We are going to learn how to navigate fear.
In this day and age, there's so much out there. That's where our attention is.
It's on what people are talking about, what the news says, and everyone's opinion on social media.
Bam, there's a lot of noise. It triggers a lot of stuff in us.
When I say trigger, sometimes we use the word trigger as if I can't help it, and that's my trauma, and you can't take it from me.
If that's the case, then we don't need to talk about this because we'll just be walking around in fear all the time.
Some of us are like, it's just not satisfying to always be in fear.
Am I doing the right thing? Did I make the right choice? Should I believe this thing, or should I believe that thing? What is causing the fear?
Sometimes, it's not as big as everything out there, as much as it is as everything in here.
Sometimes, it's like I need a different job. I don't want to trade money for time or time for money every day for the rest of my life.
I'll never get to retire, and I can barely make my rent, or I can't seem to keep the relationship, I can't seem to find a relationship, or I don't live where I want to live.
I am not raising the bar for myself.
I feel stuck. I can't get over a really hard experience that I had.
Sometimes, that's where the noise is coming from.
No matter where the noise comes from, the fear that is speaking and holding you back from making a decision and being decisive because you're actually quite decisive.
When you think you're not decisive because there's too much noise in your life, you should scale back and figure out where the fear is coming from and what's causing it.
Let's dive right in. I'm getting right to the point of this.
The point is that when fear speaks, it is a part of your fragmented self that is underdeveloped to handle the situation at hand.
Let me say that in another way.
When we're children, sometimes we have experiences that we perceive we are responsible for, that we should know what's going on, or that we have to process on the fly, and it scares us.
When that happens, a small part of our thought processes gets trapped or stays underdeveloped because it feels helpless, immobile, and unable to shift and adapt appropriately to the environment.
When mom and dad are having an argument or disagreement or talking about what they're going to have to do to pay rent, or that they're going to have to move to take a new job, or that they're going to have this uncertainty that they're discussing or yelling about, in any case, it can be perceived as scary.
If you think it's your job to navigate that, you must be better-equipped, underdeveloped, immature, or a child. You need the life experience or the know-how to cope.
The coping mechanism is to just stay afraid.
Be afraid of uncertainty.
Be afraid of a new change, a new place to be, or a new place to experience.
Navigating a divorce. Navigating a new step-parent.
We are navigating new friends in a new school.
We were navigating having to move to a lesser part of town because money was scarce.
Hearing your parents always say that we don't have enough money for that, having to contrast major differences in parental views, like one brings home a Porsche and one barely puts a sniff of tuna fish on your sandwich because there's not enough tuna fish at the store to provide for the family.
When you are experiencing something other than light and love, other than crazy good, I mean, it was crazy good to go from rolling over to crawling to crawling to walking because we're designed for more.
We are designed to ask for something better.
Rolling over or crawling around on your hands and knees was no longer satisfying.
Standing up and balancing on two feet was much more satisfying, interesting, creative, and driven by curiosity.
If that was who you were, then we have to separate who you actually are from the fear that is trying to give you counsel. You can't take counsel from your fears—you just can't.
But fear of the unknown is just a part of you that got stuck in the past when you were too underdeveloped and inexperienced to handle an adult, mature situation.
We're raised by adults, right? It's almost unavoidable.
You cannot hear the conversation about not having enough money.
You cannot hear the conversation about too high a stress.
You cannot hear about the need for more education or knowledge.
You cannot hear about life and the things that we're expected to navigate as adults.
When you hear it as a child, you're not an adult, but you're hearing about adult things.
It scares you because you're not sure. I don't know. Is that going to be an issue?
I'm going to tell a pretty vulnerable story here.
My husband and I could never energetically get on the same page in my first marriage.
He had an avoidant attachment style, and when I was with an avoidant attachment style, I had an anxious attachment style.
He was anxious, and he was avoidant when he was with an anxious attachment style.
We literally couldn't bring our energies together for anything other than raising the family.
We were pretty good at managing the family together but could not get on the same page energetically as a couple.
We were having a rather loud discussion, not yelling, but it was pretty emphatic.
Close to my kids' bedrooms—a big mistake. The doors are closed; they can't hear us, right? Their doors were locked.
But there I was, choosing that place to remind my husband that he wasn't connecting with me.
The way I said it was, you connect with the kids more than you connect with me.
You love them, but you can't seem to love me. What is the deal?
One of my very sensitive children heard that, and she took it upon herself to say to herself, it was my fault my parents are fighting because if my dad would just love my mom and not us as much, then they would get along.
