The Cords of Fear

“Humanity is unlearning fear.”—Jennifer Axcell

Painting naked in the forest

August 10th, 2026

📍House of Loto—Salida, Colorado, USA 🇺🇸

Greetings from the wilderness!

At the beginning of this year, I chose Freedom as my word for 2026. What I'm slowly realizing is that freedom isn't something we achieve once. It's a practice. Liberation isn't the absence of fear. It's the gradual release of everything that keeps us from living in Love.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about fear. Not the kind of fear that protects us from real danger—that fear is a nervous system gift. I'm talking about the quieter kind. The fear that quietly shapes our decisions, our relationships, our politics, and even our understanding of God. The kind of fear that convinces us we have to cling tighter, control outcomes, or carry burdens that were never ours to carry.

In both the large and the small decisions we make each day, we're invited to ask an important question: Am I moving from fear... or from Love?

For the past few years, one of my most unexpected teachers has been a practice that often surprises people when I mention it: painting naked in the forest. If you've been reading these letters for a while, you may remember the story I shared in Liberated Woman. At first, I thought this practice was about vulnerability—about learning to be seen without hiding behind titles, achievements, or expectations.

It is. But recently, I've realized it's teaching me something even deeper. It's teaching me discernment.

Every time I step into the woods without the protection of my clothes, every time I begin a painting without knowing what it will become, every time I resist the urge to control the outcome of what I create, I'm reminding my nervous system that it is safe to let go.

Because letting go of outcomes isn't resignation—it's realignment.

Cutting the Cords of Fear, 2024

The painting I'm sharing this week is called Cutting the Cords of Fear. As I painted, I realized the cords weren't fear itself. They were my attachment to fear. The subtle ways fear tries to convince us it deserves authority over our lives.

That word—attachment—kept coming back to me.

In Addiction & Grace, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, "Attachment... is the process that enslaves desire." He isn't only talking about addiction to substances. He's talking about anything we cling to so tightly that it begins making our decisions for us.

Fear can become one of those attachments. We begin to mistake vigilance for wisdom. Control for safety. Certainty for truth. Without realizing it, fear slowly becomes the lens through which we interpret everything.

Disturbance, 2026

The Toltec teacher Don Miguel Ruiz writes in his book, The Four Agreements, "If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy."

Don Miguel Ruiz goes even further when he writes, "If we look at human society we see a place so difficult to live in because it is ruled by fear." That's a sobering observation. Turn on the news. Open social media. Listen to political rhetoric from nearly any direction. Fear has become one of the most persuasive currencies in our culture. It sells certainty. It divides. It keeps us reacting instead of relating.

But I don't believe fear is our deepest truth. Left unchecked, we forget there is another way to live.

I wonder how many invisible agreements we've made with fear without even realizing it. What if liberation isn't the absence of fear? What if liberation is choosing not to let fear make our decisions?

Elizabeth Kneafsey, in The Wild Wool Shepherdess, writes, "Be afraid and do it anyway! That's where the power lies." Not because courage eliminates fear. But because Love becomes the greater compass.

I love what Meggan Watterson writes about vulnerability in her book about Thecla, The Girl Who Baptized Herself: "The power in being naked... is that we are then in a state of vulnerability... When we are vulnerable, we are only relying on what's left, and what's left is the truth." I smiled when I first read those words because they gave language to something I had experienced. My own naked painting practice has never been about provocation. It has been about removing every layer that isn't truly me, until all that's left is honesty.

And perhaps that's what liberation really asks of us. Not to become someone new. But to remember who we have always been. 

Untitled, 2026

I believe individuation—the lifelong journey of becoming our authentic Self—is inseparable from liberation. Every layer of fear we release uncovers something more original, more whole, more deeply rooted in Love. We aren't manufacturing a new identity. We're uncovering the one fear convinced us to forget.

As the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich reminds us, "God's love creates in us such a unity that we cannot separate ourselves from each other... God showed me this so that our love will be increased, while our fears are diminished."

Keith Giles expresses it this way in The Quantum Sayings of Jesus: "Any fear of lack is a lie… Generosity, abundance and freedom are the realities we embrace once we understand our Oneness with God."

That word—Oneness—has become increasingly important to me. If fear depends upon the illusion that we are separate from God, from one another, or from our own true nature, then liberation begins with remembering what has always been true. We were never meant to live from separation. We were created to live from communion with Source.

The more I contemplate this, the more I believe that as Love grows, fear loses its grip. I wonder if this is the deeper work humanity is being invited into in these dark times.

When we forgot our Source, fear became a substitute for memory.

Perhaps liberation is simply remembering. Remembering that we belong before we achieve. Remembering that we are loved before we perform. Remembering that we were never separate from our Source, only asleep to It. I wonder if this is what individuation really is—not becoming someone entirely new, but peeling away everything fear convinced us we had to be until only Love remains.

And maybe that's the spiritual practice before us—Not becoming fearless, but remembering… who we are and whose we are. Remembering Love.

With Love, unconditionally—

Jennifer

P.S.—I’d love to hear from YOU! Rather than emailing me or dropping me a DM, please post a comment below 👇

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