When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening

by Jan Frazier, Barbi Schulick (Foreword)

In August 2003, virtually overnight, Jan Frazier experienced "a dramatic falling away of fear"not just the immediate fear of her annual medical test but, as she learned as time went on, her fear of everything. She was "flooded with a causeless joy that has never left me." In this book the commonplace belief that enlightenment is only for saints comes apart at the seams. Anyone can be enlightened, and all we need to do is ask. This rare and beautiful account puts Jan Frazier solidly in the tradition of enlightened teachers from J. Krishnamurti to Byron Katie.

Genres: Spirituality, Psychology, Nonfiction, Personal Development, Self Help

201 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Until the summer of her fiftieth year, Jan Frazier lived a life typical for a well-educated, middle-class American woman. A divorced mother of two teenagers, she was making a modest living writing and teaching writing. Following a Catholic childhood in Miami in the 1960s, she had studied English in college and graduate school. In her late twenties, longing for hills and snow, she moved to New England, where she was active in the peace movement. But the inner peace she sought always eluded her.
Then, in August 2003, she experienced a radical transformation of consciousness. Fear fell away from her, and she was immersed in a state of causeless joy that has never left her. While she has continued her life as writer, teacher, and mother, she has discovered it is possible to live a richly human life free of suffering. Her wish now is to communicate the truth that within every person is a pool of calm well-being that waits patiently to be stirred to life.
When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening (Weiser Books, 2007) is Jan's day-by-day account of the shift in consciousness and its alteration of her life. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Greatest Hits, was published by Pudding House, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been inspired by Gurumayi, Krishnamurti, and Eckhart Tolle, but the joy she lives in belongs to no particular tradition, and is available to all.

(from Web site)

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

I so wanted to love this. I actually cried reading the intro. But in the end I just couldn't get into her story. I wanted the key to peace, and dammit, she never really revealed it! Guess I'll have to continue to search for it on my own. :)

[July Wolfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most helpful description I've read of the awakening process, unique terms and down-to-earth applications. Will read this many more times and will quote it often.

[Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
- Henry David Thoreau

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
- T. S. Eliot

I will bow and be simple,
I will bow and be free.
- American Shaker traditional hymn

When Fear Falls Away is an enticing invitation. However, Jan Frazier's follow up, The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is, is a clear step above this first book. I'm looking forward to The Great Sweetening: Life After Thought.

When Fear Falls Away starts out strong but much of the magic gets lost in translation between the author's account and the reader's interest.

Favorite Passages:
INTRODUCTION
I have learned this much: to stop being surprised. It began with the end of fear. I can say that now - it began - but at that time, I thought the end of fear was the whole story.

INVITATION TO THE READER
. . . you know that no matter what challenge you are handed - for the rest of your life - the peace will sustain. Never again will you be afraid, desperate, lonely. Whatever comes your way, this causeless joy will hold.

THE BEGINNING: The Death of Fear
Fearlessness is a flimsy commodity if it depends upon a known outcome.
______

I had never realized there was an option to be unafraid.
______

I'm learning how to let fear go from my life. It's like the plug has been pulled under it, and it's running out, so fast now I'll soon be able to retrieve it by memory only.
______

I've heard for a long time that the opposite of love is fear, and now I begin to understand why that is so, because of what I feel rushing into me, as space is being freed up. Love so big it cracks me, floods all my warm places, and all the cool, hard places, made stiff and sterile by fear all my life.
______

Today I felt loosely tethered to the ordinary.
______

It is stretching of a sort, not of muscle but of mind, or maybe I mean of soul.
______

We all carry around our definitions: they are our supplies, a suitcase full of interpretations, little stories we tell ourselves about how the world ticks, what our lives mean, the whys and the wherefores.
_______

I am baffled. I am like the otter, her head breaking the surface, dripping, her fine black eyes looking this way and that at the unaccustomed world.
_______

All you know is that there has been a shift.
_______

It's just that time has gotten all stretchy, and a little silky too. Deliciously so. It's like, the more precious time gets, the more abundant it becomes. It's all of a sudden like I've got all the time in the world, and not very much at all I need to do with it.
_______

It's like a joy with no source.
_______

Every single thing I do is a total blast. It's like being stoned, only it's entirely clearheaded.
_______

And I watched myself drop hard and sure like a stone to the bottom of a pond, a dark, sweet pond where I rested, finally. I woke a long time after from the sweet liquor of unconsciousness, utterly refreshed.
_______

I creep toward a cliff at the edge of where words are, about to say this thing that wants saying, and the rush of pure joy at the prospect of possibly getting it said is so keen it almost hurts. My eyes grow hot and wet with it, but then - I am stopped, silent, my fist to my mouth. All the words have fled like a million little birds.
It's all right. Words have ceased to matter so much to me.
_______

Everything is such a trip. I am not under the influence of anything, though it could surely be said my consciousness has been altered.
_______

Isn't it the case that the moments in a lifetime most worth saving, most worth saying, are not accessible to the reaching fingers of words? The sayable things are not the transcendent moments.
_______

I keep feeling like I'm in a movie, watching myself be so different from how I used to be.
_______

It's the joy I refer to. The no-good-reason joy. It's love that I feel - enormous love, vast, undirected love. Undiluted, unfunneled love. I know of no other way to say it.