There would be peace in our household. They would love each other, which is what she wanted most. She just wanted us to love each other.
Boy, we tried.
We were trying; we would just let go of the problem and manage the kids and the family, the activities and the schedule, and the comings and goings of our lives.
That was fine until I wanted to have a relationship.
I was like, we don't have to have a license to be friends.
My fear was talking.
You can hear it like there's the trickle down effect.
My fear was that I would never find someone to love me because I hadn't actually done the work of loving myself first.
At that point in our relationship, I was just like, you just need to love me.
How hard could it be? I'm fun, I'm shiny, I'm bright, I'm witty, I'm generous, I'm positive.
What is the problem here?
I couldn't figure it out because I didn't find the words until about a year ago.
I had never heard of an avoidant attachment style or an anxious attachment style. You know, when I started studying the secure relationship.
Those are the words being used. I'm like, oh my gosh, There it is.
Now, I have at least an explanation for why it didn't work out with us, but in the middle of not knowing my fear brain, even my subconscious fear brain, I couldn't even put words to it back in the day, was that my mother would never love me.
There was something about me that was unlovable, that I would never be good enough to have the kind of love I thought as a baby was possible.
We come into this world as babies, and we're like, yeah, we are going to lean heavily on our caregivers to teach us more about who we are, the love and the light, than anything else.
That's their job: to show us how to love and how much love and light we are so that we can remember. Because the veil is drawn, we don't remember where we came from, our awesomeness, and how enormously light and intelligent we were.
Here, we are trying to navigate life from a place of blindness.
If you will, spiritual blindness, and we're trying to figure out how to navigate.
What do we do now? How about now? Am I doing it right? Am I not doing it right? Where's the fear coming up?
That fear comes from a place where you were made to believe you were less than the love and light you are.
When my parents were fighting, and they would invite us out of our beds at midnight to watch them fight and to judge who was right and wrong, that was awesome.
But there I was. Like, oh, there's no love in our family.
My parents don't love each other, and they don't love us.
There is no love. There's no love in the world.
I'm going to have to look for love in all the wrong places to find it. And oh, I did.
I tried hard and put in a lot of effort to find love, even if it was in all the wrong places.
My fear as a child was that I entered a relationship that was not right for me.
It was wrong for me because I was out, too; I was absolutely determined to do it better than my parents did.
I was trying not to have the relationship they had, and lo and behold, I got what I wasn't looking for, what I didn't want because I was looking at what not to do, and I got what not to do.
That's the law of attraction, right?
That's the universe delivering what I was focused on. I was focused on not doing it like them, and here I was in a relationship, begging him to love me, and it wasn't being offered.
That's codependency.
I was asking for something that wasn't being offered, but that was my fear that was asking because my fear, that inner child that was afraid love was not available to me and was not accessible to me, what was governing the conversations in my head about he's just like your mom.
He's never going to love you.
You're never going to be enough.
You can't try hard enough, be smiley enough, be productive enough, or be successful enough to get the love you need because your false belief is that you must earn it.
The truth is I was loved all along.
I was born love. I was love; I embodied love, and love was in me.
You can't undo it; you can't take it away.
My fear, though, was that I wasn't loved.
My trained, conditioned brain from childhood told me that I would have to try really hard, in fact inhumanly hard, to get the love that I deserved, wanted, and craved.
In that case, fear was driving a conversation about an immature, undeveloped child still stuck in the past and afraid that love was unavailable.
Can you hear how fear, taking counsel from our fears is really a bad idea because it's from an underdeveloped place in our minds, not in actuality, not in reality, just in our minds from the conditioning we receive from the parents we were trusting would tell us the truth about the love and light that we are.
Back to my daughter, the sensitive child who perceived it as her fault.
Then she grows up and navigates life; her fear brain tells her she has to earn love.
The saga continues as if she is just a product of my fear, and her fear is navigating the same way.
As a child, she internalized Not because we told her it was her fault but because she internalized it.
I internalized it from my mom; even though she was the one having a bad life, she was the one insisting on not accepting love.
I internalized it as it was my fault and my responsibility to make sure she was happy.
My daughter did the same.
She was determined to make me happy with her antics, and she was the funniest, brightest, and most creative of all my kids.
She was also probably the most sensitive. She picked up all the energy of my inner child's not-lovingness.
Then, her inner child stayed a child as she grew up and tried to navigate life.
In this scenario, you can see how the only time we're ever in fear is because a part of us, our history, somewhere in the past, usually under the age of 21, got stuck trying to navigate an untruth that we took on as a true belief.
