19 Jan [article]Taking on fear in the new year
“Love is with us. It cannot be destroyed but only hidden.” ~ Marianne Williamson
What are your fears of healing?
Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll be stuck forever? That nothing will change? That you’ll never be loved? That your needs will be shamed? That no one will ever see you? Care for you? Value you?
These are the fears I hear from people from all places on the planet as they share their lives with me.
When we approach healing from a place of fear we tend to engender a morass of stuckness, caught in the exact “yuck” of life that we want to get out of. Like Charles Schultz’s character Pig Pen we walk around with a cloud of fear surrounding us, swirling in our doubt, captivated by the view that we are doomed to live in whatever mess we are in.
When we approach healing from the assumption (expectation) that life is dangerous, that life is somehow predetermined, that we won’t get what we need, that others are bad, out only for themselves, well, living life from that context makes it really hard to let go of our fears and defenses that protect us and keep us cozy in our discomfort.
Yet, imagine living as though life were happening through you rather than to you.
When we feel that life is happening to us we feel caught, stuck, helpless to change things.
Yet there is another option. When you experience life happening through you then you have the chance to create how you want to hold and channel that life force. With that perspective you can know your human frailty and incredible many faults while at the same time holding all the many aspects of you with kindness and gentleness.
This gives us an opening to awaken, to remember our true heart, our true nature before fear and horror and heart breaking disappointment set in.
Sometimes soak this up and know from inside their own bodies and hearts that this is true. Othertimes people question me, doubt this possibility and push back.
But really. Take a moment.
If disappointment was the way life was supposed to be, well, then that would be the norm. That would be the way life is. We wouldn’t be fighting against it, saying “It’s not the way it’s supposed to be!!!!”
We wouldn’t yearn for more.
We wouldn’t yearn for love and goodness, we wouldn’t long to feel the ground under our hearts (and our feet for that matter!)
Yet we do. In our heart of hearts we long to be held with compassion and goodness. To be with and around people who provide nourishment and kindness helping us to remember who we were before we felt broken.
When we shift our orientation and remember who we are, to who we were before we were hurt, we choose a new foundation for our life. We orient to a world where people are good, knowing that they want to help, that you can trust people and life, you can relax your nervous system, that you can open your heart, that you belong, that you are seen, specifically and individually.
That you don’t have to be different to be loved.
To begin to break apart the concreteness of fear we need the qualities of love, kindness, and compassion to hold our hearts, to remember what we’ve always known but forgot when all the disappointments, betrayals, insults, and rejections happened, to take a moment to breath in a new possibility, the one that has always been true underneath our fears.
The more we enter and live life from that spring of goodness the more we feel safe to trust, to open, and the more love flows in and through us.
Healing has to address and reconstitute the fear that shadows our capacity to love and be loved. As long as fear is an overriding experience in our inner world healing will be a struggle.
Which brings up an all important question: How to shift the concreteness of fear?
We can learn to wash the fear out of our nervous systems, out of our hearts. We can learn to clear the fear from our perceptual lens (or as the neuroscientist Allan Shore calls it “our perceptual apparatus.”)
This is a long-term project. It’s one I’m personally involved in myself every day, multiple times a day. Let’s just say, it’s never-ending. Even as that sounds torturous (!) the process gets easier, simpler, kinder the more we welcome and care for these parts of us that are bogged down in fear.
Wanting some more concrete help?
One way many have found to practice shifting your relationship to fear is with Susan Jeffer’s classic book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway has helped millions of people.
There are multiple practices that help bring these qualities alive in us. The Buddhist practices of metta [loving kindness] have become quite popular and help a great deal. Sharon Salzberg’s book Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness is a beautiful and easy practice.
Other support you might find helpful:
Embodied Living Podcast Series free, complimentary. Click here to sign up to subscribe and receive the first talk with Michael Robbins on Chi
Becoming Safely Embodied Skills Workshop for Professionals in Portland, Maine. Click here for information
Sometime in the next month the Becoming Safely Embodied Home Study Course will be out. Stay posted for detail
To try out other practices check out the Embodied Practices Home Study Course. Find out more to see if this would support you in your life.
Becoming Safely Embodied Skills manual (link for discounted copy)