The voice of a child says
It’s better that our hearts grow light.
It’s better to embrace instead of exile suffering.
Mothers weep until their tears run dry.
Their sons on distant streets decay,
kissed by the meritless fever of war,
Stripped of life.
And all souls die along with them;
Just as all souls live
when a newborn embraces the joy of its mother’s breast.
Relieved of the heavy husk of childhood
Let our voices rise to denounce
all that kept us prisoner.
Like the undisturbed stars
my heart flickers without falter.
I use its light to turn around to face my real enemies,
but all there is
is stillness and space...
Row upon row of ramparts I have built
for an enemy that doesn’t exist.
All souls are set free
as I tear down my walls
brick by brick
But not by hating them.
I have taken the child’s advice.
It’s better that our hearts grow light.
It’s better to love than to fear.
And the voice of a child says
there is no better way to love
than to love the fear itself.
Fear by Teal Swan
The third pillar of loneliness is fear. So, what does fear have to do with loneliness and connection? The answer is that fear is inherently about separation. By its very nature, fear is to push something or someone away from you, and it is the number-one most isolating experience on the planet. The more fearful we are, the more alone we are. Fears about relationships or about other people simply serve to separate us from people and make us lonely when it comes to human contact.
To help visualize this, imagine that you are standing in the middle of a circle with a bunch of people. Now see yourself feeling fear toward these people in the circle and pushing them away. When you do this, eventually everyone else ends up outside the circle and you are the only one inside the circle... alone. Now imagine that same scenario but this time your fear toward everyone causes you to want to avoid them and thus run away from them. If you do this, everyone else is still inside the circle and you are now outside the circle... alone. This is how fear creates loneliness and prevents connection.
Earlier in this book, I explained that there is only one kind of pain in this universe, and that is the pain of separation. If we feel pain, it’s because in that moment, we are separated from something. And when we feel pain in a relationship, it’s always an indication that we have a fear present. We need to face that fear directly. People who are lonely are deeply fearful people. The fear they feel is the felt experience of pushing something away.
Hell is not a state that exists external to us. Hell is fear. Fear and hell are one and the same. This is why there can be people who are in hell walking the Earth next to people who are in heaven. Heaven is love. Vibrationally speaking, love is the opposite of fear.
It’s important that we come to recognize what all our fears are about, especially our core fear. Our core fear is the thing we try the hardest to avoid in life. As such, our core fear will always be a part of ourselves that we split off from and disowned. This means that you have yet another Inner Twin, a Fear Twin, inside you that came about because of your core fear. You may have any number of Fear Twins in fact.
Facing our deepest inner fears
Here is a recent experience I had of uncovering deep fears in my own life. When I moved to a foreign country for the first time, I committed to a period of shamanic journey work with plant medicines. On one of my inner journeys, I was forced to witness my deepest fears one by one, down to the very core fear that I have. That is the fear of being trapped in pain, alone with no escape and no way of ending it. This is my greatest fear because it’s already something I have experienced in my real life.
The desperate fear I felt from that experience in my life made me cut off from the part of myself that was having that terrifying experience. It became an Inner Twin and it lay subconscious within me for many years.
When I finally became aware of this long-lost part within me, this Fear Twin, in my mind’s eye, looked completely burnt from head to toe. Only her eyes were distinguishable. Her right shin bone was compound fractured. She couldn’t move or breathe because she was in so much pain. She looked like the kind of person who had been hurt so badly that she needed to be in the Intensive Care Unit.
During that inner journey, I was told that the two greatest answers to overcoming fear were to love the self that is afraid and to love the self that you are the most afraid of. If to love means to take something as a part of yourself, to love it in this case meant that I had to re-own it and, as such, to take responsibility for its wellbeing. Therefore, I had to decide to make this part of myself, my Fear Self, my first priority.
In other words, I had to figure out what she needed and begin to change my life to make space for those needs. Thus I entered a period of healing. I cancelled my upcoming tours. I invited my Fear Twin to come up within me to take over my body so I could really feel her needs. Following her needs, I would sleep-in in the morning. I took Epsom salt baths and I practised tenderness with myself. I made sure that everyone in my life who mattered to me was aware of this inner part of me and asked them to be in a relationship with her as well. I asked people to treat me gently. As this fragile Inner Twin began to heal, I grew less and less afraid of people. I began to feel ready for life again.
Then I did the same with any other aspects of myself that were afraid and had splintered off over the years. This was the beginning of taking responsibility for my fears. Instead of seeing my fears as things that were trying to destroy my life and pull me down, I saw that they were like terrified children crying out desperately for my help. And when I answered that call, I felt less afraid and I felt less alone.
The inheritance of fear
Even if we grow up in a loving environment, we inherit fear and the belief that we are not able to deal with certain things.
Hardly any mother on Earth can avoid saying, “Be careful or you’ll get hurt.” When a child hits the toddler phase, mothers often say this many times a day. Inherent in her voice is the message, “The world is dangerous and you won’t be able to handle it if something bad happens.”
This message is a distortion because it really isn’t about the child not being able to handle it, it’s about the mother not being able to handle it. When she tells her child to be careful, what she is really saying is, “If something bad happens to you, I won’t be able to handle it.” When we were children we took on our mothers’ fear, whether we were aware of it or not.
The same is true of our fathers and any other significant people in our early environment. We adopted their feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy without questioning it, and we adopted the inevitable fear that came as a result of it. And as we will explore more in this section, the primary ways that we usually cover up our fears are through avoidance and control.
Remember, there are only two movements that we usually take: the movement toward and the movement away. When you experience fear, you naturally push something away from yourself, which is to say that you dis-include it as part of yourself. This is the opposite of love, which is to pull something toward yourself so as to include it as part of yourself.
Fear can be defined as a response to a perceived threat. When we perceive something to be a danger to us, meaning that we perceive the possibility of suffering, harm, or injury on a physical, mental or emotional level, then of course we naturally want to get away from it. Usually we want to either push it away, which would be fighting it, or we want to run away from it, but there is a third choice. We could choose to reform it so it’s no longer a threat. We can reform it by changing it into something that no longer threatens us.
Interestingly, it doesn’t matter whether the threat is really a threat to us or not. What matters is if we perceive it to be a threat. Fear is something that is primal, in the same way as shame. Each of these are a reaction that happens instinctively without us having to think about making it happen. Our reaction is a visceral and organic biological affective reaction. It begins as a reaction and then thoughts come in on top of that reaction.
If we feel fear, we think we are unsafe. We don’t feel secure from danger, harm, injury or risk. Unless we feel safe in a given situation or with a given person, we will naturally push that situation or that person away from us. This behaviour is a mirror of what we do to the part of ourselves internally that caused us to feel afraid in the past – we push it away.
