Kristen Ulmer - The Art of Fear: Why Conquering Fear Won’t Work and What to Do Instead

For Genpo

CONTENTS

I became famous in one day.

It started with an excited drive from Salt Lake City to California in an old 72 Corolla that my friends called the silver death trap. I was wearing all my ski gear, including gloves, because it was January and the heater didnt work. Neither did the radio. Racing along at eighty miles per hour on bald tires, I danced to imaginary music, amazed that I was on my way to film a ski movie. A ski movie!

Somehow Id talked a famous ski filmmaker, Eric Perlman, into giving me a shot in his latest film. I was a mogul skier, ranked seventh in local competitions. I was pretty good at throwing air off moguls, but excellent, it seems, at convincing Eric I was a badass skier, good enough to be in an industry-sponsored movie.

He was a bit of a sucker, though, I chuckled to myselfthose local mogul competitions only had seven girls competing.

Arriving at 4 a.m. in the Squaw Valley parking lot, I switched off the ignition, leaned back in my lopsided, non-reclining seat, and tried to get some sleep.

Three hours later, there was a rap on my window. I opened my eyes to see a crew of brightly Gore-Tex-clad professional male skiers whom I recognized from the ski magazines. Oh my God. They were holding their skis, ready to go. You must be Kristen, one of them said. I bolted out of the car.

It had been too cold for me to sleep, but I felt wide awake as I slipped into my icy boots, grabbed my skis, poles, and a granola bar, and ran to get on the lift with the superstars.

We had early ups, meaning the resort opened the lifts briefly at 7:15 a.m. so we could get on the mountain and start filming before the public showed up. As we rode to the top, the guys ignored me and talked with excitement about the new snow, nine inches of it. I sat there quietly. Below my dangling feet, the fresh snowfall looked soft and alluring.

Two lifts later, I followed behind as they hiked up toward something called the Palisades. When we reached the top, everyone grew quiet. It was a flat, snowy 400-foot-long plateau with an abrupt cliff band below. I watched the guys split up to claim which cliff they were going to jump off, communicating plans with the cinematographer, who was in the landing zone below us, his sixteen-millimeter film camera ready for action. At the same time, a photographer followed us around the top, arranging his shots.

One by one, the guys began jumping off cliffs and throwing backscratchers while the cameramen shot them. The trick of the era, a backscratcher is when an airborne skier arches his back and touches the backs of his skis between his shoulder blades.

Clearly, I realized, if I wanted to get into this ski movie, I needed to jump off one of these cliffs and throw a backscratcher.

Now, I had never jumped off a cliff before. Nor had I even seen, much less thrown, a backscratcher.

I looked over the edge, picked a big drop of about twenty feet called the Box, told the cameramen my intention, put my skis on, and backed up to get speed into it. Then, loudly, so no one would miss it, I shouted like I had heard the guys do: Three... two... one... Go!

And I pushed off.

You may have noticed theres no mention of Fear in my story. Why is that?

Twenty feet is a big free fall if youve never done it before. This was decades ago, too, and we were on skinny skis, not the friendly fat skis of today, which means I landed at forty miles per hour on essentially toothpicks. My ski heroes were watching, two professional cameramen had their expensive equipment aimed at me, and I was doing a difficult trick Id never done before with no visualization, no training... Are you wondering when I went through the angst-ridden, emotional What if I fail struggle?

I wish I could tell you about that struggle, but I cant, because it didnt exist. Theres no mention of Fear in this story because it never occurred to me to be afraid that day. And while that might sound fantastical, the romantic ideal of adventure and risk-takingI didnt feel Fear!the truth is, it was not romantic, and it was far from ideal.

That day marked the day I became famous, and the day I found my calling. But it also marked the day I jumped into supporting a humanity-wide pathology that is cooking us all alive: the repression of Fear. Over the next fifteen years, I, too, repressed Fear completely, and I was celebrated for it in the ski media, financed by sponsors, and talked about in ski towns all around the world. At best, this pathology sent me down a path of internal destruction, and at worst, it nearly killed me. That I survived is dumb, blatant luck.

WHY SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK?

Why should I be the one to write a book about this enormous and confusing subject called Fear, the snake loose in your veins that you, too, probably try to ignore?

Thats easy: My whole life has been about Fear.

In three separate phases, Ive gone all the way with this slippery emotion. At age six, I consciously decided to ignore Fear, perhaps with more resolve than most. As a world-class extreme athlete for fifteen years, I chased it like a Labrador chases a ball. Starting with that first cliff jump, I became recognized as the best woman big-mountain (extreme) skier in the world, a reputation I kept for twelve years. I was also recognized by the outdoor industry as the most fearless extreme woman athlete in North America.

Finally, and most important, for the past fifteen years as a facilitator Ive been obsessively curious about the role Fear played not only in my athletic career and my life, but also in the lives of my clients. Through a teaching tool I call Shift, the Game of 10,000 Wisdoms, Ive spent thousands of hours with people exploring the inside of Fear itself, and I have met andas weird as it may soundeven embodied that snake called Fear.

As a result, today I am a living, breathing, walking testament to Fear, groomed by the universe my whole life to deliver its message. Which makes the ideas in this book actually not my personal philosophythey come from Fear itself, and are a translation of the many intimate conversations Ive had with it. Im merely a conduit.

That being said, these messages have been Ulmerized, and you should know that I have two distinct sides: an open-minded, gentle side and an assertive, arrogant side. Just know that I will bounce back and forth between these two. Consider yourself warned.

Let me start with my assertive side, which I hope will provoke you: I believe that only now, in this exact moment in history, are we finally ready to hear this message about Fear. We all hunger for compassion, love, and global peace, yet it seems so out of reach. We recognize that weve come to the tipping point where growing to the next level of our individual or collective evolution will require us to get unstuck from... something. What is that something? I say, unequivocally, that its our current avoidance pattern toward Fear. With it, we remain blindly in a pressure cooker, cooking away.

This is the stuck place, because, sitting in that scalding water, youre in crisis. And when in crisis, you cant fall in love or have compassion for another. When your hair is on fire, you cannot write poetry. When youre fighting your own private internal war against a primary part of who you area war, mind you, that is unwinnableglobal community is the furthest thing from your mind.

Yet I believe it is finally hot enough that were ready to do something about it, to change this heated situationit being, in this case, your strained relationship with Fear and the radical way it affects not only your life but the whole world. Do you know your relationship with Fear is the most important relationship of your life? Because it is the relationship you have with yourself. Fear being a fundamental, primary part of who you are, you are actually incomplete without it. If you dont work toward having an authentic relationship with it, you cant expect to have such a relationship with yourself, and thus cant possibly have one with anyone elsemuch less the world. So lets stop ignoring this relationship and get to work on making it better.