Fear Moves Underground
On emotional suppression as the default — and why fear operating below the surface ruins your paragliding.
After a scary flight, a bad landing, or worse, most pilots just try to forget about it and move on. The experience either gets buried or delivered as a tale of bravery.
After all, we’re paragliders. Hardcore, strong and fearless thrill-seekers. Right?
To the outside world I think that’s how it looks. And to the newbie, stories of cascades and reserve throws are met with laughs and survival-of-the-fittest attitudes.
But I know you know this isn’t the way.
Because we all feel it, but the problem is nobody talks about it. We have language for almost everything else in paragliding — wind, gear, airspace, thermals — but very little for fear.
Heike Hamann is a four-time Australian paragliding champion. She’s been flying since 1992. She has also, across those decades, survived a powerline landing, a tow accident, a cascade at 5,000 metres in Spain that left her alone for five hours waiting for retrieve, and a reserve throw in the Austrian Alps that ended with a helicopter ride to hospital.
In 2009, she wrote a paper called Seven Steps to Dealing with Fear in Paragliding. It was published in Cross Country magazine and it had a big impact on my own journey to build my relationship with fear.
She also went on to complete a Masters in Process Work — a body of psychological practice about how people move through disturbance — because the things she was dealing with in the air eventually required more than pilot language could hold.
Here is what she wrote about the years before she built it:
For the longest time, I felt like I had to be strong and deal with them myself. Or more like it, not deal with the feelings at all, and just move on.
A World-Class pilot. Not dealing with the feelings at all. Just moving on.
What she’s describing is suppression. If someone at her level was doing that, what do you think the rest of us are doing?
I threw my reserve after a botched wingover one week before SIV training. I walked out without a scratch and literally laughed it off with my friends. I didn’t think much of it.
But something had shifted in me and I didn’t have words for it. Small bumps in the air now felt massive. My trust had been broken and the bubble of perceived safety had burst.
The thing I remember most clearly was the silence around it. Not because people were cold — paragliding friends are not cold — but because nobody around me had a language for what I was going through. We had language for weather. Language for gear. Language for airspace. But for the new feeling I had while flying, we had nothing. Or we had jokes. “You’ll be alright, mate.” “Get back on the horse.”
I got back on the horse. The fear did not go away. It just went underground, which is the worst place for it.
It took a while to find my way back to that place. Eventually I did, partly using her framework and my own deep exploration into paragliding and why we do it.
Years later I started instructing, and I started carefully bringing it up with my students. Asking what they were carrying. Whether anything had happened that was still affecting them. Almost every pilot had something that they hadn’t known what to do with, let alone had tools for.
One of our Wingmates flew alone last week despite knowing she’d be anxious before she even left the house. Climbed to 2,400 in uncomfortable thermals, talked herself through the breathing all the way up. Came back exhausted but changed. That’s what it looks like when someone actually works with fear.
That gap is what I want to start talking about.
Let me be clear about my position.
The mainstream paragliding culture tells you fear can be eliminated, or worse, reframes it as a “gift” you should be grateful for. Both of those land as dismissive when you’re actually standing on launch unable to get off.
Fear can’t be eliminated, and you wouldn’t want it to. Fear carries information — about risk, about your edge, about unresolved stuff from last month that you haven’t processed yet. The pilots who’ve lost their fear are not the ones I want near me on a spicy day. Fear, properly listened to, is one of the sharpest instruments we have. Blunting it is its own kind of danger.
What I’m going to do — in this essay and in the writing that follows — is lay out a way of working with fear, and eventually with everything fear guards the door to (like flow), that actually holds up. It draws on Hamann’s seven-step framework, flow science, decades of flying, and the particular education of having been the pilot who didn’t have words for what he was carrying and had to build them.
A way of working that I’m going to keep making sense of with my coaching clients and with you, in public.
If you’ve been carrying something — a bad flight, a close call, a slow drift in confidence you can’t quite explain — this is for you. Just notice that you’re not the only one, and that there is a language for this. We just don’t speak it often enough.
There’s a way to work with this instead of against it. I’ve been calling it The Way of Fear.
More on this coming soon.
If you fly and want to be part of a smaller conversation about any of this — Wingmates is where that’s happening. It’s also where The Way of Fear course will live when it’s ready.