In this vlog-style talk, Mary Schiller, author and coach, shares her personal journey from living in chronic fear due to an abusive first marriage and diagnosed PTSD to discovering a transformative perspective on fear through the "3 principles" she encountered in 2014. She explains how she learned to view fear as a transient, thought‑driven feeling that does not require action, illustrating the shift with a subway panic episode where she simply observed the fear without responding, resulting in the feeling dissipating. Schiller argues that fear cannot stop people from acting, supporting the claim with her own life story—earning two master’s degrees, maintaining a career, raising a daughter, remarrying, and relocating across the country—despite decades of high‑alert fear. She provides a recent example of a stressful visa renewal appointment in Paris, showing that fear did not impede the necessary steps. Throughout, she emphasizes that humans are naturally fearless, describing our true nature as a neutral, limitless space untouched by emotions like fear. She concludes by inviting viewers to comment, reach out via email, and shares a light personal note about buying plants for her garden.
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Hello, hello, it's Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, coming to you today once again from my neighborhood park. I'm going to try to keep that glare sort of out of the frame. I'm not doing a very good job. The sun is out today, which is wonderful. It's been a little bit gray and rainy here. Let's see if I can— there, that's a little bit better. The past couple days, so this sunshine is a welcome change. And it may start to get very crowded here since it's just about noon, and usually during the lunch couple hours this park really fills up, especially when it is such a nice day out. I'm also hoping that the workers who are doing some work on the sidewalk nearby are now going to take their lunch break so you don't hear that noise in the background. So a good friend of mine asked me— hi, Helen— if I would mind speaking about fear. And I'm happy to talk about fear because I've learned a lot about that particular emotion over the last 4 years because it used to be such a dominant feature in my life. I'm going to try once again to make this less blurry. Let's see, maybe that's better. Be a little shakier, but anyway, you know, I used to live my life in fear, constant fear. That was my normal status, basically, was living in fear of being harmed. I had been in an abusive relationship, as many of you may know, of my first marriage, and The abuse continued even after I got divorced. And, you know, I was diagnosed in my 20s with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I essentially lived my life in a constant state of fear for my safety. I was on edge all the time. I saw everyone pretty much as an enemy. I saw that even in people who were close to me. I thought I thought they could hurt me. I saw that in people I didn't know, like when I was sitting on the subway and someone would get close to me, which is common on the subway. I went into panic mode. And so fear was really a dominant feature of my daily life for many, many, many, many years— decades, in fact. And what I came to see me about fear after I came across the 3 principles in 2014 was that unless I was literally about to get hit by a car or something crossing the street, that any other feeling of fear was no different from any other emotion. Then that, in fact, Thoughts, which are sort of the other side of the coin of emotions, are fleeting and transient. They are neutral. They only sort of get some meaning when I decide that they are something to be concerned about. So what happened was, when I started to see this for myself, I tried it out. I was like, okay, well I'm sitting here on the subway and I'm feeling really scared. What's going to happen to me if I just sit with this feeling and kind of see it as nothing to worry about and nothing to have to do anything about? What's going to happen? And what happened was nothing. A big fat nothing. Let's see if I turn the camera over here. Maybe that's better. Trying to deal with this sunshine. I guess you're gonna have to deal with some glare on my face today. Sorry about that. But in any case, I saw that when I simply didn't respond to that fear, when I just sort of let it be there like any other thought/feeling, it didn't seem like any big deal. It stopped looking important. It stopped looking like something I needed to follow and do something about. That was truly miraculous, and I don't use that word lightly because this was absolutely life-changing for me when I saw that I could have a very strong emotion like fear and simply sit there with it and be uncomfortable and not put any importance on it, like, oh my gosh, this means something is wrong with you, Mary, you know. When I kind of just let all of that fall by the wayside and not worry about it, guess what happened? The fear stopped having any real sense of power. It stopped looking scary, if that sounds funny. Fear stopped looking scary, but it just did. It started to look like any other emotion that I felt. And that meant that it was nothing to worry about. It wasn't a problem that I needed to do something about. I think the reason why, or one of the reasons why fear looks so different to people, is because of our natural instinct to protect ourselves. So anytime we feel fear, we tend to pay attention to it because it seems to indicate that we're about to die or something. I