Chapter 2
GIVE UP YOUR FEARS
Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.
—PAULO COELHO
MY STORY
Since early on, I lived a life governed by fear.
I don’t remember exactly how every one of my fears was born, but what I do remember very well is how my fear of abandonment came to be.
I was four or five years old. It was nighttime, and I remember waking up to go to the restroom. I opened my eyes, and wanting to get out of bed, I realized that I couldn’t do it because the bed’s grilled bars were stopping me. That got me confused simply because we didn’t have any grilled beds in our home. Thinking that maybe I was still asleep and probably dreaming, I pinched myself, looked around and realized that nothing had changed. I was still in the same place.
“This isn’t a dream . . . I’m not dreaming,” I told myself with a soft yet shaky voice.
I was very confused, so I started looking around me. As I was becoming more and more aware of what was happening and where I was, I started feeling very afraid.
“What’s going on?”
My heart was now beating very fast.
“Where am I?”
My whole body began to shake, and I could feel the bed moving underneath me, making subtle squeaky noises. The air felt heavier and harder to breathe in what began to feel like a stuffy place.
“Where’s my mommy?”
“Why am I here?”
“Who brought me here?”
I couldn’t stop myself from shaking. I wanted to make it stop but I found it impossible to control myself.
“Orphanage . . . I’m in an orphanage . . .”
I recognized what an orphanage roughly looked like from a cartoon I used to watch when I was at home. The sight of nearby rows of other similar-looking beds shattered any remaining hope that I could be mistaken.
“It’s an orphanage!” The shock had set in, and my eyes welled up with tears yet again like they had a thousand times before throughout my short existence, only worse, and profusely.
“Why am I here?!” I started screaming. The moment those words came out of my mouth, I felt the temperature in my body drop, as if I were falling through broken ice sheets in the middle of a frozen lake and into the freezing water below.
“Get me out of here!” I screamed out.
Too many questions raced through my mind, so intensely that I don’t remember what exactly happened around me as others who were there awakened to my shouting.
“Why am I in an orphanage when my parents are still alive?!”
“Did they abandon me?!”
“Did I do something wrong?!”
“Why am I here?”
“Where is my mommy?”
“Somebody, please take me home!”
“Please, take me back home!”
“Get me out of here!”
“Please . . .”
My heart ripped into a million pieces.
LESSONS IN LETTING GO
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.
—PAULO COELHO
Growing up, I was afraid of everything and everyone—afraid of myself, afraid of the people around me and afraid of life itself. I was suspicious of anyone who dared to show any sign of affection toward me, and for a very long time I felt that I couldn’t trust anyone, not even myself. I remember how, whenever anyone would act in a kind and loving way toward me, I would immediately push them away, thinking that if I opened my heart to them, they would eventually hurt, betray and abandon me, just like my parents had that night.
This is what living in fear does to you. Fear makes you doubt the goodness in people. It makes you feel small and insignificant, bitter and resentful, unworthy of anything good. It makes you doubt yourself and everyone around you. It makes you question your own beauty and perfection, and it makes you question the existence of the most beautiful and most real feeling in the world, LOVE. And that’s exactly what fear did to me.
• • •
For as long as I can remember I wanted to have friends, many friends, but my fear of rejection kept me from making too many of them.
I wanted to laugh, to play and to enjoy the many gifts that life had to offer, but my fear of change kept me from taking the necessary steps that were meant to move me in that direction.
I wanted to have a healthy, loving and supportive relationship, to love and be loved, but my fear of intimacy and my fear of abandonment caused me to sabotage the relationship I had with the person I loved the most, my former longtime boyfriend.
I wanted to experience life fully, to be present and engaged in everything that was happening to me and all around me, to be happy and feel fully alive, but my fear of what had happened in the past, of what might happen in the present or what could happen in the future kept me from doing all of those things.
I wanted to go to a good university, to continue to study art, to use my gifts and talents, to infuse love, beauty and passion into all of my work, but my fear of failure and my fear of not being good enough kept me from doing all of these things.
I wanted happiness, I wanted love, and I wanted to experience the beauty of life, but by constantly nurturing fearful thoughts and by expecting the worst to always happen, I was pushing all those beautiful things away from me.
• • •
The reason why you don’t put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it’s because you know you’ll get burned. You don’t need fear to avoid an unnecessary danger, just a minimum of intelligence and common sense.
