4am

is when my niggling fears loom largest, and I'm most vulnerable to them. You know the kind:

- I bet that twinge in my tooth is an incipient root canal,
- My father's knee pain is going to cripple him within a year,
- My 401K is as good as gone because the stock market is a seething mass of corruption and insider trading,
- The next tsunami will hit East Africa and wipe out my whole country,
- Everything I eat is so full of pesticides and toxins, there's no chance I can avoid cancer,
- What makes me think I can produce a show by autumn?

I've tried going back to sleep.
I've tried tensing and relaxing each muscle.
I've tried tonglen.

The only thing I know that works - and yet I continue to resist it - is to get out of bed and get my body moving. Fear is paralysed energy that needs to be put into motion. The more I stay still and try to tamp it down, the more it builds. Once I move, it flows into ideas, solutions, connection to the world around me. Dissolves into endorphin-spiked-laughter at my internal scaremonger.