Personal burdens come from your own lived experience — the shame from something that happened to you, the anxiety wired in by a relationship or event you lived through. Legacy burdens are different. They’re inherited fears, beliefs, and behavioral patterns passed down through family systems, cultural conditioning, or ancestral experience. The grandmother’s unprocessed war trauma. The family rule nobody named but everyone followed. The cultural wound absorbed before you had language for it.
The distinction matters because they feel different from the inside. Personal burdens feel like your pain. Legacy burdens often carry a quality of this doesn’t quite belong to me — and yet they shape behavior just as powerfully. Both can be unburdened, though legacy burdens often require reaching back through the lineage to release them fully. The goal in either case is the same: restoring the parts of you that have been carrying what was never theirs to hold.
Three Origins of Fear
To recap what we’ve covered so far, fear tends to originate from three places:
Biological and evolutionary: hardwired threat responses, the ancient survival system. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish well between a charging predator and a difficult conversation. The fear of dying, of physical harm, of losing someone to illness or accident — this is the oldest fear there is. It runs in everybody.
Learned and conditioned: fears acquired through direct experience, modeling from caregivers, classical conditioning. We learn fear quickly and forget it slowly. The fear of abandonment often lives here — taught by a relationship that fell apart, a parent who was inconsistent, a love that came with conditions. The fear of not being truly seen frequently has a specific origin too: a home or classroom or relationship where being known felt unsafe, or simply never happened.
Inherited and transmitted: fears that arrive through family systems, cultural frameworks, religious teachings, and epigenetic imprinting. Anxiety about harm coming to loved ones is often transmitted this way — a parent’s unresolved grief or vigilance landing in the body of the child, carried forward as if the original loss were still happening.
Beyond biology, consider the cultural and religious fear frameworks many of us were raised inside. Fear of hell, fear of divine punishment, fear of being wrong or impure or unworthy — these are among the most durable fears humans carry, precisely because they were installed before critical thinking was available.
Your inventory may hold fears that feel old — fears that, if you examined them, belong to a child who didn’t yet know she was allowed to know differently.
Research adds another layer. A 2018 review in World Psychiatry by Rachel Yehuda and Amy Lehrner found that children of Holocaust survivors showed altered stress hormone patterns — suggesting that trauma leaves a biological signature that can be passed down. Epigenetics points toward molecular-level transmission, though the field is still working out the mechanisms. We’re only beginning to understand how fear travels through generations, but what’s already emerging is worth sitting with.
Fear or Intuition?
Now that we’ve explored fear and where it comes from, I want to address one of the biggest questions I get when helping people develop a relationship with their intuitive self: how do I know if it’s fear or intuition?
Fear and intuition can feel nearly identical in the body — a quickening, a knowing, a pull away from something. In spiritual communities, there’s often enormous pressure to read every charged feeling as guidance. But not every activation in the body is the voice of spirit or intuition. Sometimes it’s the nervous system running old code.
Here are some distinctions worth sitting with:
Fear contracts, catastrophizes, and loops. Intuition tends to be quieter, more present-tense, and doesn’t need you to spin.
Fear has a familiar flavor — it usually connects to something old. Intuition often feels new, even surprising.
Fear tells you what you don’t want. Intuition tends to point toward something, even when what it’s pointing toward is uncomfortable.
Fear gets louder when you argue with it. Intuition doesn’t argue — it just stays.
From a neuroscience standpoint, this isn’t just poetic advice. Mindfulness practices have been shown to reduce amygdala reactivity and strengthen the hippocampus’s ability to contextualize threat — essentially training the brain to distinguish between a past danger and a present moment. That capacity for discernment isn’t separate from spiritual practice. It’s the foundation.
Creating the Gap
When intensity rises (think sensation, emotion, racing thoughts) the most useful thing you can do is create a gap before you act or interpret. The activation will peak and then subside, usually within a few minutes — but only if you don’t keep feeding it. The emotion has a lifespan. You don’t have to solve it.
A few practices that work:
Two quick inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth. This is called a physiological sigh. It re-inflates the lungs and activates the parasympathetic nervous system almost immediately — one of the fastest known ways to downregulate in real time.
Bilateral tapping — alternating light taps on the chest or knees. Rhythmic, bilateral stimulation helps discharge activation and signals safety to the nervous system, drawing on the same principles as EMDR.
Just breathe and wait. You’re not trying to figure anything out yet. You’re letting the wave pass.