—ECKHART TOLLE
If when my father was alive most of my fears were instinctual (an instinctual fear is your body’s natural response to real potential harm and danger, when something or someone presents a direct threat to your physical body), in the years that followed his death, all kinds of psychological fears began to surface (a psychological fear is nothing but a creation of your imagination, presenting no real and direct physical threat to you), illusory fears that were meant to give birth to more stress, unhappiness and anxiety, emotions I was so accustomed to.
It took me a very long time to finally understand that you can’t hold on to fear and expect to feel loved. You can’t hold on to fear and expect to be happy. You can’t hold on to fear and expect to receive many of the gifts that life has to offer. It took me a very long time to be able to understand the difference between rational and irrational fears, but once I did, once I understood that many of the things I was so frightened of were only in my head, I immediately started letting go of fear, replacing it with love—love for myself, love for my life and love for the world around me.
You can’t hold on to fear and expect to feel loved.
Whether your fears go back to your earliest memories, as mine did, or they are more recent, unwelcome guests in your life, such as a nagging concern or anxiety about a loved one, or a phobia that has crept into your mind and taken control of your thoughts, you have the power to let them go.
Joanna, a reader of the PurposeFairy blog, knows about this all too well. When she was eight years old, Joanna was very close to being raped, but luckily for her, her best friend came to her rescue. Even though she was spared, that traumatic experience had a huge impact on Joanna and her life. From that moment on, she started building many walls and barriers between herself and the world around her. She didn’t want to be hurt again.
In her twenties, when she gave birth to her baby girl, she knew one thing for sure: she wanted to be a loving mother for her child. But as years went by, she began to realize that her fears were interfering with her ability to love her daughter as much as she deserved to be loved. That’s when she slowly started to dismantle the walls she had built to keep the pain away, and began to give love not only to her daughter, but also to herself and everyone around her. It took work, and time, but she is now more available to her child, and more whole within herself.
If you want to be happy, if you want to experience the many wonders of life, and if you want to feel what it really feels like to be fully alive, you have to let go of fear. You have to tear down all the walls you have built between you and the world around you and you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. You have to allow yourself to be fully seen. You can’t serve two masters. You have to choose one—fear or love—and based on the one you choose your life will either be happy or unhappy.
THE PATH TO “GIVING UP”
1. Take a Trip to the End of Your Life
Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
—STEVE JOBS
Close your eyes for a little while and see in your mind’s eye the image of you twenty, thirty, fifty or even sixty years from now. You are on your deathbed, ready to depart this world.
Surrounded by the people you love, your friends and family, you begin to remember all the things you did throughout your life, and all the things you were too afraid to do.
Your whole life flashes before your eyes, and all of a sudden you are able to see the big picture.
Seeing all that you see and knowing all that you know, you suddenly realize:
“I could’ve done it all. I could’ve achieved it all!”
Detached from all your fears and fully present in the now, for the first time ever you can see things crystal clear.
All your past fears, all your doubts and all your insecurities, they all look so small and insignificant. None of it seems to matter anymore. Your fears no longer frighten you, you no longer feel scared. This realization brings with it a great sense of relief but also an overwhelming feeling of deep sadness:
“Where did my life go?”
“What have I done?”
“I could’ve been so much happier.”
“I could’ve done it all.”
“It’s too late for me now.”
“I can’t go back. I can’t undo what was already done . . .”
Your life has an expiration date. You’re not going to live forever, none of us are. And when the time comes for you to leave everything behind, when death comes knocking at your door, everything will fall away, leaving only what is truly important. But why wait until it is too late?
Why wait for your whole life to flash before your eyes to finally realize that fear is not worth clinging to? Why wait until it is too late to realize that love is the only thing that’s real, the only thing that matters? And that fear is nothing but an illusion.
Let go of it, and surrender it away.
2. Live Your Life Moment to Moment
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Each day presents us with a new beginning—the opportunity to create something new, something better. To be born again and to remember who we truly are underneath all our fears, doubts and insecurities. Each day you are given a new opportunity to leave behind all illusions and create a better life for yourself. With each day comes a new chance for you to unlearn all the fearful things that you have learned; to replace your fears with love, and your sorrows with laughter; to let go of everything that no longer serves you and to put your faith in love once more.
Take advantage of this opportunity.
Don’t let the troubles of yesterday occupy your mind today. Forget about your past fears, forget about yesterday’s worries and make room in your heart for love. Put your past fears aside. Die to the past each night and allow yourself to be born again next morning.
Be led by your hopes, dreams and aspirations, not by your fears, problems and insecurities.
