Fear is Only A Problem When It Defines Our Limits : How Yo Meditate With Fear For Freedom From Fear.
When I was growing up, the book “Feel the fear and do it anyway” was very popular. Having just done a check on the web, I see that it is still a top seller.
What that tells me is that – and this is so reassuring – most, if not all of us, have fears bubbling away that are strong enough to stop us from doing things in our lives.
Fear is a chemical feeling.
It can feel edgy and tense. It can feel like a deep dread. It can rustle underneath us like an animal stalking through the woods, or it can swell from our bellies into our throats and paralyse us from speaking up, from moving, from acting. Fear can literally freeze us.
It can be unreasonable to the point of irrational, but the feeling of fear is powerful enough it does not seem to yield to logic.
We all have this experience.
It is part of being human.
We need never fear being singled out or picked on while most of the world swims on fearlessly.
There is a reason for fear. And a reason why its chemistry needs to be so strong. The biological reason for fear works at the deepest level of our survival. It is there to protect us. We need this protection. We need, when we enter the powerful domain of the ocean, to be fearful of strong currents and sharks. Fear keeps us alert, and safe.
For that reason alone – because fear can save our lives – it needs to be felt strongly. There are times that to survive, we have to run fast. At other times, for survival, we have to stay silent and rooted to the spot.
Every wild animal knows this.
So we can reframe fear and welcome it, respect it as a powerful inner instinct which is there to empower us, to protect us and above all, to keep us alive.
It can make us feel powerless when in fact its innate purpose is to empower us.
The challenge for us is to know which fears are really keeping us safe (the fear of water if you know you can’t swim) and which are fears that we have learned or encoded, because of things we have picked up or learned from our experiences. If an experience makes us fearful once, we may withdraw from the experience or environment which produced that reaction. We may never want to do that thing again – whether that thing is speaking in public, being vulnerable with another person, or changing direction in life.
This is when fears can start to over protect us, stifle us and threaten our sense of freedom to be who we truly are and live in the wide open space of adventure, opportunity, experience and growth that is our birthright.
We can meditate with fear. When we are meditating, we are creating a sanctuary – a loving, kind and endlessly expansive space from which we can open our arms to the universe and to our inner lives.
We can practice feeling the physical sensation of fear and tension until we become comfortable with it.
Simply allowing something that we normally feel resistance to, to enter our space freely, has a counter-intuitive effect of reducing, dissolving and softening that thing. Literally, taking the sting out of it.
Allow it to move freely – let it move on the peaceful, relaxing, resting state that is always pulsing in meditation underneath all the cares and concerns that will spontaneously come up for healing, processing and integration.
We can ask the fear where it comes from and what it wants.
Spontaneous memories may arise in meditation as we are called to understand and witness where that fear arose from.
So often, we will see the fear was not ours to keep in the first place – but belonged to a person in our lives who passed it on, from an impulse to protect us.
We can release ourselves from that person’s fear, simply by being aware it is not ours and was a gift offered to us with good intentions, but which we do not need to hold onto.
We might imagine ourselves passing back the fear to its owner.
All the time we are honouring the impulse, but exploring whether is one that serves us in our lives now.
We can choose a quality that we would like to take into our beings to diffuse the strength of the fear and create a new chemical and sacred energy. That quality might be Love, Trust, Power, Wisdom, Balance, Harmony or Peace.
We can say this word quietly to ourselves as a mantra. Then breathe with it. We can spread our arms to receive that quality from the pure loving energies of the universe and draw it into our hearts and inner bring, filling ourselves with grace.
Fear is not here to harm us or to set us back – but it has a strong energy that can make it feel like that, because its reason for being an instinct is to protect us from harm: from being eaten by wild animals, from drowning, from falling into a ravine.
In that sense it is one of the loving energies of life, gifted to us by a universe that wishes us no harm and to have life in abundance.
When fear is reframed like that, how does it make you feel? Do you sense any shifts in your physical and emotional body?
The above is all a meditation for you to explore and rest in the currents of, and see where it takes you and what shifts your being might experience that you can take into life so that you can “feel the fear” but when you know it’s not really there to hinder you -is just an automatic warning light on your dashboard, a just-in-case – you can know you really are free to “do it anyway” and enjoy!
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