Keen believes that our lives are shaped—and occasionally misshaped—by the stories we tell about ourselves. It's only by becoming intimately acquainted with these narratives—as they have been handed down from our families, our cultural backgrounds, our religious beliefs—that we can begin to live consciously and, as the Sufi poet Rumi said, "unfold our own myth."

Unless we understand our lives as a kind of autobiography in the making, says Keen, we're likely to take refuge in other people's stories, in ready-made ideologies, and in unexamined systems of belief.

In this interview, originally published in The Sun magazine, I talk with Keen about the meaning of true freedom—about overcoming our resistances and becoming "connoisseurs of fear."

"Most of us are fear-avoiders," Keen says. "We worship the god of security. Instead of facing our fears, we walk around with a kind of free-floating anxiety. It's much more therapeutic to recognize that we have fears and to try to separate out the ones that are reasonable from the ones that are not. I think we have to become connoisseurs of fear."