For example, if part of us is angry and we have learned that anger causes us to be rejected by others then we won’t feel safe to include anger as part of ourselves or even acknowledge that it is within us. Other people might say, “There’s nothing wrong with anger,” but if your past experience has taught you that there is something wrong with anger and it comes with big consequences, you’ll perceive anger as a threat and you will therefore continue to fear it.
The fears we hide inside primarily arose because we lacked safety in our childhood or lost our personal security too early. As adults, we still long for someone to protect and provide for us, unaware that we have other options to feel safe. We carry the remembered imprint of the small child within us, who was surrounded by indifferent, un-attuned or hostile giants, otherwise known as the adults in our lives, and that child inside us decided that safety was impossible. If we experience a lot of fear relative to relationships, chances are that this early experience was our reality. We just don’t believe that it’s possible to feel safe in the context of connection with other people, which torments us because connection is also something that we so desperately crave.
The four primary fears in relationships
People have four primary fears when it comes to relationships. They are:
1. Abandonment
2. Rejection or disapproval
3. Being trapped in pain
4. Loss of self, also called enmeshment
Abandonment is an exiting violation and leads to isolation. When we are abandoned or perceive abandonment, we feel we have lost connection with someone because they went away.
When we feel rejected or disapproved of, we perceive ourselves to be pushed away by someone. This causes acute pain within us.
Sometimes we feel that because of certain circumstances or even perhaps due to our own needs, we won’t be able to get away from someone who is hurting us mentally, emotionally or physically. When this is the case, we are trapped in pain. This is the essence of torture.
Loss of self or enmeshment is when we feel completely consumed by our partner rather than the kind of connection and unity we crave, which is to become part of each other. Enmeshment is definitely not mutually positive, which is why we are so scared of it. It’s when one person becomes part of the other but not the other way around, so it actually feels more like being eaten.
There are two sides to the fundamental core of fear. The first is that you feel powerless to prevent what is unwanted and the second is that you feel powerless to bring about what is wanted. If you dissect any fear you have, you will always find these two sides within it.
You’ll notice also that desire is always present if fear is present. Most of us don’t recognize that. If you feel powerless to bring about what you desire in your reality, it means that despite having a strong desire, it is your thoughts, words and actions that are pulling in the opposite direction of what you desire. In other words, there is a separation between you and what you desire.
On a physical level, this rather energetic circumstance shows up in your embodiment as the feeling of fear. It feels like life is happening to you. That wouldn’t be a problem if you felt like you could handle what was happening to you. But the thing about fear is that if you are feeling fear, without exception it means that you feel like you can’t handle whatever life is bringing to you or whatever is happening to you at that moment. For example, if I feel fear about making a fool out of myself, I can’t handle the experience of being embarrassed and I don’t feel able to face the potential consequences of being seen as foolish or silly by others.
It’s impossible to fear the unknown
One of the biggest fears is “the unknown”. This is because, as humans, we have become addicted to knowledge. We just have to know everything about everything at all times. It’s part of why you picked up this book to read.
There are several dynamics that make knowing things appealing and one is that when we grasp a new concept, our brain releases a dose of chemicals similar to opium. Knowledge addiction also gives the human being a strong evolutionary advantage. We are guaranteed to progress if we are hard-wired to learn. Without thinking about it, we tend to want to pick out experiences that are new because those experiences will cause us to learn more, thereby quenching our thirst.
This desire for knowledge is not in and of itself negative, but it has a shadow side. The shadow side is that knowledge is often used by the human ego as a security blanket. Let me explain. The ego uses knowledge to avoid things it fears, things like insignificance, worthlessness and physical pain. The ego knows that we become significant to others when we know more than them and we gain status and respect from others. And knowledge is often used by the ego to keep itself away from the rocky seas of uncertainty. Cognitive closure provides more certainty to us and makes us feel safe. And if the ego’s goal is survival, knowledge is more essential than even food or water is. After all, knowledge is what allows us to find food and water in the first place.
However, this commonly accepted idea that we fear the unknown is actually completely and totally false. We don’t fear the unknown. If we truly feared the unknown, babies would fear everything and they don’t. What we fear is what we project into the unknown based on our previous experiences. When we face something unknown, our mind goes to work projecting the fears that it has already acquired in an effort to predict what terrors lie in the unknown and then the ego goes to work trying to figure out how to avoid those fears. So you can see, it’s actually those projections that we are afraid of.
For example, if we quit our job that we have been working at for ten years to do something radically new and different, we are venturing into the unknown. But we don’t fear that unknown in and of itself. We fear the potential failure and fall from grace that we could experience socially by venturing into the unknown. This fear arises because we have experienced the feeling of failure or fall from grace before and wish to avoid that again at all costs. If we learned to not project our fears into the unknown, the unknown would no longer be scary.
Most of us fear not knowing because we fear that, as a result of not knowing, we will end up going through a “bad” experience, that we will experience whatever it is that we fear. However, your worry will greatly be reduced when you train your focus to see that value is contained in every single experience.
Begin to shift your thinking so that you can accept that you cannot know everything about everything. Expecting yourself to know everything about everything is cruelty, and usually the result of being in a state of fear relative to the world and life itself. Instead adopt the philosophy that life is based upon exploration, expansion, adventure and the progression of discovery and learning.
There is a Zen master who once said, “The barn is burnt down. Now I can see the moon.” Inherent in that statement is the idea that even the things that we would identify as a tragedy contain value. If we make it a habit to see value in all experiences in our lives, we don’t spend so much time and effort trying to avoid certain experiences. That in and of itself is liberation.
The greatest avoidance strategies of all
Most self-help experts, psychologists and spiritual teachers approach the issue of fear by telling you why you should not be afraid and how to avoid fear itself. There are several movements with lots of advice about how to control your reality, such as “your mind creates your reality” and the “law of attraction”. Since fear is about feeling powerless to avoid something unwanted, it’s obvious that if you control your reality, you’ll have nothing to fear.
Regardless of whether or not these philosophies are correct about how the universe operates (and some of them are), this is the wrong way to deal with fear. It’s comforting to accept that if we have control over our mind, we can have control over what is happening to us. It’s comforting to believe that we control our realities. But the problem is that when we use these philosophies, what we are doing is coping by avoiding and pushing away our fear.
The truth is that coping through avoidance never gets you anywhere. It means we are just resisting the thing we are avoiding. We are pushing it away. In a universe like the one that we live in, which functions like a mirror, anything you resist, you get more of.
