Posted: July 1st, 2022

Thich Nhat Hanh’s Fear

Overview: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm and the other learning resources for this module explore how we can learn to face up to life’s challenges through changing our perspectives, building community, and learning to better understand the workings of our own minds and emotions. In connection with Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings and this module’s other readings and viewings, choose one of the keywords below as a main focus for your essay:

Anxiety

Struggle

Happiness

This is primarily a source-based essay. It is appropriate to include an example from your own experience to help illustrate the points you are making, or a plan for putting what you’ve learned here into action in your own life, and for these sections you may use the first person. However, this essay should not be mainly a personal narrative about yourself.

Audience: Write for an audience that is not in this class. That means you’ll need to spend some time summarizing key ideas, defining any terms that might be unfamiliar, paraphrasing and/or choosing short quotes from the reading selections to help your reader get a sense of the authors’ arguments.

Length: 3-5 pages (800-1200) words

Requirements:

Integrate a minimum of FIVE sources including the following:

Required source: Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm

ONE additional module learning resource

THREE additional sources identified through independent research

Cite all sources using MLA style in-text citations

Include an MLA style Works Cited page at the end of the essay (not included in 3-5 pages of text)

See Essay 3 Checklist for more specific requirements
Pushing Through Life’s Struggles By Fighting One’s Innate Fears
In his book, Fear: Essential Wisdom For Getting Through The Storm, Thich Nhat Hanh delved into the role of mindfulness when it came to dealing with individual fears. The author noted that human beings are innately afraid of being powerless but if they choose to live in their actual present moment which is being mindful, then they will have the power of booking deeply into their fears and understanding their source. At this point, the fears no longer have control over them hence allowing them to touch their ultimate joy. One important thing that Thic Nhat Hanh emphasized on is that all these fears are in-born due to their fundamental desire to survive (Finnigan 4). Every human being has to face various struggles at different points of their lives. These struggles come with a fear of whether they will pass through the struggles successfully. Notably, Thich Nhat Hann noted that the fear of failure among other worries affiliated with life’s struggles entails looking deeply and embracing one’s entire experience with acceptance, love and understanding thus going beyond fear and anxiety to find fearlessness and inner peace even during the struggles.
The positive effect of being mindful would also be evident in my personal struggles. Being a 19 year old individual that had to maintain a balance between my academic and fundamental extracurricular activities, it was evident that my mindset was very important on how far I would get in attaining this balance. I had a mindset that believed in oneself such that no amount of hard work would scare me. It was about being patient and working hard through the struggles since I understood my end goal. Ultimately, the direct results from the consistency and discipline during these struggles were extensively positive. Even today, while I still face both internal and external struggles, I have developed a mindset that refuses to wallow in self-pity and feel bad for the setbacks. Rather, I choose consistently and diligently to listen to the small voice of motivation that tells me to push through the fears I have one step at a time.
Thic Nhat Hanh maintained that the fear faced when dealing with different struggles comes from an original fear generated from particular causes and conditions. He noted that the original fear that is inborn does not come from the sense of it being innate but the sense of their existence since birth. “We were born and with that birth, our fear was born along with the desire to survive (7).” Thich Nhat Hanh provides that this original fear is the explanation for the subsequent fears individuals deal with in their struggles. A similar perception has been echoed by Becker who drew from the post-psychoanalytic theory to state that the universal fear of death has a causal impact on the affective attitudes and behavioral responses present even when in normal functioning. Becker claims that the fear of death is “repressed” similarly to how the memories of traumatic events could casually impact their experiences and responses without them happening in the conscious awareness (Becker 74). While Thich Nhat Hanh has not used the ‘repression’ term, he claims that “we deny our fear away …we try to ignore our fear, but it is still there” (Hann 1). Therefore, when human beings choose to look inward, they will realize that the fear they have comes from the original fear that came from when they were newborns, helpless and could not do anything for themselves. Thus, all fear could be handled by addressing their underlying trauma that conditions it.
According to Palmer, successful leadership is attained when the individual is able to look downwards and inwards as they work through the hard job of being a leader (7). Looking downwards entails moving towards the hardest concrete realizations of life (Palmer 7). However, this process will have the individual dealing with the violence and terror that comes from within which are projected outwards into the institutions and society at large. An example is how human beings will have a tendency of making enemies by projecting what they hate about themselves. Therefore, going downwards and inwards, a leader will meet the monsters but choosing to ride them all the way down will have them touching the deepest place in the community and help in taking other people to this position.This perspective was reiterated by Thic Nhat Hanh who stated that every individual needs to change for the better since each human being has the responsibility of taking care of each other. He asserted that “We are the gardeners, the ones who help the flowers grow. If we understand, the flowers will grow beautifully. Goodwill is not enough; we need to learn the art of making others happy.” In the end, the society will be made of individuals facing numerous fears in their different struggles but still putting in the efforts of living through them, helping each other for all of them to be successful.
Conclusively, while struggle will continue to be part of every person’s life in conjunction with the affiliated fears, the solution comes from choosing to live through them and facing them head-on.

Works Cited:
Becker, E. “The denial of death, New York (The Free Press) 1973.” (1973).
Finnigan, Bronwyn. “Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear of Death, and the Consolations of Science.” (2022).
Hanh, Thich Nhat. Fear: Essential wisdom for getting through the storm. Random House, 2012.
Palmer, Parker J. Leading from within: Reflections on spirituality and leadership. Indiana Office of campus ministries, 1990.

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