In the case of fear, it wants to take you to a safe distance. I find fear the hardest feeling to simply sit with, because it doesn't want to sit, it wants to run.

In the four-quarter model we use in Shadow Work®, fear is the "gateway" to the Magician archetype; that means when fear arises, your Magician comes online. (For more on the four-quarter model, see The Shadow Work® Four-Quarter Model at the Shadow Work Seminars site.)

What a Magician wants is to get some distance, some perspective, so it can analyze the situation and find out how to eliminate the threat that brought up the fear in the first place. So fear will generally take you "into your head" where you can figure things out.

In the personal growth business, I commonly hear people criticizing themselves for "going into their head." I think that when a threat is present, "in your head" is a good place to be.

When we hear the word "danger," we generally think just of physical danger, but I think there are actually four kinds of danger: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Emotional danger is the risk of getting hurt, particularly in a way you've been hurt before. (Getting hurt in the same way twice can be more than twice as painful if there's an angry reaction inside saying, "You idiot, you let it happen again," even if there was no way you could have prevented it.)

Intellectual danger is the risk of adopting an idea which is harmful to your well-being. Fascism is a good example; so is the kind of extremism that would persuade you to become a suicide bomber. It's hard to imagine an idea that's more harmful to your well-being than that.

Spiritual danger is the risk of losing your belief that life has meaning and is worth living.

One common way is in the chest, especially in the lungs. Fear often seems to affect our breathing; for example, when somebody sneaks up from behind and grabs you, it's pretty common to gasp, or suddenly inhale your breath. Some people feel fear as a tightness across the chest.

Some other ways people feel fear: tingling in the legs, "butterflies" in the stomach, clenched teeth, a tight scalp with the hair standing on end. Some people find themselves pacing back and forth, or sitting very still (frozen). Some people feel cold, perhaps with goose bumps on their skin.

If you can become familiar with the way fear shows up in your body, it can give you useful information. That is, the body symptoms can tell you you're feeling afraid when you wouldn't otherwise be aware of it. And once you know you're afraid, you can be more conscious of potential threats.

For years I didn't like visiting friends in the hospital. I found it hard to relax enough to just sit and comfort my friend, so that I often left the hospital feeling bad about myself. At one point I began to recognize that fear caused a sensation like a tight band across my chest. Then I happened to visit a friend in the hospital, and I immediately noticed a tight feeling in my chest as I entered the building. No wonder I had trouble relaxing while visiting a friend, I thought, I've been feeling afraid without knowing it. I later discovered that I'd had an operation as a child. No wonder I felt fear in hospitals!

Knowing the fear was there helped me figure out how to take care of myself so that I could be there for my friend, and not feel bad about myself afterward.