Another popular belief system is positive focus. It encourages you to stay positive at all times and that will solve all your problems. But it doesn’t work. The vast majority of fears are about past trauma that we have experienced. When we experience something traumatic on an emotional level, it works the same way as it does with physical trauma.
There is an enormous difference between focusing on something positive for the sake of positive focus and focusing on something positive with the hope of trying to escape from, ignore or get away from something negative. My advice is to stop trying to stop fear and instead become better at knowing how to care-take fear.
Here’s an example to help you understand the danger of using positive focus to escape from fear. If you are in a bad car accident and experience a compound fracture to your leg, no amount of positive focus is going to heal you. If you don’t go to the hospital or a doctor, and instead attempt to distract yourself from the fracture by thinking positive thoughts, you are only avoiding the reality that you have a serious medical issue that needs conscious medical intervention. What is the result if you try to escape from, ignore or get away from a broken bone like this? It festers. You become incapacitated if you survive the infection at all. In short, when we try to avoid something, the thing we are trying to avoid gets worse. And this includes fear.
This is the exact scenario we face on an emotional level. If we suffered an emotional trauma and we ignore, suppress or deny it in favour of positive focus, we are using positivity to get away from negativity. The emotional wound does not get better; it just festers. In short, positive focus is an amazing technique but there is one enormous exception. Positive focus works on everything except for the things you’re trying to use positive focus to avoid. Positive focus cannot and should not be used as a tool to enable our resistance.
A better strategy to deal with fear
When it comes to fears and the feeling that we are powerless to what happens in our reality, the discussion doesn’t need to be about how we create our reality, how to control our reality or how to stop feeling fear. The focus needs to be on developing trust in your ability to handle whatever happens. If we believed that we could handle anything that came our way, fear would not occur within our being except when the basic fight-or-flight instinct kicks in if our life is threatened. If we believe we can handle what comes our way, we would no longer be scared about day-to-day activities or relationships, and fear would no longer limit us or close us down to enjoying life.
If we experienced many situations as children where we couldn’t handle what life threw at us, we ended up with a learned helplessness that led to constant anxiety. It’s as if that feeling of being a child who was powerless to take care of itself imprints on our being. We develop learned powerlessness that doesn’t change even when we become adults who are capable of handling those situations.
One of the most popular metaphors used in the world to demonstrate learned powerlessness is that of elephants. If you tie an elephant to a tree as a baby, when he is too small to move the tree, he will grow up believing that he cannot escape the tree and won’t even try when he’s an adult animal and he could easily uproot the tree entirely. This is how it works with the ingrained feeling that we cannot handle what life brings us.
It’s at this point that we can clearly see a powerful way that fear braids itself in with shame. If we feel that we are powerless to deal with something, we feel ashamed that we can’t deal with that thing. In that moment, we are not feeling good about ourselves because we are seeing ourselves as incapable. This is especially true if it seems to us like other people can deal with that same thing. We decide that not being able to handle something means that something is innately wrong with us or bad about us. For this reason, when you feel fear, consider that what it means is that right here and now, you are feeling bad about yourself.
As we did with shame, it’s important that we go back to the original experiences that caused us to believe we couldn’t handle what life brings us and caused us fear in the first place, and then find a way to resolve those original experiences. Again, if this is an issue for you, I encourage you to read my book entitled The Completion Process because in it, I offer a process to do this. I cannot stress to you enough the power and potential of experiencing yourself positively handling situations that you could not handle in the past.
Since fear is about a situation where you don’t trust that you can handle it, it’s then obvious that your focus needs to switch from, “I can’t handle that situation” to “How can I handle that situation?” Then imagine it happening just that way. Sometimes, this is all it takes to diminish the fear you have about something and reduce your feelings of learned powerlessness.
Choice
If we feel powerless, the implication is that we have no opportunity to make a personal choice. But choice immediately gets you out of a place of helplessness. Instead, you feel empowerment. The idea of power terrifies most people. It’s frightening because people associate power with tyranny and manipulation, both things that cause suffering for others and thus both things that give power a bad rep in human society.
The thing is, genuine empowerment makes you less manipulative and less controlling of others. Genuine empowerment makes you free. It makes you open to the world instead of closed to it. Personal power therefore is a necessary part of love.
To begin the practice of increasing your personal power, adjust your focus in any situation that you face toward exploring what choices you have in that situation. In most cases, there will be a multitude of choices.
For example, say you were asked to give a public speech and you were petrified. You might even tell the person, “Oh no, I can’t do that,” when you really mean you won’t do that. You can physically do it, so saying that you can’t is not the truth. It’s more accurate to say, “I don’t choose to get up on stage and give a talk.” You may have an array of very valid reasons why you made that choice, but the empowerment comes from realizing that the truth is you choose not to do it rather than believing that you can’t.
Often, fear puts limits on us that don’t inherently exist and we overuse the word “can’t”. We believe we can’t do something that we want to do, when in fact we can. That being said it is important to know that all people have certain limits. For example, a paraplegic cannot walk up the stairs. So in a situation where someone literally can’t do something, the empowerment is in the choice to embrace their limits and ask themselves, “What choices do I have now, having accepted this limit of mine?” Having limits is not wrong. We still have access to a vast array of choices even if we accept a limitation.
What it comes down to is, when we have to make a choice about our options or our actions, we need to be asking ourselves, “Is this option bringing me more power or less?” Recognizing choice brings your power back to you instead of leaving it in the hands of other people.
THE BIG QUESTION
Begin your process of transcending fear by accepting this statement: fear will never go away. You will never live a life without fear. There is no such thing as fearlessness. Even though we experience various degrees of fearfulness, as long as you are on this planet and you are growing and expanding as a person by taking new risks and following your desires, there will be fear. We may try to hide it from each other but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Now ask yourself this big question: “How would my life be different and what might I do differently with my time and energy if I just accepted that I am in a lifelong relationship with fear?”
How thoughts become fears
Fear is the feeling that arises from any thought that takes you away from what you desire, therefore thoughts play a leading role when it comes to fear. Here is an example of a thought pulling you in the opposite direction of what you desire.
If you want a relationship that is committed and secure, you will want to be careful about thoughts like these examples. “No man can ever truly be committed, it goes against his biology.” “No woman could ever commit to me because she loves me, because all women care about is what I can do for them.” “There is a less than 50 per cent chance that any marriage will last, so it’s a total crap shoot.” These kinds of thoughts will pull you away from what you want and induce fear.
Thoughts don’t only come in the form of words in your head but also as images. For example in the previous scenario, I may not hear the words, “No man can ever truly be committed, it goes against his biology”, but I may simply see an image of a man walking out the door or cheating on me with another woman. Regardless of the form of the thought, when it’s about fear it can be anything that goes against our desire.
