Faith is letting go

Fear is holding tight

I used to faint a lot as a child. It started right after I was adopted at around 7. I would get a woozy feeling, things would start to spin, and I’d get that dropping feeling in my stomach and wham! I was out. It happened in crowds at the mall, on stage singing once, during a hoola-hoop competition, at church, at school, in the backyard. The last time I fainted was in college. I was in the school library checking something out and got that familiar feeling. I grabbed the librarian’s hand and explained that I was about to pass out. When I came to, she was in full freak out mode. “Don’t call an ambulance!” I shouted as I woke up, calming her down and assuring her that I would be fine soon.

The brain is a funny thing, and somehow what resulted after all of those falls, is an intense fear of falling. I’m not afraid of heights. I don’t have a fear of failure (boy howdy, I fail all. the. time.). I’m mildly afraid of spiders and after being bitten by a rattlesnake, my fear of snakes is kind of serious but not debilitating. I think I have a fear of loss of control, but I’m not even sure about it. My fear of falling, however, is big. Really big.

So, imagine this: I’m lead climbing on a rock wall that travels upwards, to the left around a barrel, and then to an overhang where the climb ends. I’m 50 feet off the ground hanging by my fingers on the overhang on the last holds before the final clip. My arms are giving out and I can’t seem to figure out how to reach with my left hand to the very top of the wall so that I can hang on and clip into the last bolts. I’m clipped in at the corner of the wall several feet below me. If I let go, I’m taking a huge fall. I start to panic. My breath gets shallow and my hands start to sweat making it even harder to hold on. This is a familiar feeling. I start yelling down to my rock climbing coach who is belaying me, “I can’t reach! What now??” “You’ve got this!” she yells back confidently, “I’ve got you!” I’m in full panic mode. I hate falling. I look at the final hold, it’s impossibly out of reach and I cannot move now. My legs will literally not let my feet move closer to my hands so I can reach that last final hold. “Let go!” the coach yells, “it’s okay to fall!” Easy for her to say. And then I’m forced to let go of the wall and fall 15 feet in a matter of seconds before I’m lowered down to the ground where I collapse in a heap, trying not to cry. I really hate falling. And I’ve taken some bad falls recently. Two weeks before, I had to leap from a 20 foot bouldering wall when I couldn’t make the next move. I was terrified and shouting for help. No one came. The week before, I was lead climbing on an overhanging route, and slipped and accidentally grabbed the rope and had rope burns across my right hand that blistered and bled. This is all not to mention that just a year ago I watched my husband fall from about 25 feet off the ground without a rope and break his knee into a million pieces and then watch him rehab for 9 months after emergency reconstructive surgery.

Interestingly, some of the world’s elite climbers are afraid of falling. You see, mostly in climbing you are trying not to fall. Falling on rock has serious consequences and a number of things can go wrong in the act of falling. I have been climbing on and off for almost 30 years and I’ve never really taken a hard fall. In the last month I’ve taken 3. Climbing inside, in a controlled environment with pads and well-trained belayers, falling is encouraged, congratulated, CLAPPED AT.

One of the world’s greatest climbers, Alex Honnold, taking a fall. Photo by Keith Ladzinski

In my efforts to overcome this fear, I have taken many approaches. One of them, is to take a meditation course on performance anxiety because I thought it might relate. One of the sessions was all about letting go. You know that moment when you read or hear something that travels right to your core and shakes you just a little? It’s like your spirit is recognizing truth and let’s you know. When the instructor said, “faith is letting go, fear is holding tight,” it was one of those moments for me. He was talking about faith in your abilities and faith in yourself as you perform your sport, but I instantly saw the applications in my own life. Faith is a state of openness, a state of trust. To have faith is like trusting yourself to let go and fall. You don’t grab the rope when you’re falling on a climb, you release your hands and let it happen. If you hold tight, the rope can burn you and if you remain stiff, you can injure your joints. It’s important to loosen up, relax, breathe, and let go.

Sometimes, we hold so tight to certain ideas or beliefs about ourselves or others, that we are in a state of constant fear. Faith is the opposite, it’s in letting go. It opens you to the truth and we are able to see ourselves and those around us without judging. Observation without judgement isn’t possible without faith. Alan Watts wrote in his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, “faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it might turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. The present phase of human thought and history, almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window.” As life gets hard, and we face difficult circumstances, faith is only possible in letting go. It takes incredible faith to trust in a God we know is there and has a path that is just for us to travel and an openness to what will happen next. And then learn what we can about each experience we come to. It’s in letting go of what we thought life was going to be, and the faith to travel the new path that God has placed us on, full of wonder and relaxed ease as we shift up the mountain, bit by bit.

Letting go is not a simple or easy thing to do. It requires an incredible amount of strength, much more than clinging and holding on ever required of me.

Little Hellion, Little Cottonwood Canyon, that me at the top! Photo by Emily Bithell