The Gift of Fear

The small dokusan room, dark even at midday, was filled with the sound of the nearby Tassajara Creek. Sitting face-to-face, knees almost touching, my teacher Darlene Cohen said to me, “You don’t have to be so afraid.” My body jerked back a bit, not sure I had heard her correctly. “Sorry,” I said, tilting my head in question, “Could you repeat that?” “You don’t have to be so afraid.” I had heard it right, I thought, totally mystified.

Thus began a practice that has been profound and liberating for me, my personal koan of fear. The thread of my koan was so tightly woven into my perception of reality that it was hard for me to identify. Fortunately, it was blatantly obvious to her. The gentle, steady, and clear mirror she held for me to look into, slowly revealed the profound ground of fear from which I operated all the time.

It took quite a while for me to see it as fear. What she pointed to as fear I prided myself on as exemplary competence, a beneficial behavior to be proud of rather than to disparage or change; a behavior that had faithfully yielded annual promotions in a highly competitive corporate environment. How was this fear? With gentle persistence, she explained how I used my competence to maintain my separation and hold people at bay, how it reified Self. In my uber competence, I didn’t require the assistance of anyone, which I came to realize was my way to feel safe.

Having been born into a familial karmic crucible of award-winning dysfunction, I quickly realized that sangha, as first embodied by my family, was not safe. This shaped an early misunderstanding that all people were unsafe and unpredictable. To keep them out and to rely only on myself truly made sense and worked for a number of decades. Armored with these early experiences, it was hard to touch or even understand the dharma of interconnection. Much less want to.

In this first and future dokusans we began to explore my personal koan. While understanding slowly increased, it was through her embodied teaching that I first gained greater understanding.

Darlene’s practice was to invite students to spend a day or two with her in her home temple, blending formal practice with informal practice. We’d sit zazen, study, make and eat meals, walk to the post office, and shop together. Slowly, in a nonverbal way, my body began to trust being so proximate to and intimate with her steady, trustworthy body. In this way, I began to experience a previously unknown relaxation. This provided a new embodied baseline against which I could assess myself somatically in other settings.

Early in our relationship, with her emphasis on and trust in body-to-body practice, unbeknownst to me, Darlene designed a perfect practice for me.

During a period at Tassajara, I was working on cabin crew. In this work practice, one tends to the guest cabins, making beds, sweeping floors, emptying waste baskets, and cleaning bathrooms. A glass had spilled and broken in the cabin I’d been assigned to clean. I went to the crew leader and asked for a mop. She said if I’d just wait a moment, she would help me. Immediately this struck me as so unnecessary. I just needed a mop, tell me where it is and I would have the task done in no time. While I waited, she helped several others with their requests and I found myself growing impatient. Interrupting her, skillfully I thought, I said, “If you just point to where the mop is, I’m sure I can find it myself.” “Oh, just wait a moment or two then I can help you,” she answered with a smile, as she cheerfully puttered about the linens.

My impatience was escalating. This was so insensible to me, so inefficient and, frankly, a waste of my time. But I kept my manufactured Zen cool as I seethed and waited. Finally, she came to me and said, “Let’s go get the mop.” Pleading my case again, I said, “Really, it’s a one-person job. You don’t need to help.” A sly smile was her reply. So off we went to fetch the mop. “Now, let’s get the bucket.” “Just point the direction and I’ll get it in a jiff.” “No, let’s do it together.” Which we did. After filling the bucket with some warm water and placing the mop inside, she turned to me brightly and said, “Here, let’s each hold on to the bucket handle and carry it to the cabin.” To which I replied, “I can carry it. It’s not heavy at all.” “No, she said, let’s do it together.” As we walked down the path to the cabin, I commented silently, but vehemently, to myself how utterly crazy this was. OMG, I reeled, sometimes Zen is so pathetic!

When we got to the cabin, she insisted on holding the dust pan while I broomed the small amount of glass into it. Resigned to her sweet yet adamant approach, I dutifully swept the glass in. Then she squeezed the water out of the mop and handed it to me. As I mopped the small area, no more than a foot square, she seemed both unnaturally engaged in this paltry task and unnaturally happy to be doing it with me. Upon completion, she suggested that we carry the bucket and mop back to their appropriate place, together of course. Taking a deep breath, in my mind relenting to this charade of “work,” we carried the bucket and mop back. I don’t recall her parting words but I do recall her tenor was kind, as it had consistently been. I also recall my extreme reaction: a mind that was frenetic with judgment about the craziness of the experience. And beneath that cover of judgment, dark to my mind at the time, pulsed the fear of spending time with a stranger. The whole experience probably only lasted 15 to 20 minutes, though it felt like eternity to me.

What does fear feel like? Can you breathe into it? Soften it? Can you find your ground of safety amid it?

It took more practice on my personal koan to see the genius of what Darlene had designed and executed with the help of the cabin crew leader. It proved a dharma gate which afforded me the opportunity to slowly recognize the underlying fear I felt, a fear utterly disproportionate to the situation. The emerging awareness of my competence as a mask, conjoined with my palpable and pitched physical reaction, caused me to stay with the experience and wonder why it had been so disturbing to me. When I questioned Darlene about it later, and her role in it, a trickster twinkle sparked in her eyes as she simply demurred.

There was lasting benefit in what Darlene had engineered. As I began to recognize and feel in my body the extreme limitations this fear-based competence put on me, I willingly plunged deeper and deeper into the koan with curiosity and intention. With her encouragement, I began to drop into my body more, seek out that body-based wisdom. “Notice how you feel walking into a room of people, of strangers,” she’d suggest. “What arises in your body? Where do you feel it in your body? What does fear feel like? Can you breathe into it? Soften it? Can you find your ground of safety amid it?”

Slowly the need for both presenting and self-perceiving as uber-competent diminished. Importantly, competence itself did not diminish but with its primal motivation revealed, it became just competence. I could hold it in a much different way. Of additional benefit, the perfectionism and fixed ideas, which frequently accompanied my deep-seated fear, also began to diminish. A hidden need within the competence was to be seen as “right,” a sub-koan which underscored separation, that I got to work with and unravel with her help. As Darlene would often ask, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be in connection?” A profound and clarifying question. After much practice, more and more, I learn to relax and choose connection.

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Excerpted from Alive For It All, Wisdom in Everyday Life: The Teachings of Darlene Cohen by Cynthia Kear. Copyright ©2026. Used with permission.