What am I really afraid of?
The first step in overcoming fear is to become fully aware of the fear. Most of us become used to the discomfort of anxiety or fear without ever really putting in the effort to figure out what exactly we are afraid of. Our fears are a bit like ghosts that haunt us, but that we cannot clearly see. But a phantom only has complete control of you if you can’t see it. Seeing it in fact instantly reduces its magnitude. We have to ask ourselves the question, “What am I really afraid of in this situation?”
To figure out what you’re really afraid of, you must dive into the feeling of the fear instead of doing things to get away from it. This is easier said than done, but it will get easier with more and more practise.
Here is an example. The moment I feel fear, I can try to get rid of the fear, which would most often be to push it away. For example, if I get onto a plane and I start to feel fear, I can distract myself with video games. I can tell myself all the things that make the plane safe. I can tell myself that the fear is ridiculous and suppress it with my refusal to see my own fear as valid. But these tactics don’t really work.
This is the better approach. The moment I start to feel fear, I can try to integrate the fear by inviting it to come closer. For example, I could close my eyes and focus all of my attention on the sensations of the fear itself as they occur in my body. I could watch the images popping up in my mind. I could listen to what the various inner voices are saying or showing me.
Then I could begin to dive deeper by compassionately questioning with a genuine desire to understand. I could ask myself: “What about this is so frightening?” When I get the answer, I might then ask, “Why is that so frightening? What does that remind me of that I have experienced before?” By inviting my fear closer to me in this way, I am not only exposing the fear so I can face it but, by doing so, I care-take it directly and become more conscious.
Whenever we have faced an actual fear, we have the power to use our minds and hearts to resolve the past traumatic experience that caused the fear. We can also make choices and strategize direct ways to make the situation safer for us.
Why exposure strategy doesn’t work for fear
Once people are aware of what they are afraid of, a common strategy people often use to overcome the fear is exposure therapy. For example, a person who is deathly afraid of snakes is taken to a place where they have to hold snakes so that their anxiety eventually goes away by seeing that there is no real threat. In my opinion, if this form of therapy is done too prematurely it only serves to reinforce an internal atmosphere of fear and unsafety.
Imagine that someone is considering exposure therapy but they have Inner Twins that don’t agree. One Inner Twin wants to rush toward the fearful element to get over the fear, while at the same time the other Inner Twin wants to run away from it and be kept safe from it. What happens then is an internal tug of war erupts inside ourselves between those two aspects of us.
To expose ourselves to what we fear in this situation is to bulldoze a vulnerable part of ourselves, our Inner Twin that is not ready. That scared Inner Twin component of ourselves will only learn to distrust the other part because its best interests, free will and desires are not being considered. This creates an internal emotional atmosphere of distrust. The result is that we won’t trust ourselves and we won’t even know why that is. We won’t realize it’s because one of our Inner Twins played a zero-sum game (I win and you lose) with another Inner Twin. A zero-sum game is a situation where the end is always that in order for one person to win, the other has to be the loser.
The better, alternative approach to exposure therapy is that once we have discovered a fear, we can use our minds and hearts to resolve the fear. You can imagine this as the process of taking your attention off of the fear itself and turning your loving, attentive presence and focus toward your Inner Twin who wants to get as far away from whatever it’s afraid of as possible.
Using this inner technique, we approach this aspect of our self as if it were a terrified, crying child. Instead of forcing it to do what scares it, we try to understand its fear and express that we see that fear as valid, and that the fear must be there for an important reason. We then sit with its fear and see how we can best offer the Inner Twin the reassurance and safety that it needs.
Often what happens when we do this is that we become very clear on a boundary. Either we become clear that what is right for us and what is needed in order to feel safe is to say a clear “no” to engaging with the thing that scares us. Or we may become clear that the side that is scared also wants to engage with the thing that scares it.
There is a big difference between hearing the Inner Twin say, “I am scared and I don’t want to engage with this thing,” as compared to them saying, “I am scared but I also want to engage with this thing.” The only point at which exposure therapy is a good idea is the point at which the frightened Inner Twin says they are willing to engage with the thing they fear. If this is the case, our two Inner Twins are aligned, which creates an internal atmosphere of trust. The fear can then be met and it can be faced by the two Twins approaching it hand-in-hand, which will then remove the fear and reinstate inner harmony and trust.
However, just to be clear: if the fearful Inner Twin is not ready to face the fear and sets up a firm boundary and they say “no” to the exposure therapy, then that must be respected and held firm to, in order for there to be an internal atmosphere of trust.
Emotional wake-up call
Body, mind and soul: this triad has long been considered the pillars of a complete life. But what if I told you that we got it wrong? When we think of soul, we think of an etheric or intangible energy. But then we also have the ethereal, intangible nature of feelings and emotions (which we don’t understand), and we very often relate them to our concept of soul. This is why advice about how to feed and heal your soul is designed to help you to emotionally feel better.
In truth, our soul aspect is innately healthy. It cannot be in an unhealthy state. Soul, which is pre-manifested energy, creates three important things: feelings, mind and body. Thus all three levels of a person are in fact comprised of soul. Our body is our soul projecting itself physically. Our mind is our soul projecting itself mentally. Feeling is our soul consciously perceiving.
Due to this reality, we can look at it one of two ways. The first is that the three pillars of health are body, mind and emotion. The second way is that emotion is the language of the soul. If you choose to see it these ways, then the key to what people are calling soul health is actually your emotional health. And an important aspect of emotional health is the conscious acknowledgement of our non-corporal consciousness, the non-physical side of our being, which we could call spirit or soul.
When we use the word soul, we are referring to the core aspect of a person’s being. In the English language, soul and heart are interchangeable concepts. This is why when someone is speaking from the core of their being, they may say, “I know it in my heart that this or that is true.” What this means is that deep down, we know that the very heart of our experience in life is not mental or physical, it’s feeling and emotion.
When we first come into this life, we experience the world entirely through felt perception. We feel the world before we see the world. Feeling and emotion are not only the heart of your life here on Earth, but these two crucial elements are also at the heart of your relationships. And because feeling and emotion are the heart of relationships, it’s also where the most damage is done.
It’s clear that the way we relate to feeling and emotion, and what we know about them, is grounded in our upbringing and socialization. We can say now, looking back over the last centuries of human existence, that our ideas about good and bad ways to raise a child have changed dramatically. For example, in medieval times childhood did not really exist. As soon as a child could physically manage it, they were put to work, often in roles that would be seen as slavery today. Children were not seen as pure but rather as evil and extraordinary corporal punishment was considered normal and commonplace. In that era, even in the most aristocratic households, instead of valuing and adoring their children, some parents took to despising their offspring and deliberately belittling and abusing them, misguidedly thinking it was for the children’s own good.