Fill each day with love, joy and laughter, not with fear, regret and resentment.
Be like a newborn baby. Look with eyes of wonder at the world around you. Look at everything and everyone and do your best to perceive the whole world through eyes of love. With no past and with no reasons to fear.
Fear is not of the present but only of the past and future, which do not exist. There is no fear in the present when each instant stands clear and separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the future. Each instant is a clean, untarnished birth... And the present extends forever. It is so beautiful and so clean and free of guilt that nothing but happiness is there. No darkness is remembered, and immortality and joy are now.
—A COURSE IN MIRACLES
3. Fear Is Just an Illusion; Love Is the Only Thing That’s Real
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
—JOHN LENNON
No matter how real your fears might seem, and no matter how hard your mind might try to convince you of their authenticity, the truth of the matter is that fear is nothing but a learned behavior. It’s nothing but an illusion, an illusion created by your mind. While love is the only thing that’s real, the only thing that matters.
Love is present within each and every one of us. We were all born with this emotion. While fear is nothing but a learned behavior, something we attached ourselves to as we started to experience life, observing and interacting with the world around us. And in a controversial experiment called the “Little Albert” experiment, the famous behavioral psychologist John Watson, together with his assistant Rosalie Raynor, proved just that—that fear is a learned behavior.
They exposed this little boy to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers. At first, the boy showed no fear of those objects. However, the next time he was exposed to the rat, Watson made a loud noise by hitting a metal pipe with a hammer. Hearing the loud noise, Albert got scared and began to cry. After Watson repeatedly paired the white rat with the loud noise, the boy began to cry every time he saw the rat. After conditioning, the little boy feared not just the white rat, but a wide variety of similar white, furry objects, such as a rabbit, a dog, and even a ball of cotton.
• • •
Underneath all your fears, doubts and insecurities there’s nothing but pure and unconditional love. Love for yourself, love for those around you and love for life itself. But because you have been clinging to fear for so long, you can no longer remember this truth. You can no longer make the distinction between what is real and what is not.
Just as John Lennon once stated, there are two basic motivating forces, two emotions we can express, and these two emotions are FEAR and LOVE. All the other emotions with which we are all so familiar are nothing more than subcategories of these two. Where there is LOVE, we may have peace, joy, contentment, serenity and forgiveness, while on the other hand, where there is fear, we will have anxiety, sadness, depression, fatigue, judgment and guilt.
Where there is LOVE, fear cannot survive, and where there is fear, LOVE cannot exist.
You are not your fears; you are not your past; and you are not your doubts, insecurities, excuses and limitations. You are beauty and perfection. You are made of love and made to love.
You are love!
Let go of fear and allow love to rule your world. Let go of fear and allow love to show you the way back onto your life path.
4. Let Love Tear Down All the Walls You Have Built
The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy.
—JIM ROHN
Open the door to your heart and let it stay wide open. Tear down all those fearful walls you have built between you and the world around you.
Build fewer walls and more bridges.
Don’t hide yourself from yourself. Don’t hide yourself from life. Don’t hide yourself from love. Allow your own light to shine as brightly as possible. Allow yourself to be fully seen. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Tear down all the walls you have built to numb yourself in order to keep suffering away from you, and allow love back into your life. Allow love to show you how it feels to be fully alive.
Let the world see into your naked soul and beautiful heart. Let yourself experience life fully. Understand that love is life and life is love. And if you give up on love, you give up on life.
Infuse love into your life. Pour love into everything you do and everything you are. Pour love into yourself, into your relationships, your work, your environment and into your life. Pour love onto your past, your wounds, your struggles and your fears. Infuse love into every experience and every interaction, either good or bad, and let all your fears be healed by love.
Offer your love to everyone you come in contact with, not necessarily because they are worthy of your love, but because love is all that you have to offer. Because love is all that you have to give.
Take your focus away from all the things that scare you, away from all the fearful stories your mind has been fabricating for all these years, and start focusing on the things you love instead. Speak only of that which brings you joy, peace and happiness. Do work that has meaning, work that feeds your soul. Surround yourself with beauty.
Let go of fear and allow love to govern all areas of your life. Love all your fears away. Love until your heart breaks and then love some more. Love until there’s nothing left in you but love.
Give up the fear within and allow the real you to awaken. Allow the real you to be, to love, to play, to create and to live the life it came here to create.
Don’t be afraid of love, for love can never hurt you. Love can only love.