The fear · 14 of 24

How fear talks

Learn to hear it in your own sentences.

I need, I want, I believe, I expect, I deserve

The My Big TOE glossary gives fear a definition that is one word long in its essential part: fear is about self. Love is about other. Everything else follows from which of those a thing is about.

It then does something unusually practical. Fear, it says, is creatively expressed as ego, belief and expectation — and it expresses itself in terms of value to itself, in a phrasebook you can actually listen for: I need, I want, I believe, I expect, I deserve.

That is a detector you can run on your own speech. Not because those phrases are forbidden, but because each one marks a place where something is being claimed on your own behalf. Notice how often they show up in a description of a conflict, and who they are always about.

The same entry offers five roots that most individual fears trace back to: not being good enough, pain, the unknown, not being in control, and death. Worth knowing, worth not over-using — the roots are a map, and a map is not the territory.

The app does a little of this for you. When you write in the journal it quietly points at those five phrases if they turn up. It is noticing, not correction.

Paraphrased from My Big TOE

The five roots appear on the official site rather than in Campbell's own voice, so the app presents them as the framework's rather than as his.

My Big TOE glossary: Fear(opens in a new tab)

This session deliberately goes looking for something uncomfortable. That is the exercise, and for most people it is unremarkable — but if it turns up more than you expected, stop. Nothing here is a treatment, and there is no version of this practice that requires you to push through distress.

Before you start

Lighten up. Do not be intense or serious about this.
Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed. A chair is fine. He does not specify anything beyond that.
Close your eyes.
Pick a time when you are not already churning. First thing on waking or last thing before sleep tend to work; straight after a big meal, or while you are angry about something, tend not to.
Bring a disagreement — recent, ongoing, unresolved. One where you are fairly sure you are in the right.

How long

Campbell’s own instruction is twenty minutes, twice a day. The shorter lengths early on are ours, not his — starting at twenty is how most people stop after a week.

The two buttons during a sit

Campbell’s mantra is not a fixed thing you repeat for twenty minutes. Its size is a dial, and you move it during the sit against how much thinking is going on. His instruction is symmetrical: if intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form; as thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity.

Busier: Your mind keeps wandering off. Give it more to hold, so there is less room for anything else. At the busiest: fill your mind with the longer chant: ah-lum-bar-dee-dum · ah-lum-baa-dee-dum. no need to make an actual sound. let it be busy.
Simpler: Nothing much is intruding any more. Let it thin out — there is no point crowding a mind that has already gone quiet.

Keep going down and you reach the end of it: If the sound slips away and no thoughts come in behind it, let it go. Drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness. That is the whole aim — the mantra is scaffolding, and you take scaffolding down when the building stands up. Arrow keys work too, if you have a keyboard to hand.

Keep this tab open. The screen stays awake and dims itself, so the phone can lie face down. On iPhone, locking the screen or switching apps stops the sound — a browser limitation rather than a setting.