In the late 1600s in the Western world, history saw the birth of the punishment-and-reward style of parenting. Instead of pure corporal punishment, philosopher John Locke suggested that the better way of training a child would be to withdraw approval and affection by “disgracing” the child when they were bad and “esteeming” them when they were good by rewarding the child with approval and affection.
In the early 20th century, not much had changed. Childrearing experts still formally denounced all romantic ideas about childhood and advocated formation of proper habits to discipline children. In fact, a 1914 US Children’s Bureau pamphlet, Infant Care, urged a strict schedule and urged parents not to play with their babies. John B. Watson’s Behaviorism argued that parents could train children by rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad behaviour, and by following precise schedules for food, sleep and other bodily functions.
Corporal punishment began to fall out of favour in the Western world in the late 20th century. Many parents became conscious enough to see corporal punishment for what it is – abuse. And so, today, while sadly there are still pockets of unconscious parents that still abuse their children in the name of discipline, the majority use parenting practices like timeouts as tools for discipline.
Creating a healthy emotional climate
It’s easy to look back over time and say that we were living in the dark ages in terms of parenting. But I will tell you that in the years to come, that is exactly what history will say about today’s style of parenting. History will see many of our common practices as barbaric and cruel. We now know how to create a healthy physical climate for our children and for each other. But I am here to tell you that we have no idea how to create a healthy emotional climate for our children or for each other.
While there are some rare exceptions to this rule, over the course of human history, even up to today, the emotional climate of a household has not even factored into the idea of good parenting. But I believe we are starting to awaken to the realization that it is possible to be a good parent to a child on a physical level and a terrible parent to a child on an emotional level. This has vast implications when we acknowledge that emotion is the core of our life and the heart of our relationships.
In today’s world, we fear emotions, such as fear itself. Most parenting advice ignores the world of emotion entirely. It focuses on how to correct misbehaviour while disregarding the feelings that underlie and cause the misbehaviour. Regardless of how far we have progressed, the goal of parenting is still to have a compliant and obedient child, not to raise a healthy adult. In other words, the goal is to raise a child who is “good”. Good parenting involves emotion. Good relationships involve emotion.
Creating a healthier emotional climate in this world starts with how we treat our children and then these same standards need to extend to how we treat ourselves and how we relate to our friends and our loved ones.
Primarily, parents need to correct three crucial mistakes. And we as adults have to do so with each other as well. We don’t need to blame parents or chastise anyone, because hardly anyone in today’s world was raised with emotional security themselves, so hardly anyone knows what they could be doing better. But here in a nutshell are the three golden rules, the new rules for parenting and for us in our relationships, which will bring about a much healthier emotional climate in this world:
1. Parents need to stop disapproving of their children’s emotions. And we need to stop disapproving of our own emotions and the emotions of those around us.
2. Parents need to stop dismissing their children’s emotions. And we need to stop dismissing our own emotions and the emotions of those around us.
3. Parents need to offer guidance to a child with regard to their emotions. And we all need to understand how emotions impact every aspect of our lives so we can learn to cope better with emotions.
So here’s how this looks within parenting. The parent who disapproves of their child’s emotions is critical of their child’s displays of negative emotion and reprimands or punishes the child for expressing their emotions. The parent who dismisses their child’s emotions disregards them as important, and they ignore their child’s emotions or, worse yet, trivialize the child’s emotions. And the parent, who offers no guidance, may empathize with their child’s emotions, but does not set limits on behaviour or assist the child in understanding and coping with their emotions.
The devastating implications
To give you an example of how this plays out in practical terms: imagine that William doesn’t want to go to school and begins to cry when his parents take him there. The parent who is disapproving might scold William for his refusal to cooperate and resort to calling him “a brat” or punishing him in some way with time alone or with a spanking.
The dismissive parent may brush off William’s emotions by saying, “That’s silly. There’s no reason to be sad about going to school. Now turn that frown upside down.” The dismissive parent may even resort to distracting William from his emotions by giving him a cookie or pointing out a cow in a field on their way to school.
The parent who offers no guidance may behave in an empathetic way toward William by telling him that it’s OK to feel sad or scared but then continue to help William decide what to do with his uncomfortable feelings. Instead the parent would leave him in a space where he feels as if his emotions are an all-consuming force that he is powerless to deal with.
Let’s consider the deep implications of parents not providing a healthy emotional climate. Children who are raised this way are not able to self-soothe and also tend to develop health problems. The child fails to emotionally connect with their family and often feel as if they don’t belong. And very importantly, they fail to develop intimacy with their families and as a result, they feel isolated and alone.
This isolation and loneliness of course carries on into adulthood. They grow into adults who are incapable of managing their emotions and struggle to make relationships work. They suffer with an extreme fear of intimacy. They feel powerless and often develop co-dependent relationships.
Creating better adult relationships
Our parents did not teach us how to treat emotions in a healthy way, and so this is how we treat our own and others’ feelings as adults. Our friendships and romantic relationships are painful because we don’t know how to emotionally relate with one another. We fail to develop true intimacy. We continue to dismiss and disapprove of our own and each other’s feelings and so tell other people how they should and shouldn’t feel and have no patience for the emotional needs of others around us. Most of us see emotions and feelings as weaknesses and we call people who display emotions overly sensitive. And as a result our adult relationships are emotionally unhealthy.
Here are just three examples of adult relationships that are emotionally dysfunctional but I’m sure you can come up with many more.
Regardless of whether it’s a friendship or a romantic relationship, emotions and feelings are the heart of every healthy and meaningful relationship. Without a healthy emotional life, a relationship is not a relationship, it’s merely a social arrangement. You simply cannot create an intimate connection with someone if you are not in touch with your emotions and feelings.
1. A woman goes to lunch with her friend. The woman is disappointed because she didn’t get promoted at work, the way she thought she would. Her friend tells her she is just being negative and needs to look on the bright side. Her friend insists that all she is doing is creating more disappointment in her reality because she is so negatively focused.
2. A husband gets home late from work and his wife starts crying the minute he walks through the door. The husband sees her crying and immediately says, “You always overreact. I was only a half an hour late. Maybe you are just menopausal. You need professional help.” He completely dismisses her and then withdraws to his office to watch television.
3. A man is facing divorce. He tells his friends about what is going on and they convince him to join them at the bar. When he shows up, none of them acknowledge that he is going through a difficult time emotionally. Instead they encourage him not to think about it, have a drink, watch the sports game and look at pretty girls at the bar.
