On an extraordinarily beautiful early fall weekend several years ago, my friend Myrna and I set out on what was, for each of us, our first backpack trip without a more experienced guide along. She'd been on her first backpacking trip earlier that summer with her son as guide. I had been on three trips with different women vision quest guides some years before.
We'd had lots of outrageous fun shopping for (and then deciding to return some of) the equipment we needed to fill in for what our guides had contributed to our earlier trips. We'd read an article that taught us how to jerry-rig our own bear-proof containers using lengths of PVC pipe and PVC end plugs.
Our first day, of driving, arriving and setting up our first camp (in the vicinity of the car), went easily and well. We spent the night at 6000 feet practicing with all our gear and getting acclimatized to the altitude.
Next morning, we began to pack our way up to the camp at 8000 feet where we expected to spend three days. The weather was glorious, the skies filled with dramatic and soaring clouds, the sun bright and the air a little nippy. It was so exhilarating to be on our way. For the first twenty minutes, that is.
At that point, it became clear that the trail was going to be a relentlessly steep and narrow one. The boulders of the mountain loomed on one side, a sheer precipice fell away at the other. A precipice without even the smallest bit of chaparral to mask its edge: an enormous challenge for me.
Just the tiniest veil of low shrubs gives me a sense of groundedness when I'm walking near a cliff edge. When there's nothing at all between me and the drop, I walk with a low level of terror as my companion. With a heavy pack and the steepness of the grade adding to the challenge of keeping myself balanced and grounded, the level of my terror escalated considerably. It was really hard to revel in the magnificence and beauty all around me. It took almost all of my energy just to keep walking and to keep my eyes away from the edge.
And, I kept walking-two-ways-at-once. My anticipatory dread of the steep-downhill-trip-with-pack to come kept adding to the already intense terror I was experiencing on the uphill climb. Coping with the weight of my terror on top of the weight of my pack was exhausting! I kept talking gently to my terrified self. I promised her we could stop and turn around any time we felt we couldn't handle it anymore.
Despite the terror, there was so much of me that really wanted to get to camp in the alpine meadow ahead. So, I practiced going very, very slowly with many, many breaks-each for however long my terrified self needed in order to feel able to move again. I kept gently reminding myself not to be walking two ways at once. I kept giving Myrna updates on how I was doing. And, I kept making sure I still had her assurances that she'd turn back with me at any point.
We did a lot of stopping and resting. At some point it seemed we were stopping 15 minutes for every 10 minutes of walking. Though Myrna wasn't frightened by the edge, she was more than happy to be stopping to rest as often as my terrified self and I were wanting to. Her pack, like mine, seemed to be to getting heavier and heavier as we climbed. And, as my most regular hiking buddy, she already knew and was both sensitive and sympathetic to how much of a challenge physical edge walking was for me.
Then, the worst happened. We met an 8-mule pack train with four horsemen coming downhill and had to move off the trail to let them pass. That meant standing on the very edge of the precipice. The very grumpy, brusque leader of the train was most impatient with me as I very slowly tried to find some secure footing on the small, rocky outcropping at the edge of the drop. I was almost frozen when he told me I'd have to take off my pack because it/I was too close to the trail and likely to spook one of the more skittish mules into shying. Myrna, standing further out at the edge, helped me out of the pack and I sort of dissolved to the ground in a petrified puddle as the mules and horsemen passed by.
It took a while to put myself back together enough to crawl back onto the trail, slow the adrenaline and get Myrna's help getting my pack back on. Amazingly, when I checked, the inner consensus was still to continue on. So we did.
When we crested the mountain and arrived at the pine forest surrounded meadow ringed with yet higher mountains, it all felt worth the struggle. It was incredibly beautiful, awesome, very magical and completely our own private domain. The campsite was near a creek, had a huge downed tree trunk that would do perfectly as a counter on which to set up our kitchen and another smaller trunk that would work as a backrest for sitting. Upturned roots were hooks for all sorts of miscellany.
Right nearby was a small, deserted weather observation cabin with a tiny sheltered entry that proved immediately useful. Just as we stood there, gaping at the beauty, the clouds broke open in a downpour with thunder and lightening. Both of us with our as yet unopened packs fit neatly under the entry's shelter for the half-hour of dramatic storming.
The storm left as suddenly as it had arrived and we began the business of setting up camp, filtering water, and preparing our evening meal. We even had a small fire going for a little while.
Once we gave up on the damp fire and crawled into our sleeping bags and tent, we soon discovered that our sleeping bags were not fulfilling their promise: our feet were freezing. Making foot pocket linings out of our Mylar emergency blankets warmed our toes but set us off into hysterical cackling as they crackled riotously at any slight movement. Our cackling led to each of us having to wriggle out of bag and tent to pee. Of course, that led to more uproarious cackling and crackling. In the midst of all this we heard cowbells. It wasn't an auditory hallucination: we peeked out and saw a huge herd of cattle grazing in the meadow. More cackling, it was so much fun. All my earlier fear and terror seemed so distant. (I celebrated my little one for having been able to make it up to the meadow despite how scary it had been for her.)