It was like, well, it must be true, or my mother would love me.
It must be true, or my parents wouldn't fight. It must be true that love is lacking in life, and you have to try really hard to earn it in order to have love.
Then you start looking around the world, going, yeah, but there are people who love each other, and they don't try. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong.
Then there's conflict.
Well, how come them, not me? How come they had such a good life, and I don't? But who's talking? That's the difference.
We've got to separate the voice in our head.
Who is talking when we feel good and we're lined up with the life we want? Who's talking?
Well, that's a mature part of us.
That's a developed, nurtured part of us that does not have a trauma bond with the past.
It's a mature part of us that is willing to explore how to navigate life without fear.
There's a little uncertainty to it because we can't see three steps in front of us other than where we are, right?
We take on life as it is.
If we have a developed, mature part of our brain that can say, well, this is what it is, but it's not always going to be this way because I'm born for more.
I'm going to get a new job, get more education, and find a better life routine that helps me feel fired up.
That part of our brain is not fear.
Therefore, it is the part of our brain we should listen to most. The part of our inner being and our brain are connected.
They're actually lined up with the bright, shiny, loving people that we are.
Our spirits are all the intelligence of the energy that creates worlds without numbers. It's a connection.
When you feel good, your brain is on board with the true love and light inside you that can navigate life, even though it's not been navigated before; you've never lived tomorrow yet, or next week, or next year.
That's all of the unknown out there, and there are a lot of facets of that in our political world, our economic world, our financial status, our relationships, our careers, our purpose and our contributions, and our charities.
There's a lot to navigate that we still need to navigate, and life will always cause us to ask for more.
We'll be good for a minute, and then it's not enough, and we want more. We buy a bike, ride it around, enjoy it, and then decide we want a motorcycle.
If we're growing and developing, it will always be different.
The reason we get stuck is because we're taking counsel from our fears that are stuck in the past.
It could be last year.
Perhaps you suffered a tremendous loss in your life that you just didn't see coming.
A loss of a relationship, a loss of a loved one, a loss of a home, or due to natural disasters.
If we've experienced something, even in the recent past, our brain got stuck there.
There's just a piece of your brain.
You had a thought that is untrue that keeps you stuck.
Now, I'm not saying that that's every case.
You might be able to process a traumatic event and grasp it with your mature and developed brain.
That's like, oof, that was not fun, but I'll be prepared next time. I'm not going to dwell on it. I'm going to move forward. That's good.
That's not your fear guiding you.
What we're talking about here is navigating fear.
When fear's talking, we've got to stop and ask, who's talking?
Is that the underdeveloped, scared child?
Is that the person stuck back there in the house fire that happened two years ago, and you lost everything you owned?
Is that the fear brain that experienced a loss that completely blindsided you and flattened your life?
Is that the fear brain that didn't get the love and nurturing from a parent that should have been there to advocate on your behalf?
Who is talking, and how old is that person?
Oftentimes, if you stop and ask yourself, when you're in the middle of fear, you're like, oof, do I navigate this medical decision or that medical decision? What am I going to do? Who's talking?
As soon as you ask yourself, who's talking? A memory will flash in your mind.
When that memory flashes in your mind, how old were you in that memory?
It's okay about the things you can't remember. It's OK if you can't go back to age two and catch all the details.
If you were like eight years old, and you came to school one day and learned that a classmate had died, and you just had your first experience with and you just couldn't even process it, but all you saw around you was sadness and unable to process.
You're like, I don't even know what to do with this information.
Then you are faced with a medical decision that you're trying to help your loved one navigate, and you're like, I don't know.
That fear comes from an experience you had prior, and that's how old you are.
That memory is helping you understand that an eight-year-old is trying to navigate something in your life that you've never had to navigate before.
If you seek counsel from your fears and feel stuck, immobile, or powerless, you must ask that child to step aside.
Please, I'm the adult. I'm going to take a breath.
I will ask you to go over there and take a nap; the younger child is underdeveloped unemotionally equipped to handle what's happening.
I'm going to look for answers. I'm going to talk to people who have been through this experience.
Never talk to somebody who has not done what you're trying to do.
I promise it won't go well.
Only talk to people trying to do what you are trying to do.
Ask for their opinion and experience story, and then consider it and consult with your inner being.
If nothing feels right, wait. Wait to do anything yet.
Wait for the answer—as long as you're not trying to navigate from fear, which is usually a knee-jerk reaction.
Somebody cuts you off in the road, you sucker.
Fear, you're putting my life in jeopardy.