Please be reminded here that intimacy is not about sex. Sex may be a by-product of intimacy, but it’s not intimacy in and of itself. Intimacy is knowing and being known for who we really are in all aspects of our lives. It’s the bringing forth of the truth of who you are to the centre of the relationship and being received for who you are; and the other person doing the same. It’s a meeting at the heart where empathy and understanding can then occur.
Intimacy can be broken down into three little, very important syllables: “into me see”. Intimacy is to see into one another so as to deeply connect with one another and to know one another for who you truly are. And if the core of who you are is your feelings then the language of the soul is also feelings, thus creating the most important part of intimacy, which is emotional connection and understanding each other’s feelings.
Emotions matter
The bottom line is: emotions matter. In order to have healthy, lasting relationships, we must see the importance of and the value in each other’s feelings and show respect for each other’s emotions. We must listen for the feelings behind the words. We must open ourselves up to being understood and open ourselves to understanding others.
You should always acknowledge that you understand someone’s feelings and emotions before you proceed to give them advice. If instead you tell someone how they should or shouldn’t feel, you are teaching them to distrust themselves. You are teaching them that there is something wrong with them.
We struggle the most with negative emotions so, the way we deal with negative emotions is a good indicator of the emotional health of our relationships. When we are dealing with negative emotions, there are steps we can take to address those emotions and develop an emotional connection with another person and so enhance our intimacy. This goes for our children as well as the adults in our lives.
The following rules are solid gold in a relationship when you are facing conflict. Once you learn and apply them, you will see your whole world improve. Here’s what to do:
1. Become aware of the other person’s emotional state.
2. Express care about the other person’s emotion by acknowledging that it is valid and important.
3. Listen empathetically to the other person’s emotion in an attempt to understand the way they feel. This allows them to feel safe being vulnerable without fear of judgement. Seek to understand, instead of just agreeing.
4. Acknowledge and validate their feelings. This may include helping them find words to label their emotion. Notice that in this step we don’t need to validate that the thoughts they have about their emotions are correct. Instead we need to let them know that it’s a valid thing to feel the way that they feel. For example, if our friend says, “I feel useless,” we don’t validate them by saying, “You’re right. You are useless.” We could validate them by saying, “I can totally see how that would make you feel useless and I would feel the same way if I were you.”
5. Allow the person to feel how they feel and to experience their emotion fully before moving toward any kind of improvement in the way they feel. In this step we need to give them the permission to dictate when they are ready to move up the vibrational scale and into a different emotion. We cannot impose on them our idea of when they should be ready or be able to feel differently. This is the step where we practise unconditional presence and love for someone. We are there as a support without trying to “fix” them. Do not be offended if they don’t accept your support at this time. There is a benevolent power inherent in offering, which is love in and of itself, regardless of what someone does or does not do with it.
6. Only after their feelings have been validated, acknowledged and fully felt, help the other person to strategize ways to manage the reactions they might be having to their emotion. This is the step where you can assert a new way of looking at the situation that may improve the way the other person is feeling. This is where advice can be offered.
Apply the same relationship rules to yourself
If you wish to be emotionally healthy, you have to realize and accept that you are in a relationship with yourself, which is to say your own emotions must matter to you. This means you must acknowledge and validate your own emotions and not dismiss or disapprove of them. Therefore, the six steps I have outlined just above, you must apply to yourself. If you do this, you will learn to trust yourself.
Never be ashamed of how you feel. If you feel shame because of how you feel, it means you have been judged by others and told that your feelings were wrong or bad. But the reality is you wouldn’t be feeling them if there wasn’t a very valid reason to be feeling them. Your feelings are valid. If you feel an emotion, there is a good reason that you are feeling that emotion. Don’t let anyone tell you how you should or shouldn’t feel.
Know that you deserve a relationship where your feelings matter. And the fastest way to get to that kind of relationship is to decide that your emotions matter to you. If you stop abandoning yourself when you are experiencing negative emotions, you will come to trust that you will always be there for yourself. You will feel a deep sense of inner peace arise within you.
Once you become aware of your boundaries, you can protect them. If you ever feel that you are about to violate your own boundaries, you’ll know you should stop and change course before you go ahead. Having a good sense of boundaries is essential to self-trust. It’s also essential to creating connection with other people.
Fear and worry
Fear and worry go hand-in-hand because fear is about the future. It’s about something we don’t want to have happen, something we are desperate to prevent. If we have experienced painful things in life, especially if we can look at our past and say it was mostly painful, we come to expect that pain will be our future experience as well. Naturally then, we’re going to worry.
In today’s world, everywhere we turn, we are bombarded with things to worry about and people who think we should worry about them. Turn on the news. The collective human belief is that danger is lurking around every turn. We are convinced that worrying keeps us, and the ones we love, away from pain. We think worry allows us to see potentially life-threatening or unpleasant things before they come, so we can prepare or prevent them. If we can’t find a way to prevent dangerous things, our survival and basic human need for certainty is at risk. Thus we use worry to try to outsmart our adversary.
And if we struggle with fear, our adversary seems to be the whole entire universe. Here’s why. As worriers, we believe that whoever or whatever does create our reality is the authority figure, and so we ascribe the personality traits we associate with our primary authority figure to the universe and expect the same kind of treatment from the universe. Since most of us who worry had an authority figure that believed in punishment, we come to expect the same kind of treatment from the universe as we got from our mother or father or from whoever our primary authority figure was. We expect the universe to cause us pain.
So you can see that those of us who worry don’t believe that we can create our own reality even if we desperately want to believe that we do. We also believe, down deep, that we are not good enough to deserve love, rewards or good things to happen. Instead we think that we deserve punishment.
On top of all this, those of us who feel like we cannot handle situations, worry a lot. In our minds, we think if we know what to expect that it won’t hurt as bad. We focus on the impending fall and not on the fact that we could just get out danger now, before we get too close to the edge.
Here’s what’s really going on behind the scenes of this situation. We live in a vibrational universe, and the solution we are seeking, to get out of danger for example, is a different vibration than the problem we keep obsessing about. You cannot be focused on the problem and be a vibrational match to the solution at the same time because that is a vibrational contradiction.
This is why worrying never feels good. There just isn’t a way for the solution to come to you when every thought in your mind is a worry. But if we consciously choose to switch our focus to finding a solution, then our mind and our energy naturally vibrate toward making a solution appear. We become a vibrational match for a solution to the problem or a resolution to the fearful situation.