When we were finally warm enough and quieted enough to say goodnight, I was completely surprised not to be fast asleep in my typical 5 minutes. Instead, I found myself catapulted quite quickly into a resurgence of fears. I began imagining the already terrifying downhill trip made slippery by the rains. I began to worry that it might rain again over the days we planned to stay up here, making the steep narrow, edgy trail even more muddy and slippery. The cowbells and the lowing of the cattle kept coming closer as I lay there getting more and more anxious about the trail. Then, I started to be afraid that the cattle might wander into our camp and trample us as we slept. I was feeling extremely claustrophobic and vulnerable in our tiny little tent.
The Mommy part of me was there and watching as I moved from anxiety and terror into what was clearly becoming a panic attack. That part kept holding me, rocking me. She kept talking gently and lovingly to me, acknowledging how really overwhelmed I was feeling, how scary this all was being for me. She reminded me that I was not alone, that she was with me and would stay with me.
The panicking part felt a desperate need to be down from the mountain, back near the car, back where it was safe. She wanted to go down right that very moment even though she knew it was not possible or safe to go then. She could hardly breathe. She was afraid to wake or to share her panic with Myrna; afraid that the intensity of her panic, so rare and unusual in her, would frighten Myrna. If her panic frightened Myrna she would feel even more completely overwhelmed.
The Mommy reminded her that Myrna was not like her biological mother, that Myrna probably wouldn't get terrified by the little one's terrors. And, the Mommy let her know she didn't have to tell Myrna now, in the middle of it, if that was too scary. The Mommy promised the terrified one again and again that she would stay with her no matter how frightened the little one was. She crooned and soothed and promised her that we could tell Myrna in the morning that we had to go back down the mountain. That we would, together with Myrna, figure out a way to do that safely. That we could ask Myrna to make two trips and take our pack down for us if we couldn't do it ourself.
The Mommy kept reminding us to breathe out so that we would be able to breathe in. She reminded us to breathe deep into our belly, slowly. She reminded us that she loved us so much, that it was okay to feel scared whether or not there was anything really scary happening, that she would never leave us alone with our fears or be angry at us for having them-no matter what. Gradually my body relaxed from its clenching, the panicked, exhausted one began to calm and finally drifted into sleep.
When I woke in the morning, the cattle were very close but had miraculously kept outside some invisible perimeter. It was another glorious day. I wasn't feeling terrified, but I felt sure I needed to get off the mountain early on in the day. Over breakfast I shared the saga of my night with a somewhat astonished Myrna. She was absolutely willing to break camp and head down as soon as I needed to leave. And, also, absolutely willing to help deal with my pack if I needed her to do that.
We actually took a quite breathtaking hike further up the mountain (with only our fanny packs on) before heading downhill with all our gear. Of course, the downhill trip turned out to be a piece of cake: the trail was dry and hard, not nearly as steep as it had seemed to promise on the way up and, this time, we didn't meet up with any mule-trains.
Setting up camp in the valley at 6000 feet, I felt sort of sad and blue that I had so needed for us to come down. I felt a little sheepish about having been so panicked at the prospect of what had turned out to be a very unchallenging downhill trip after all. But then the Mommy reminded me that it didn't matter that it had turned out to be so much easier than I'd thought. That it didn't matter that there was “nothing to be afraid of after all.”
What mattered was that we had really listened to the fears we were having, honored them, taken them seriously, and taken such good care of ourself in the middle of them. That we had asked our friend to be as respectful as we were of our fears and that she had been. That neither we nor Myrna had tried to belittle or to talk us out of our fears. We had made it safe to be afraid, no matter what.
It is such a huge and empowering step to openly own our right to our own fears, to name them, to honor them without apology or excuse or shame. It is how we can begin to stop abandoning our frightened selves. It is how we can begin to say “ No! That's not the truth!” to anyone (including parts of ourselves) who would think less of us for being fearful, for having fears. It's not fear that we need to be afraid of (with all due respect to FDR), it's our fear of fear. When we commit to listening to our fearful self and to helping her find safety, she begins to trust our care-giving enough to risk walking her edges. This always helps her grow stronger.
All the me's of me learned so much, grew so much and did so much healing of early woundings in the middle of this scary experience. It was so exciting to be able to be taking such good care of my frightened self. And, an added bonus of the journey is that I really have learned not to walk-two-ways-at-once when going up steep trails.
Consider being really gentle and loving with the fearful parts of yourself.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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