And what your fear Are within yourself. The Tao teaches us to take charge of our lives, to face our fears and learn from them.
Fear is a valuable warning signal, our natural response to danger.
In an automatic fight or flight response, our bodies go through a variety of changes to meet the perceived threat. But in the modern world, many problems cannot be remedied by fight or flight. There's an old story told about a man so afraid of the sight of his shadow and the sound of his footsteps that he ran away from them. But the more he ran, the faster the footsteps sounded after him, the more swiftly his shadow followed behind. Falling into a panic, he ran faster and faster until he finally died of exhaustion.