You don’t escape fear by fighting it—you let it move through you

I remember sitting on a bench outside a temple in northern Thailand, watching a leaf drift slowly to the ground. It was a small moment—quiet, forgettable.

But in that stillness, I felt something shift.

That leaf, falling without resistance, reminded me of something both Buddhism and Osho have pointed to in different ways: nothing stays the same—not the leaf, not the fear, not the thoughts running wild in our heads.

And yet, when anxiety takes hold, it feels like it will never leave. Like the fear has always been there and always will be.

This is where most conventional advice falls short. It treats anxiety as something to be managed, fought, or suppressed.

But what if the path to freedom wasn’t control at all? What if the very effort to control is what keeps us trapped?

That’s the doorway Osho invites us to walk through—and where the Buddhist teaching of impermanence gives us the key.

Why most approaches to anxiety keep us stuck

Much of Western psychology treats anxiety as a problem to fix.

You’re given cognitive tools, breathing exercises, medications—strategies that assume anxiety is the enemy and your job is to eliminate it.

But here’s the paradox: the more you try to resist anxiety, the more it persists.

You monitor your thoughts, try to catch the early signs, control your breathing, avoid triggers. Eventually, the act of managing anxiety becomes anxiety itself.

This aligns with what’s known in acceptance-based therapies—particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—as “experiential avoidance,” where the attempt to control or escape internal discomfort actually reinforces psychological suffering.

In my own experience—as a student of both psychology and Buddhist practice—I’ve seen that this mindset is rooted in a deeper illusion: the belief that our emotional states are fixed unless acted upon.

We fear they’ll linger indefinitely, that if we don’t fix them, they’ll consume us.

But what if they were never meant to stay?

Osho challenges this entire framework. He doesn’t tell you to fight anxiety. He asks you to watch it. Not like a scientist analyzing a specimen, but like a mountain watching clouds pass.

That watching—without judgment, without reaction—is not passive. It’s powerful. Because in that still presence, something surprising happens.

What I learned when I stopped trying to make anxiety go away

Years ago, during a particularly difficult period of my life, I developed intense anxiety around public speaking. I tried every cognitive trick I knew. None of it worked.

One day, while preparing for a talk, I gave up. Not out of peace, but exhaustion. I told myself, “Fine. Let the panic come.”

And it did. But then it moved through me. Not because I fought it—but because I didn’t.

That was the first time I saw the principle of impermanence in action, not just in theory. It’s one thing to understand Anicca intellectually.

It’s another to feel fear rise like a wave and recede without you needing to do anything.

This is what Osho meant when he said, “Don’t fight with fear. Be a witness.”

But witnessing doesn’t mean dissociation. It means staying aware—present—in the body and mind while refusing to grasp or run. And that’s terrifying, at first.

But it’s also exactly what mindfulness-based approaches, like MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), train us to do: to observe our internal experience with curiosity rather than resistance.

So why does it work?

Because fear, like every thought and feeling, is inherently transient. But we rarely let it finish its course.

We interrupt it, resist it, suppress it—and in doing so, we keep it around longer than it would naturally stay.

If your thoughts aren’t permanent, why do you treat them like they are?

This is the turning point.

Ask yourself:

• When I feel fear, do I assume it’s permanent?

• Do I believe my anxious thoughts reflect objective truth?

• Have I ever actually tracked how long a wave of fear lasts when I don’t interfere with it?

Most of us never do. We assume the worst—because that’s what fear does. But we forget that the story fear tells is not fixed. It shifts. It collapses under observation.

That’s the hidden power of impermanence. Not as a nice idea, but as a tool.

In cognitive behavioral terms, fear thrives on “cognitive fusion”—our tendency to believe that just because we think something, it must be true. Mindful observation breaks that fusion.

When you begin to witness your fear with the understanding that it’s not a fixed state—that it’s already dissolving the moment it arises—your relationship to it changes.

You stop trying to fix it. And paradoxically, that’s when you stop being trapped by it.

Stillness isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the freedom to let fear pass through

One of the more radical things Osho says is that fear is not your enemy; your clinging is.

Fear will come and go. But clinging to the desire not to feel it, clinging to the identity of “someone who is anxious”—that’s what stays.

This is why meditation isn’t just a tool to relax. It’s a training in impermanence.

You sit. You breathe. You feel a thought arise: I’m not safe. You don’t push it away. You watch. And maybe, five seconds later, the thought is gone—replaced by another. And then another.

Eventually, you start to see the entire mechanism for what it is: a stream. Not a structure.

This perspective aligns closely with the Buddhist concept of anattā—non-self. Your fear isn’t who you are. It’s a passing event in awareness, not a permanent trait.

And if your mind is a stream, what are you holding on to?

Let go. That’s what both Osho and the Buddha keep saying—not as a metaphor, but as a literal instruction.

The surprising calm that comes when you stop trying to feel calm

Here’s the hardest truth I’ve had to learn: you don’t escape anxiety by becoming a calmer person.

You escape anxiety by letting go of the need to escape it.

When I teach this, I often ask:

• What if you stopped labeling yourself as anxious?

• What if fear was just another wave in the ocean of your awareness?

• What if your job wasn’t to stop the wave, but to let it pass, ungripped?

This is the essence of non-attachment—not detachment, but the willingness to let reality unfold without needing to control it. It’s also a key tenet of my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, where I explore how freedom arises not from fixing yourself, but from seeing clearly.

This isn’t about resignation. It’s about trust—trusting in the nature of things to change. That’s the heart of Anicca.

And once you trust that, you no longer have to fight what you feel. You can stand in the middle of it and let it move through.

That’s not suppression. That’s not avoidance. That’s liberation.

Anxiety is real—but so is your freedom from it

Let’s bring it back to the bench in Thailand.

I didn’t stop being afraid that day. But I saw, for the first time, that I didn’t have to fear fear itself. Because it was always moving. Always changing.

Just like the leaf, floating down, with nowhere it had to land.

When we treat anxiety like a permanent identity, we create a trap. But when we remember impermanence, we create space. And in that space, there’s a different kind of calm—one not rooted in control, but in clarity.

What I’ve learned, over years of writing about fear, mindfulness, and healing, is this: You can’t reason your way out of anxiety, but you can remember your way out—back to the truth that nothing in you is stuck.

Osho doesn’t ask you to fix your fear. He asks you to be with it. And Buddhist practice shows you how.

Not by replacing anxiety with calm—but by letting go of the belief that you need either to be whole.

So the next time fear rises, don’t brace yourself. Don’t fix. Don’t cling.

Watch.

And let the wave pass.