Once the intensity settles, you can ask: is this old, or is this now? Is this mine, or did I inherit it? That’s where discernment becomes possible. You can’t hear intuition clearly from inside a threat response. The gap is where it lives.
Tending Fear, Not Transcending It
Now that we’ve looked at what fear is, where it comes from, and how to begin telling it apart from intuition — I want to sit with a bigger question. These aren’t practices that produce instant results. They require tending over time. So, what does it mean to tend fear, rather than transcend it?
Across traditions, fear has been a threshold. In the Christian mystic tradition, the dark night of the soul moves through fear toward transformation. In Buddhist practice, the instruction is not to escape suffering but to turn toward it with clarity and compassion. In many indigenous traditions, fear signals the proximity of something powerful — something that requires preparation and respect, not avoidance.
Tending fear is not the same as dwelling in it. It is not rumination. It is not performing your wounds. It is the practice of turning toward what frightens you with curiosity and care — with enough grounding in the body that you don’t get swept away.
What tending looks like in practice:
The fear inventory — not as a one-time exercise, but as a seasonal check-in. What fears are present right now? Have any shifted?
Body-based regulation as devotional practice — nervous system care as a form of spiritual self-tending.
Asking the fear what it needs, rather than trying to eliminate it. Treat fear as a part of you with information, not as an enemy to defeat.
Discernment practice — learning to distinguish old fear from present guidance. This is ongoing. It doesn’t resolve into a formula.
Community and co-regulation — social engagement is one of the most powerful regulators of the nervous system. We tend fear better together or with the support of another person we trust.
And for those of you doing work with the dead — with grief, with loss, with the question of what comes after — tending fear means eventually sitting with the one that underlies all others: that we, too, will die. That those we love will die.
Mediumship, for me, has not erased that fear. It has changed my relationship to it. That is what tending does. It doesn’t make the fear disappear. It makes it livable.
Here is what tends to happen when we stop running: our fears begin to reveal things. The fear of abandonment, tended honestly, often points toward a deep need for secure attachment — and beneath that, a self who hasn’t yet learned that she can be her own consistent presence. The fear of not being truly seen often reveals an unexpressed self, a part of you that has been waiting for permission to be known. These fears are not just problems to solve. They are maps. They are pointing at real needs, real desires, real parts of you that have been asking for care.
And here is the part that took me a long time to really understand, some of what your fear is asking for, only you can give. Not a partner. Not a teacher. Not a community, as much as community matters. There is a version of you that has been waiting — patiently, persistently — for you to turn toward her. To ask what she needs. To stop outsourcing her safety to people and circumstances that were never meant to hold all of it. We are, in the most practical and unglamorous sense, the ones we have been waiting for. Tending fear is how we begin to show up for that work.
Fear and the Shadow: A Cross-Cultural View
When people come to fear work, they often arrive already curious about shadow work. The connection makes sense. Shadow work and fear work are not the same thing, but they are deeply related — and understanding that relationship can change how you approach both.
A Brief History
The term “shadow” in the psychological sense was coined by Carl Jung in the early twentieth century. For Jung, the shadow is the part of the psyche that holds what we have rejected, suppressed, or disowned — not necessarily because it is evil, but because at some point it felt too dangerous, too shameful, or too unacceptable to carry in the light. Fear is almost always involved in the formation of the shadow. We split off what we were afraid to be seen having.
But the concept of a hidden or disowned inner realm predates Jung by millennia. In ancient Egyptian thought, the “ka” — the spiritual double — carried aspects of the self that were invisible in ordinary life. In Vedic traditions, the concept of the “samskaras” describes deep impressions left by unprocessed experience, including fear, that shape behavior from below conscious awareness. Buddhist teachings on the “kilesas” (mental defilements or obscurations) point to a similar idea: that unexamined states cloud perception and perpetuate suffering. In many West African spiritual traditions, including those carried into the diaspora through Vodou and Candomblé, the principle of the hidden or unintegrated self appears in practices of ancestral healing and spirit possession — the community holding what the individual cannot hold alone.
Jung didn’t invent the idea. He gave it a name in a Western psychological framework. What he contributed — and what remains useful — is the idea that integration, not elimination, is the goal. The shadow isn’t meant to be destroyed. It’s meant to be met.
What Science Has to Say
Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have produced a body of research that maps onto shadow work in interesting ways, even when it doesn’t use that language. The work of Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine establishes that unprocessed trauma — including fear — is stored in the body and in implicit memory systems that operate below conscious awareness. These are, in functional terms, shadow material: experiences that were too overwhelming to integrate, now shaping behavior from somewhere the conscious mind can’t easily reach.
