Our spirit guides told us (me and my girlfriend)this the other day:
“Sometimes when we are avoiding dealing with emotions, things become very tiring that otherwise might not consume so much time and attention. We are very good at misdirection – for example, we may think we are worn out, annoyed, or not enjoying the company of an individual, when really we are avoiding something specific and related within ourselves.”
False Expectations Appearing Real. I have heard that this acronym describes what fear really is, and it has been proven true to me time and time again. For me, the emotion that I had been avoiding was fear. Often I have felt exhausted, anxious, wanting to get away from another individual, because I do not want to allow myself to experience the fear that I felt. When I do the thing that I was afraid of, I have felt that the tiredness, powerlessness I felt, was more caused by the internal conflict of avoiding the fear and the people and things that were triggering it.
Since most of are fears are based in an untruth – we want the worst to happen, we want things to go wrong – the best thing to do is to stop treating those fears as if they are real, to let go of wanting the worst to happen. Over the past six months a lot of my fears, which paralysed me, kept me tense all the time, and kept me constantly tired, have begun to evaporate.
For me, the two things that I have needed to do have been:
1) Begin to treat the fears as they truly are – not real. Feel the fear and do it anyway.
2) Allow myself to really feel the fear physically in my body for as long as it takes before it leaves – I have done a lot of shaking, rocking, and trembling – something I had not allowed myself to do before. I have found that this has really been effective, and that things that I was extremely afraid of before I am now either doing, am less afraid of, or not afraid of at all.
I was extremely afraid of expressing emotion in front of others. I was afraid to cry. After not having done these things for years, I am now regularly able to feel and express what I feel, no matter who is around. In order to release the fear, I needed to allow myself to feel it. In order to feel it, I just needed to do the thing that I was afraid of.
One book I read was “Feel the fear and do it anyway” by Susan Jeffers. She said, just start to acknowledge that the fear is there, and decide if you want to do what you really want, or allow yourself to be ruled by your fear. What she didn’t say was that I could be free from the fear. But that has been what I have found.
I was afraid to talk to adults (children were not a problem) because I was afraid that I would look stupid, look afraid. I began to do so, allowed myself to feel the fear, allowed myself to rock, or tremble, to stammer when I talked. I did look stupid. I looked afraid. Just as I thought. But I didn’t know that the more I allowed myself to feel my fear, the less afraid I would become.
I believe that I am acting out this goal, because I am now more often looking for things that I am afraid of and doing them, instead of running away from them. I want to feel the fear, because it is the only way that I have found to get rid of it. If you allow yourself to just feel the fear, but do not allow yourself to do what your afraid of, and to acknowledge that the fear is in fact false, then you will allow the fear to run your life. I feel so much freer, less afraid, than I did a year ago, that I am also working on my goal of “having no fear” or living completely free from fear – something I now believe is possible.