But here’s an important realization: we think worry keeps us safe, or at the very least lessens our pain. But as long as you are worrying, you are not feeling safe and you are feeling pain. So you will most likely spend your life never actually experiencing safety or enjoyment. Sit with that for a moment. Worrying in fact keeps you in loss. It keeps you in a reality where you and the ones you love are dead or injured. Reality is whatever the mind perceives, whatever your mind is focused on. It has already been scientifically proven that the mind does not know the difference between what you are thinking about and what is actually happening. So if you are focused on the worst-case scenario, the worst-case scenario is the only reality you can perceive. Even if the person you’re worried about is alive and well, in your mind they are already injured and dead. You are making them dead or injured in your mind.
At this point, I’m going to present a radical idea. By worrying, we are living the fear and reality of something without it happening physically. Worry prevents us from seeing reality. It makes “now” not exist. The only thing that exists is a future that we can’t deal with. And should what we are worried about now not happen, we will worry about something else. These simple exercises can go a long way when it comes to directly caretaking your worry.
HOW TO CARE-TAKE WORRY
You aren’t going to release worry all at once, not after a lifetime of being convinced that worry is the only reason you’re alive and those you love are alive. And not after a lifetime of convincing yourself that worrying about someone means loving someone, which, as we know now, it does not.
So here are some things you can do to care-take your worry:
1. Acknowledge and observe your anxious thoughts and feelings. Don’t try to ignore, fight or control them the way you usually would. Instead, simply observe them as if from an outsider’s perspective, without reacting or judging. This way you are not giving them your energy or attention, you are merely observing and acknowledging them.
2. Don’t try to stop worrying. Don’t resist your own worry by trying to tell yourself or force yourself to stop worrying. “Thought stopping” backfires because it forces you to pay extra attention to the very thought you want to avoid. As a side note, some of us who believe that our minds create reality are terrified that worrying about something will make that very thing happen. You don’t need to worry about this. The universe arranges itself according to vibration. Vibrationally speaking, worrying doesn’t make us a match to experiencing the thing we are worried about happening. Worrying simply makes us a match to experiencing circumstances that cause us more worry.
3. Stay focused on the present moment. When a worry pops into you mind, consciously ask yourself: “What is happening right here right now?” List off the sensations in the present moment such as how your body feels, the rhythm of your breathing, your ever-changing emotions and the thoughts that drift across your mind. If you find yourself getting stuck on a particular thought, bring your attention back to the present moment using the prompt above. As you keep doing this, you’ll find that there is nothing wrong with the present moment. For example, you may be worrying about a plane crash, but right here and now you are sitting in a room. The atmosphere is calm. You can hear noises in the room. Nothing is happening. Most especially a plane crash is not happening right here and now.
WORRY JOURNAL
If you find yourself often overwhelmed with worry, start to keep a worry journal. This is a notebook where you can just write lists upon lists of all the things you’re worried about or are terrified will happen. Writing them down gets them out of your head and you can put them on the shelf until you have time to deal with them.
When you keep your journal, designate a time of day (not before you go to bed or first thing in the morning) to make a list of everything that is worrying you. Allow yourself to vomit up all these worries onto the page. If you’re a chronic worrier, you may need to do this at the same time each day so your mind is less anxious about when it gets to vent. Postpone worrying until the time you have set aside for the worry journal. If you absolutely can’t stop fixating on something you’re worrying about, write it down in the journal and put it aside for later until the appointed journaling time.
Postponing worrying in this way is effective because it breaks the habit of dwelling on worries in the present moment. There’s no struggle to suppress the thought or judge it, you simply save it for later. As you develop this ability to postpone your anxious thoughts, you’ll start to realize that you have more control over your worrying than you think.
When you have time, analyse your lists and sort out things you are worried about that you can do something about right now. We can call these productive worry items. If this is hard to do, then just pick one item each day to focus on, just one productive worry item. For example, you may have written down: “I am going on a trip, so I am worried about making plane and hotel reservations.” This is a productive worry because you can take action now by going online to do the research and make the reservations.
As you get better at this, try to deal with as many of the productive worry items as you can. With each one, evaluate it, come up with concrete steps for dealing with it and then put the plan into action.
This switches your thoughts from the problem to the solution. Once you have a plan and start doing something about the problem, you’ll feel much less worried.
It’s also important to ask yourself, “Is the problem something I’m currently facing or is it an imaginary what-if?” If the problem is an imaginary what-if, can you do something about the problem that would make you feel better? This is a kind of vibrational game you’re playing, to come up with ways that will help you to release resistance to what you’re worried about and do what comes to mind to make yourself feel better.
Once all the productive worry items on your list are dealt with, you will be left with unproductive and unsolvable worries for which you can’t identify a corresponding action. For those ones, it’s important to realize that you’re not doing any good by worrying about them at all. It’s a dead end. In fact, now that you know about vibrational matching, you know that by thinking about them at all, you’re just lending your precious energy to creating more or bigger problems. This is your incentive to just let the unproductive worries go and focus on things you can change or control, which are the productive worry items.
PLAY THE MARTIAN GAME
Many of us become isolated because we tend to be overly worried about what other people think of us. You can’t worry what they think of you when you’re thinking about them instead. So play a little game I call the Martian Game. Focus all of your attention on understanding the other person or the group you’re so worried about. Think of them or observe them like an alien observer, not a vulnerable peer. Write a list or make a mental list of your observations. This takes you out of worry mode.
It’s fun to pretend you’re a Martian gathering data on humans. As you notice what they do and say without focusing on your fears about their opinions, you’ll feel far less self-conscious, and they’ll feel the non-judgemental attention they’ve always wanted from you. It’s a win-win proposition.
ZOOM OUT
Zooming out is a way to ground yourself into what is really worth worrying about. When you worry, it’s not often about something big in the scheme of things. So when I say “zoom out”, I mean think about something much bigger than what you’re currently worried about. For example, you may be worried that your mid-term assignment won’t be done on time or that you might get fired.
Instead of focusing on something like that, zoom out and look at a bigger problem within the world such as problems faced by people in under-developed or war-torn countries. People there may be starving and their children dying in front of their eyes. Or people there might be refugees trying to escape from persecution.
When your mind is thinking about bigger issues, you’ll stop worrying about whether you have all the place settings you need for tonight’s party. This technique will help to ground you in reality very quickly. Another way you can change your focus is to think about experiences you’ve had where the potential outcomes were much, much worse than what you are currently thinking about. It’s difficult to worry about trivial things or even imaginary what-ifs when you remember being in a much tougher situation, which you obviously survived.
DEATHBED
Yet another technique is to stop when you are worrying about something and to imagine yourself on your deathbed. See what matters to you once you are there. Then think about whatever you were worrying about and ask yourself, “Do I care about this or do I consider this a significant worry to have had when I am on my deathbed?”
