August 10-17 Eugene Hughes and I again offered Lead Like a River in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. Designed for leaders in business and the arts who are ready to use their already considerable gifts to make a real contribution to the planet, the program entails spending time in wild nature, including a dawn-to-dusk solo high in the mountains, to gain clarity and insight.

One participant, Vanessa, works with international corporations, helping them make major transitions. For her solo day she chose what she thought was a secluded place in a forest of old, gnarled cedar trees. As the morning sun warmed the earth, she began a ceremony to let go of old attitudes that had become obstacles. She would name each attitude, then find a stick, stone, or other object to symbolize it, and place the object in a tree.

Suddenly she was interrupted by two teenage boys who walked down the mountain and discovered her.

To visitors these rugged mountains are remote, but to the local Berber people they are home terrain, where they graze their sheep and goats on the high passes, grow crops, and lead their mules up and down the narrow, rocky trails. The boys obviously saw Vanessa as an oddity, someone not engaged in any recognizable activity. Curious, they sat down and gaped.

Vanessa was both alarmed and annoyed. Might she be in danger? And how could she do her inner work? She tried to indicate that she wanted to be alone. One boy eventually wandered away, but the other simply lay down on his side, propped his head in his hand, and gaped. Vanessa couldn't decide whether to continue with her ceremony, try to ignore the boy, or go for help. Before she could decide he fell asleep.

She tried to resume her ceremony, but suddenly anger flared up. This was her day to focus on the rest of her life, and every minute was important! She knew that she was the stranger here and that her presence no doubt seemed bizarre, but she was unwilling to be disrespected or treated as an object of curiosity. She also realized that that was exactly how she often felt as a woman working in the higher echelons of the male-dominated corporate world.

Looking around, she found a large round stone. She picked it up and walked to spot a few feet from the boy. She lifted the stone above her head. And then she dropped it. With a resounding, decisive thud it fell. The boy woke, leapt to his feet, and dashed off.

As for Vanessa, she felt exhilarated. She had stayed her ground. She had neither run from the situation nor harmed the boys. Two days later she declared that she would launch a series of programs to educate young woman about patriarchal attitudes in the business world and how they could stand their ground and be themselves while succeeding.

Earlier in August, an ocean away from Morocco's rugged peaks, in a range of rolling green hills known locally as the Endless Mountains, a woman confronted fear in a much different way.

Claire came on the 17th annual Endless Mountains Vision Quest because she was at a turning point in her career. An educator for many years, she was training in a new field of therapy for youth, an approach she was passionate about and determined to succeed in. She was worried, however, for she had a habit of sabotaging herself. Lingering fears from her childhood sometimes held her back from being as bold and forthright as she yearned to be. She wanted to confront that old pattern and transform it.

She launched her mission by deliberately choosing for her solo a place that challenged her: a patch of Scotch pines planted in the 1930s by a farmer who had intended to farm them for Christmas trees, but never gotten around to thinning them. The trees had grown dense and tall and too close together. The lower branches had died from lack of sun, and the ground around them, bare of vegetation, was covered in the lavender-brown duff of decades of needles.

After arriving at her spot in the morning, Claire began creating a "fear altar" on which she placed, and sacralized, symbols of each of the things she was afraid of. She took a break to spend time in a sunny, open swath of ferns, and as she returned to the pine forest the seemingly inhospitable nature of the place confronted her anew. On the climb back to her pines, she stopped short. "Wow," she thought, "there is an army of trees standing in opposition to me." Quickly she laughed, realizing that the trees were not enemies, but allies, and that in her life, as well, many allies and supporters surrounded her.

She then made a final offering to the fear altar, thanking fear for showing up in such a timely way to teach her a lesson and asking it to refrain from visiting her in the future when she didn't need it. She walked to one of the trees. "I am not afraid," she told it. She walked to another. "I am not afraid." It became clear to her that she needed to make this declaration to every one of the trees in that patch of forest, and this she did, standing formally in front of each one and informing it, "I am not afraid." At least two hundred trees, by her count, witnessed her testament. With this declaration, made with such patience, such honoring of all the different trees in that wood and, by virtue of the mirror that nature holds to humans, of all the different parts of herself, Claire transformed her old fear into new openness, clarity, courage, and dignity.

 (Above: a Scots pine plantation in Finland. Photo by Niall Corbet, Flickr) 

Many years ago, at a particularly troubled time of my life, I started seeing an amazing therapist named Judith Mosson. Judith was a big advocate of right action as a way to instigate right thinking. For example, every week I would make a contract with her to do some specific act that was healthy and life-affirming... and difficult for me to do. Another way she helped me was through a question she'd pose when I floundered in uncertainty.

"What would you do if you weren't afraid?" Judith would ask.

That was usually enough to liberate my imagination and, indirectly, help me to recognize how often the obstacles in my life were rooted in fear.

I stopped seeing Judith more than twenty-five years ago and, sadly, she died of cancer six years ago. But that question she used to ask still guides me.

Try it! When you find yourself procrastinating about some task, ask, "What would I do if I weren't afraid?" You may not even have realized that the reason for your delay is some little noose of fear, but just asking the question has a magical way of freeing you up so the answer itself can penetrate to the fore of your consciousness. Or ask it when you can't make up your mind about something. Suddenly, when fear is no obstacle, the course of action is plain.