How old were you when someone put your life in jeopardy? How powerless you felt to change that.
Don't take counsel from your fears.
Your adult self will always give you space to think it through, to investigate more, to sit tight till it feels right.
That's a good one. That just came out.
Sit tight till it feels right.
When your fear talks, it's not you.
It's different than the inner intelligent, wise, decisive person talking.
Some part of you is underdeveloped, got stuck in the past, and is still operating from the premise of a falsehood that is believed to be accurate.
You have to unravel what the false belief is.
What is my inner child?
Suppose you want to develop the inner child so that fear doesn't keep coming up.
In that case, you've got to identify what the false belief that child picked up in that circumstance or that underdeveloped person who wasn't ready to navigate and went from fight or flight to freeze, and they're still frozen in that place and that loss, that unexpected turn of events though was anything but on your radar.
That's the person you've got to ask.
What is the false belief that you're trying to make true in your life right now by fighting against a decision that scares you?
If there's resistance, it's fear. If you're indecisive, it's fear.
If you're uncertain, it may be a hint of fear, but it's also your inner guidance system telling you to wait until you know it's right.
When you want to navigate this ever-changing environment and world, you realize that we are a global people, have global news, and are not just living in our neighborhoods anymore or down the country block.
There's so much to navigate.
Then we look in the mirror, and we're like, how am I going to even manage what I see?
The person who is different on the outside than they feel like they should be on the inside.
We are navigating our health.
That's a discussion that has so much noise attached to it that we do nothing. Or it's like, yeah, I just need some popcorn and a soda at the moment. I don't know what else to do.
That is a fear brain. It's an underdeveloped idea in your mind that is a false belief because it makes you feel bad, stuck, indecisive, etc.
We've got to identify the belief there—the belief that you can't trust yourself to take care of your body.
The belief that you'll never listen because you don't know what to do, the belief that you're trying to follow somebody else's advice, which is for their own body and not about you.
What is the fear?
That you'll start something and never finish it?
Is that true?
Probably not, because you have decided to get groceries, you make a list, you go to the store, you find a parking place, you walk inside, you get all the things on your list, you put them in the car, you check out at the end, you walk back to your car, you put the groceries in the car, and you get home.
You put them in the cupboard, and then you cook the food, and you eat it?
You started something, and you finished it to the end, all the way to the end.
It can't be true that you start something and then you don't finish it.
Maybe you lose interest, that would be more true. You're trying to find more truth.
When you find more truth, you feel relief. It's a big difference.
It may not have a solution to it, but at least your thoughts are more lined up in a mature and developed way that aligns with your true self than having your fear brain tell you it's only going to get worse from here on out.
When did you first hear that? When did you first think that?
The memory that comes up first is always the one it was rooted in, and you have to go back, ask yourself how old you were, what was happening, why you thought it was true, and how it is false, and then find the truer belief.
Improve the story. Find the thought that gives you a better feeling in your gut.
That's how you navigate fear.
Now it's up to you. It's you who does the work. It's you who can make these changes.
Some self-awareness is going to go a long way for you to realize that your fear brain has no business trying to navigate your life, none.
Navigating fear is identifying what the fearful thought is.
Where's it coming from? How old are you? Put it to rest.
Well, that wasn't true. I'm not sure what was true, but that wasn't true. Because if it were true, it'd make me feel better.
Truth makes us feel good.
Lining up with the truth of you makes you feel good.
When you're like, it's like Christmas morning. Lining up with Christmas morning is like, oh my goodness, I can't wait. I just bought a present. I wrapped it in the best wrapping paper.
I will give it to somebody; their delight will be my favorite thing. That's lining up.
Sure enough, you give them a gift, unwrap it, and they're delighted. It's your favorite thing. Ta-da!
That is how you navigate out of fear to find the truth.
The truth that you were doing something with the intention of delighting somebody that was absolutely true.
It's true because you feel it. That's how you know it's true.
Truth makes us feel good.
When we read somebody and we catch hold upon a thought and we're like, yes, that feels good. That's because it's lined up with who you are.
When you speak untruths and try to make them accurate, just watch yourself suffer.
Just step aside and watch it go down. It's about to go down.
You feel stuck, flat, unmotivated, discouraged, jealous, unworthy, undeserving, tired, exhausted.
Those are the things you feel when you're working with untrue beliefs.
Those untrue beliefs come from fear.
The fear is stuck in the past. It's the underdeveloped, emotionally stuck person who had an experience that couldn't have it.
Note: You can access the full blog content in audio versions on Spotify and YouTube. Happy listening! 🎧
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