Why we seem to always expect the worst
The feeling of looking forward to things is one of the best feelings we experience in life. It makes us feel like we are excited to be here. It makes us trust that our future holds good-feeling things for us. We feel that we are headed toward the light and our desires are meant to be ours. But what about those of us who don’t or can’t seem to feel this way?
For a great many of us, instead of looking forward to things, we expect the worst. This makes us distrust and fear our future. It makes us feel like we are destined to suffer and that the future holds tragedy for us. Instead of heading into the light, it feels like we are walking around a blind curve and into potential indescribable darkness. For many of us, it feels like our desires are not meant to be ours.
Preparing for the worst is a coping mechanism that most of us were taught as children. It’s a survival strategy for those of us who were raised by people who believed that we don’t create our own reality and life is a tragedy waiting to happen. Preparing for the worst becomes a survival mechanism for those of us who have been hurt and especially for those of us who have been hurt over again and over again.
The most painful part about expecting the worst is the feeling of grieving for things before they have even happened. We miss people before they are even gone. We feel disappointment before we have been let down. We feel the crushing weight of the loss of people we love, even when they are alive and well and actively part of our lives.
So how did this all begin? It is most likely due to a trauma or tragic situation, which impacted us deeply. We may still resonate and think about it or we may have stuffed it deep down into our subconscious. Either way, that earlier tragedy makes us a vibrational match to future tragedy without us even knowing it. We are a match to tragedy because we have not let ourselves grieve the loss of the connection that we suffered in that original event.
The solution is that we need to stop suppressing the feeling of worry. We need to allow ourselves to grieve for the original tragedy that we experienced in our lives. To do this, we need to allow ourselves to feel our feelings and fully experience them. The more willing we are to feel, the less resistant we become to negative past experiences and the less we worry about them happening or try to prevent them from happening.
We need to acknowledge that part of what is so scary is that we don’t know what is going to happen. This is terrible on the one hand because it means that bad things could happen. But we can use this uncertainty to our advantage by the simple acknowledgement that good things could happen too.
If we can acknowledge that we don’t actually know what is going to happen, we cannot say that we know 100 per cent beyond a shadow of a doubt that something bad will happen. Just this simple acknowledgement can release our conviction that something bad is inevitable and thus change the way we feel, which raises our vibrational frequency.
Another strategy is to reflect back on times when you thought that a worst-case scenario would happen, and it didn’t. Maybe you were convinced that a loved one who was hit by a car would die or slip into a coma, but they didn’t. They made a full recovery. Make a note of these times so your mind begins to see that chronic worry is not always accurate.
DESIGN YOUR DAY YOUR WAY
One of the best ways to control your level of fear and worry is to begin to design each day around things to look forward to that you can control. Your day belongs to you. If you fear the future because you expect the worst, begin to place good things in your future by planning things that feel good to you and doing them throughout the day. Think of this like placing gold coins in your future and collecting them.
Start small. If we really expect tragedy to strike and expect disappointment, we will tend to feel as though the bigger the thing is or the more we want it, the more likely it is to fall through. So start with things you would enjoy and are most likely to happen.
For example, I may believe that a vacation with friends will fall through and end in disappointment, but a lunch meeting with them will probably happen. So I can plan an enjoyable lunch meeting for today.
Then get in the habit of actually actively planning and scheduling lots of little things that you can look forward to each day. These could be things like watching a movie, eating a treat, going for a walk, sitting on the beach or going swimming, or visiting with someone. The more comfortable you get with expecting things to pan out and go well, the easier it will be to plan bigger things to look forward to and the less you’ll fear catastrophe.
This is a great strategy for improving your life because you are making deliberate choices. It’s your choice to wake up and play music that soothes you. It’s your choice to go for a morning run. It’s your choice to make a breakfast that will set you up to feel good throughout the day. It’s your choice to select an outfit that feels great to wear.
When you focus on the multitude of choices at your disposal, it will be much easier to look forward to your day-to-day life because you cannot have choice in your life and be powerlessin your life at the same time. Choice is the opposite of powerlessness.
TAKE LOVING RESPONSIBILITY OF FEAR
At the end of the day, your personal safety and wellbeing should be of paramount importance. You know now that you can control many things in your life and you can always make choices that make you feel better rather than feeling worse.
However, if you do find that you still struggle sometimes with feeling safe, create a list of things that can help you to feel safe. To get you started, here is a small list of the things that could potentially make you feel safe:
• Being enclosed in a cocoon (under blankets)
• Being held
• Warm water to sit in
• A hot-water bottle to hold
• Talking to the part of you that is feeling super unsafe
• The smell of apricot and chamomile and baking bread
• Hot tea
• Listening to your soothing sounds playlist
• Watching a comedy movie or a stand-up comedian
• The colour blue
• Cooking
• Guided meditation to feel safe and relax the body
• Writing down things you are grateful for
• Getting reassurance or being comforted by others
• Making a list of ways you ARE safe in the current moment or relative to whatever you feel unsafe about
• Lying down outside in the sunshine
• Mentally going to your safe place in the snow
When you feel unsafe, go to your list and pick something to do, giving it your full focus.
You can also make decisions in your life that make you feel safer. For example, if you feel that going to a specific party makes you feel really unsafe, you can decide not to go to it or you can go with someone who makes you feel safer.
Another good technique to increase your positive vibration and deal with fear is deep breathing into your diaphragm and belly. Inhale for a count of four... hold the breath in for a count of two... exhale gently counting out for eight... and finish by holding the breath out for a count of two. Keep your breathing even and smooth throughout, and make sure the exhale is longer than the inhale.
Reclaim your unity and connection
When it comes to life and relationships, there will be so many times that we find we are compelled not to move forward because we are fearful. In these kinds of situations, action must come before the feeling of fear dissipates. All too often, people take no action until the fear goes away. But life cannot be lived like that. It cannot be lived like that anymore than it can be lived in spite of fear.
People who spend their life avoiding the feeling of fear never really live. They wander through life in a routine and familiar way only to arrive at death... safely. People who live their life in fear don’t listen to the important messages encoded in their fear. They ignore limits and warning signs and don’t care-take themselves. This ultimately leads to suffering and collapse. Our life depends on our capacity to lovingly take responsibility for our fear.
Trying to conquer or get rid of fear is nothing more than trying to separate yourself from separation itself. Remember: the opposite of fear is love. Any love you can have toward anything diminishes your fear, but the ultimate answer to fear is to love the self within you that is afraid and love the self within you that you are the most afraid of. It’s by embracing fear itself that we dissolve fear. It’s by embracing fear itself that we reclaim our unity and our connection.