DEEPENING OF UNDERSTANDING
The delight is the deepest reality. The indifference is to everything else, all the details of a regular life.
It's a sensation of disengagement, of distance from worldly concerns.
_______

I want to learn how the ordinary and the extraordinary can be bedfellows, how their fingers can interlace and be warm and be tender companions to one another.
_______

How can it be that I've been holding this at bay, holding my shoulder to a bulging door all my life - all my effortful, fearful life - trying against all reason to hold away this thing that always did want to come in and overwhelm?
_______

One thing I'm noticing - a very new thing to me - is that it is possible to care without being fearful. That is to say, the evaporation of fear is not synonymous with not caring.
_______

. . . there is such mystery around that what brought me here. I little know how to account for it, let alone could I tell anybody else how to bring it about for themselves.
The only concrete help I can give right now is to say that it is valuable, perhaps, to long for it - to believe that such a thing is possible. Belief is, in and of itself, a great opener of doors, a lusty squirt of oil on the rusty hinges of all kinds of resistance. Also, perhaps it is helpful to be in the company of one who is established in that state. For a contagion takes place. And there is no cure.

ASSIMILATION: Becoming Fully Human
Through so much of this experience I have felt like an alien has come to occupy my skin. I turn my head this way and that at the woman who looks very much like me, but who bears really very little resemblance to the woman she was before all this came about.
________

. . . he was like Walt Whitman across the table from me, singing the praises of mud, brandishing his butter knife.
________

Enlightenment comes through being human.
________

My ways of encountering the world and experience that didn't serve me or that were a waste of energy - those things fell away, evaporated, and thereby feed up space.
_______

The fact is, we have it within us to do better - dramatically better - both individually and as a species.
_______

The magnitude of the transformation is so thorough, so all-pervasive and unhinging, so vast a reordering force in a person's condition, and it is so irrefutable that the change is permanent, that there can be no mistaking it has taken place.
_______

The substance and joy of my life no longer derive from the environment or from the particular present, nor are they dependent in any way upon anything external to my self.

IN THE WORLD, BUT NOT AT THE MERCY OF IT:
Accessing the Deep Stream of Consciousness
It's a feeling of radical freedom.
_______

Realization looks like an achievement only from the outside of it.
_______

Time is a lie, a big fat lie, and death too.
_______

Life is a drag for a lot of people. We accept it as sane that life is suffering. It mostly doesn't dawn that there's something wrong with this perspective. It is a perspective. It's all in the looking. Seeing life as suffering is what makes it so.
_______

How suffering becomes a door to peace. How pain is a trapdoor that if stood fully upon opens under the terrible weight of full acceptance. How the trapdoor is the roof above a pool of aching tenderness. How the very things we think are obstacles to peace are windows, and on the other side of the windows are our peaceful selves.

AFTERWORD
People seeking enlightenment often want a path to pursue, practices to master, or teachers to follow, because they want a method, a formula, for "achieving" the state. They can't stand to not be doing something to "get there." It can be comforting to have a project of sorts. They want to feel like they're making an effort. But these efforts can become substitutes for simply letting go into the reality that is available every moment. They can become a way to avoid the terrible recognition that you are constantly opting out, turning away from what is constantly possible. If you tell yourself there is a path you need to travel, that it will take time to get where you want to go - that there is a distance between you and the fully realized state - then the path can become a way of holding liberation at arm's length.
_______

There are people who are established in the awareness of fundamental reality. Some are articulate conveyors of that state, of the ways it can be missed. You would be crazy not to drink at the fountain of a teacher who gives you glimpses of the deep truth of your own condition.
_______

There are many ways to the truth. You may not even recognize your way for what it is. Even if you think of yourself as being on a particular path, chances are that later on you'll look back and have a different understanding of how you got there. Be ready to be surprised. This process will take you by the hand - or more likely, by the scruff of the neck. You won't be directing it, and to the extent you try to, you'll be putting yourself into a stall. Let your path be the particulars of your existence, the things that naturally arise in the course of daily life. They carry enough teachings to fill a library full of books, a life's worth of retreats. In the end, ordinary life will be the only indispensable teacher - the one whose lessons you cannot bypass.
________

I am encouraging you to turn gently toward the possibility that your life could be different.

