Does Meditation Make You Fearless?

Fear can get in our way of achieving our potential, but does meditation play a role in reducing that fear or making you fearless? 

Meditation can absolutely make you fearless. But it will often come as a byproduct of pushing through weeks and sometimes months or even years of consistent practice. 

With meditation, you will be facing your demons, but grow stronger both mentally and emotionally from it. 

There are things buried in your subconscious that can be attributed to the source of most of your fears, but fortunately, meditation allows you to tap into your subconscious, address the fears and weaken the mind’s role in controlling you.

The mind hates meditation and often turns away from anything uncomfortable and hard. When it comes to fear, the mind will often exaggerate these fears to the point where these fears seem so big that you might feel like you can’t confront them. 

The issue only gets worse if we neglect to address these fears and run away every time they show up in, or out of the meditation practice. 

Now there are some fears that are completely reasonable and crucial for our survival. Fear is also a primal emotion that you won’t be able to eradicate completely, nor should you want to.

But that’s not the type of fear I’m talking about here, I’m talking about the kind of fear that holds the best version of yourself, hostage, from becoming one with you. 

Facing Your Fears

This might seem obvious, but it’s the first step toward becoming fearless. Facing your fear gets easier with meditation since you’ve already overcome the first step of giving in to the mind’s attempt to stop you from meditating. 

That small track record of discipline can usually weaken the mind’s influence on you, and considering that part of the mind plays a role in magnifying your fears, it’s a variable that gets reduced and you have a clear mind to face your fear. 

This will of course bring lots of discomforts. In meditation, you’ll sometimes fear certain thoughts that cause fear if you open yourself up to experience anything. But remember that you are in a safe environment and nothing can hurt you. 

While meditation has its dark side for some, a sizable amount will benefit from the fear experienced in meditation, as it’s a bit like facing fear in the form of a nightmare and knowing you are dreaming, and knowing that you can wake yourself up at any moment. 

The same can be said about meditation. Simply remembering that you can stop the meditation experience at any moment should provide some comfort and safety. 

That’s not to say that meditation is scary by any means (although it can be fore some), it’s quite the contrary, and most will find the experience relaxing. But meditation opens up a wide range of experiences you can have, ranging from pleasant to borderline traumatic. 

Now, meditation isn’t the only environment in which you can tackle fear, otherwise, you’d make it too easy for yourself. Meditation is also meant to help you outside of meditation should you face a fearsome situation, so you can apply the same principles to that fear, and eventually overcome it. 

Of course, this is far easier said than done, and the lack of a safety net will put a lot of people off by the idea of facing their own fears, but taking bite-size steps is better than taking no steps at all. Just make sure it’s somewhat out of your range of comfort. 

But the reward for overcoming that fear is also larger the more is at stake, and by no means am I saying to deliberately take uncalculated risks or put yourself in danger, just to overcome fear, since some situations will obviously warrant legitimate fear.  

Fear Can Often Teach You Something (About Yourself)

You may not know this, but the fear that’s in you sometimes is there to tell you a message. Sometimes it comes in the form of urgency, as a way to get you to do something, in which case it would be something positive. 

For instance, imagining a life where you don’t live up to your potential and getting an idea of a worst-case scenario is a fear that works in your favor. The fear of staying the same if you aren’t where you want to be is always a healthy type of fear to embrace.

At which point it’s obviously time to act. But the fear that manifests for no reason at all, presenting itself as an obstacle is the type of fear we want to get away from. 

But we don’t start by running away from it, but instead, by accepting that fear is there and observing it, allowing it to evaporate, just like we observe our thoughts and let negative ones evaporate. 

Take fear as an additional source of wisdom that can be a stepping stone. The more fears you overcome the more you will feel able to rely on yourself more to move forward. 

Detaching From Fear

Fear is often what contrasts hope, but if you don’t identify with either, the degree to which fear can affect you is far lesser. Meditation is about letting go and just being there, just existing. 

Almost having no thoughts, even though having no thoughts is impossible, which is why we usually focus on our breathing. The moment you start viewing yourself in a third-person perspective and seeing fear as its own separate entity, you become an observer. 

There is no fear in observation, there is just being in the now. The beauty of meditation is that it can be done anytime and can really be anything when you boil down the most basic principles. 

Addressing Fear Before It’s Too Late

Of course, it’s never too late but the more you let fear grow, the harder it is to address. Meditation allows you to dive deep into yourself, seeing yourself in your rawest form and accepting yourself at where you are. That’s the first step in changing anything. But in your subconscious is often where your deepest fears are. 

The moment you address it is the moment growth starts to happen. Fear can many times be the difference between living the life you want to live and where you are right now. The roadblock. Of course, this is not gonna be true for everyone since everyone’s path is different. 

But many times, fear is fabricated and exaggerated. The sooner you address the fear, the less likely it is to grow into something worse, and the sooner you can conquer yourself and walk a path where you become the best version of yourself. 

The price to pay to overcome fear will always be worth it in the long run and something that your future self will thank you for, and no one or nothing can take that achievement away from you.

Final Thoughts

Many strive to become fearless, and meditation is one means to becoming fearless, but so is facing your face, whether you meditate or not. 

But meditation can certainly streamline the process since you’re removing many of the variables that amplify the fear, to begin with. 

The sooner you overcome fear, the sooner you build habits to overcome other obstacles that mimic fear, but fear in itself is often the most prominent roadblock in many individuals’ paths towards becoming their best selves, which is why it’s crucial to become fearless. 

Becoming fearless will often be a byproduct of meditation, but you are unlikely to overcome any fears without facing some type of adversity. You can certainly make it easier for yourself if you approach fear one way vs. another, for instance, by remaining calm and entering observation mode.