mean, I'm not joking, like there is some kind of survival instinct in involved there. But that, you know, in, in most modern-day situations, that's simply not the case. It was true during my marriage, certainly. I lived with a lot of fearful thinking because of how my first husband behaved. He acted in ways that injured me and had the potential to actually take my life. So in that circumstance, that fear was something I did need to pay attention to. But after I was away from him, this is what also became obvious. When I started to see this for myself, I hadn't had any contact with him or seen him in over 13 years. And I thought, well, that's interesting because I'm still responding to this fear as if he's standing here, you know, holding something over my head, like he's going to hit me with it. And that seems kind of strange. There's no imminent threat to me. This is a passing thought, and I can simply wait for it to go away and not worry about it. I saw that the, the fear was coming from me listening to a fearful thought that seemed to indicate something was a problem that I needed to pay attention to. That's a lot of thinking on top of thinking on top of thinking. And it all of a sudden just kind of wiped the slate clean. One other reason I want to bring up the topic of fear is because people in our popular culture say that fear stops us from doing things. Well, I can tell you unequivocally that that is false. And you can look at your own life for examples of this and look at other people's lives for examples of this. But the truth is that is absolutely impossible for a feeling to stop us from doing anything. And I will tell you why just from one quick example from my own life. As I said, from age 22 to 52, I was pretty much living in a constant state of high alert, fear, anxiety. That was my surface experience most of the time. Yes, I had our natural clarity underneath all of that. Which allowed me to do a lot of things in spite of having all that fearful thinking. I lived a reasonably successful, normal life despite living in a constant state of fear and unease. I went to grad school, got two master's degrees. I had some really good jobs, raised my daughter, got remarried, uh, moved across the country from California to New York and, and had a lot of fun there, made a lot of great friends in my life, have good family relationships. If, if fear was something that could stop me from doing something or achieving something, what would that really have looked like? That I would have basically curled up into a ball on my sofa, I think. And so I totally disagree with vehemently any person who says that a feeling like fear can stop you from doing things. That is just false, because a feeling of fear is like any other feeling. It comes from a transient thought, and thoughts are not the power in that equation. Oh, thank you, uh, Joanne, I appreciate that. Thoughts are not the power here. You are the power in this equation. You are not the thoughts that go through your head. You're not the emotions you feel as a result of those thoughts. You are much, much bigger than that. And so, you know, that book that came out a long time ago— I haven't actually read it— Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. That's kind of how it is. It's like we feel fear all the time, but it doesn't stop us from doing things. I can give you a very poignant example just from a couple days ago. Um, we had to go to our first visa renewal appointment here in Paris, and I had a lot of nervous, fearful thinking about it. You know, lots of normal thoughts like, what if they tell us we have to get out of the country or something? What are we going to do? You know, and I, I was nervous, you know, do we have all of our paperwork together? And I had a lot of fearful thinking about it. It didn't stop me from getting the paperwork together. It didn't stop me from taking all the steps necessary to get myself to the office to then sit there and wait for 5 hours before we saw someone and then sit there while she patiently went through all of the paperwork. So, you know, that's just a very recent example of, of how fear is not a force that needs to be reckoned with in any way at all. We don't have to defeat it. We don't have to try to push it away. We don't have to do anything with it. So feelings are never things we have to deal with. They're simply a product of a passing thought that we can ignore. We can kind of just sit and wait through if we want. We can ignore and continue doing whatever it is that we want to do. And, and the point of seeing that is that we are naturally fearless. Our true nature is fearless. Our true nature is perfection. Our true nature has no— what do I want to say— no constraints. Our true nature has no limitations. Our true nature has no measurement or judgments or anything attached to it. It's like this beautifully, perfectly neutral space, and things like fear have no bearing on that whatsoever. That's like saying that fear could make these plants stop growing. I mean, that would be crazy to say something like that, and yet that's basically what we're saying when we say that fear can stop us. So I hope this has been helpful to you today, and I'd love to hear from you. So post a comment, please, wherever you're watching this this video. And if you want to get in touch with me, email me anytime, mary@maryschiller.com. I am off to buy a few plants for my flower boxes because my flowers are looking a bit sad, so I'm going to cheer them up. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!