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could have been way shorter and concise.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

day to day raw diary of Jan's experience after enlightenment. A lot of it is surprising. she's just as confused (but blissful) as anyone else imagines themselves to be if they suddenly hit a completely different state of being.

I didn't enjoy this as much as her other book "the freedom of being", which was much more thought out, structured, deep. But this kind of genre of a day by day log of what it's like right afterwards is rare and insightful in its own way.

[Jennifer Lauck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, this is a case where I don't go crazy praising the writing. Frankly, the writing is pretty dreadful but KUDOS to Jan Frazier for speaking on the topic of awakening. She is telling us what so few can tell us now--which is how is awakening done. What is this elusive "enlightenment thing?" Jan goes in there and tells us how she found it. I read it cover to cover and keep it on my desk as reference.

[Barbara Lynn-Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first learned of this book several years ago in yoga class. My teacher, Michelle, read excerpts from it at the end of class sometimes. The title really intrigued me -- what a concept, what a desire, that we could live without fear -- but the book got a little weird for me, with this almost cult worship of this Indian guru woman, I forgot her name. I lost interest at that point, it was just too out there for me.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jan is one of the few writers who attempts to convey the sense of what it's like to be be liberated from the usual bonds of fear, worry, resentment, mistrust. Reading it gives me a wonderful taste of that freedom, and reminds me that it really is possible for me to live that way. She's a delicious writer too - very tasty sentences!

[Lorena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is book that I come back to again and again. I love reading it. I feel peaceful and calm after reading it. I definitely recommend it.

[Joel Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

LIBERATION IS NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT, IN THE USUAL SENSE OF THE WORD. IT ISN'T A DOING. i IS AN UNDOING, A RESTORATION TO THE INTENDED STATE, TO THE FRESHNESS OR ORIGIN. EGO IS WHAT GETS IN THE WAY OF THE GREAT UNDOING.

Post enlightenment all the endeavours are done with clarity, effortlessness and an absence of stress.

Expect when needed for a task, your mind is at rest.

Never again will you be afraid, desperate, lonely.

As soon as you look at a thing enough to collect words for it, it has ceased to be.

It seems I want nothing anymore. For wanting means, among other things, lacking.

For there to be a he, or a thought, or a dish, or a separate God, there has to be a looker and a looked-at, a subject and an object. No such thing.

Belief is, in and of itself, a great opener of doors, a lusty squirt of oil on the rusty hinges of all kinds of resistance.

Surrender is the plain acceptance of the present reality.

My constant experience is that I am not doing anything, things are simply happening.

Dont let yourself get away with thinking it comes and goes, or that it resides outside of you. It is only your awareness of it that comes and goes.

[Judy Rancourt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carol Miller recommended

[Peggy D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was enlightening for me. I enjoyed reading it and felt inspired and encouraged from reading it.

[Kamala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply inspiring .

[Seinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style was a bit too… flowy to my taste. But the message was powerful

[Kiersten · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will not be for everyone, but I enjoyed Frazier's poetic prose. Her experience is so inspirational and gives me hope that awakening is available to a supposedly 'ordinary' person like me!

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read this book several years ago, it invited me back to questions I had closed long before about the nature of spirit and the capacities of our minds. Frazier offers a chronological account of her experience of what might commonly be called "enlightenment," but might more aptly be called Waking Up. This is what it feels like, at least for one person. It turns out that hearing it described is at least as helpful as all the talks, teachings, techniques, and meditation manuals I've seen. It is just a plus that her writing is clear, personal, and intelligent.

[S. Harrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frazier's account of her personal release of fear is a touching and empowering gift. I must say that I did not find her voice in the piece to be as strong as that of the woman whose story she was telling, though that does not diminish the beauty of the experience she shares. While I can celebrate her obvious triumph, I just didn't feel the excitement of her process coming through in her words. Frazier is a skilled writer, though her Editor has not done her art justice in this book.

[Jack Purcell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a journal, of sorts, about an awakening. As Krishnamurti and others have stressed, she clarifies the extent to which fear dictates many people's lives. I've read it twice now. And am likely to read it a third time in the near future.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that makes "enlightenment" understandable!

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sincere, personal account of a woman's experience of awakening.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I needed to be reading right now. Great description of the process of awakening but too repetitive with inconsistent writing. Definitely will re-read parts of it again in the future.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many great insights into a transformative experience.

[Owen Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated the sincerity of this book. Jan's writing is very poetic while remaining clear and concise in descriptions of her awakening.

[Jenniferlauck Lauck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dreadfully written but more food for the spirit...