As passionate and creative forces of nature, we want to live a life of meaning and fulfilment, and feel the pulse of aliveness flowing through our veins. As passionate and creative forces of nature, we want to live a life of meaning and fulfilment, and feel the pulse of aliveness flowing through our veins. As we step beyond fear, and begin to move from love, the Devil you know aka fear, will do its best to keep us from change. I've been paying attention to ways that we humans can be in relationship with fear, and how that feeds back to us out down the line:
- We disconnect and distract, which makes us anxious all the time.- We deny and project on others or the circumstances, which creates a blind spot that snowballs into greater intensity and worse issue later.- We fake confidence and push our way through with sheer will power, which grows into resistance, procrastination and self-sabotage. - We decide that the things we love are not meant for us and settle for less, which grows into a life of having it all but feeling empty and dead inside.
Any version of this unfolding in your current experience is not bad or wrong, it just IS. I've been in ALL of them and will no doubt be again. Acknowledging fear and moving the way love calls us to is the opening to a bigger possibility. A life skill to practice, cultivate and master, one we didn't learn in school. It definitely doesn't come automatically. It's worth underscoring that, as perfectionism - which btw we did learn in school - is shameless and will not hesitate to play its sneaky tricks here. When we notice ourselves in patterns of shadow behaviour, we will need to actively and lovingly see them as ideas conditioned by culture, and deliberately take it easy with ourselves as we stand for a higher intention.
As we breathe and allow more, the very thing that we were resisting, can decompress and take up space in our inner world. It arises as a wave, starts to intensify and peak, and then begins to dissolve.
When any of the flavours of fear is activated in our experience, the body becomes tense and the breathing gets shallow. it really helps to simply take a deep breath, or two, until we feel the healing response kicking in. This is so simple that it can be overlooked in favour of more complex solutions. Breathing with presence has a calming, reassuring effect on our physiology. It's the most direct way of sending love into the system, and works in real time.
Pic by Monika Vijh