Research on expressive writing (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, 1997) shows that putting language to previously avoided emotional experiences reduces physiological stress markers and improves immune function over time. This is essentially the mechanism behind many shadow work practices: bringing what was hidden into articulation. More recent research in emotion regulation suggests that “affect labeling” — simply naming what you feel — reduces amygdala activation (Lieberman et al., 2007). Naming the shadow doesn’t just feel therapeutic. It is, neurologically, a de-escalation.
Internal Family Systems maps onto shadow work particularly well here. IFS founder Richard Schwartz describes “exiles” — parts of us that carry unbearable burdens of fear, shame, or grief and have been locked away by protective parts who believe they’re keeping us safe. Shadow work in the IFS frame is the gradual, compassionate retrieval of those exiles from the interior dark. Fear is almost always the exile’s primary burden, and the protectors — the ones who manage or deflect that fear — are often the parts we mistake for our whole personality.
Shadow Work Across Cultures
Most traditions have a version of this work, even if the language and cosmology differ significantly. In Shamanic traditions across Siberia, the Americas, and Central Asia, illness and spiritual distress are often understood as the result of soul fragmentation — parts of the self split off during overwhelming experiences (including frightening ones) and needing retrieval. Soul retrieval is, in essence, shadow integration: going into the underworld or the unseen to bring back what was lost.
In Taoism, the concept of yin carries a related principle: the dark, the hidden, the receptive are not problems to be solved but essential aspects of wholeness. To suppress yin — to refuse the shadow — creates imbalance. The Taoist path involves neither indulgence nor avoidance, but the cultivation of presence with what is.
In many Indigenous North American traditions, vision quests and rites of passage are deliberately designed to bring the initiate face-to-face with their fears — often through solitude, darkness, fasting, and the dismantling of ordinary defenses. The community holds the container; the individual does the descent. This is not pathology. It is recognized, supported transformation.
In the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the concept of the “klipot” — shells or husks that obscure divine light — functions similarly: the work of tikkun (repair or rectification) involves engaging with what obscures, not pretending it isn’t there. In Sufi mysticism, the nafs — the ego-self with its fears, desires, and attachments — is not condemned but refined through spiritual discipline and honest self-examination.
What is striking, across all of these frameworks, is the consistency of the basic insight: what we refuse to see in ourselves does not disappear. It goes underground, and it shapes us from there. The path forward, in almost every tradition, runs through the fear — not around it.
A Practice Note
If shadow work is calling you, a useful entry point is the fear inventory you’ve already done. Look at what you wrote. Then ask: which of these fears do I most want to hide from others? Which one, if someone named it about me, would make me most defensive? That defensiveness — that place where you want to look away — is often the edge of the shadow. It isn’t a verdict. It’s a doorway.
Shadow work is not the same as wallowing. It is not digging endlessly through your wounds in the dark. Done well — ideally with support — it is oriented toward integration: toward making the unconscious conscious, so that your fear becomes information rather than fate.
A note: this piece is for educational and reflective purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you’re navigating persistent anxiety, trauma, or emotional distress, please work with a qualified mental health professional. What’s here is meant to companion that work and for those individuals who feel resourced enough to engage this type of self-reflection on their own.
References
Neuroscience of Fear
Öhman, A. (2005). The role of the amygdala in human fear: Automatic detection of threat. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 30(10), 953–958.
Shin, L.M. & Liberzon, I. (2010). The neurocircuitry of fear, stress, and anxiety disorders. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35(1), 169–191.
Intergenerational Transmission
Dias, B.G. & Ressler, K.J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience, 17(1), 89–96.
Yehuda, R. & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: Putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.
Shadow Work and Emotion Processing
Lieberman, M.D. et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
Pennebaker, J.W. & Beall, S.K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.
Pennebaker, J.W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.
Somatic and Nervous System Frameworks
Levine, P.A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice. North Atlantic Books.
Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W.W. Norton.
van der Kolk, B.A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
Balban, M.Y. et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895.
Mindfulness and Fear Regulation
Sevinc, G. et al. (2019). Strengthened hippocampal circuits underlie enhanced retrieval of extinguished fear memory following mindfulness training. Biological Psychiatry, 86(12), 969–977.
For Deeper Exploration
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. W.W. Norton.
Floyd, T. (2023). Listening When Parts Speak. Sounds True.
Schwartz, R.C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.
Wolynn, M. (2016). It Didn’t Start With You. Viking.