According to Merriam-Webster, fear is an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. It may be argued that fear is a natural and necessary emotion that helps protect one from pain and injury, physically or emotionally. Sometimes this awareness of danger may be intuition, informing us of a wiser path. But what if there actually isn’t any impending danger at this moment? What if we are simply suffering from the recurring belief of looming danger? Many of us are living like this everyday.
Throughout the day you may discover, upon deeper observation, the “subtle” actions of fear that you engage in. These actions are expressions of powerlessness. I call them subtle because we mostly do them unconsciously, in a sort of autopilot mode. When we enter our autopilot mode, our conditioning and beliefs that we have mastered as reality take over. In this state, we repeat to ourselves through thoughts, words, and actions that we are indeed powerless, often translating into aches, pains and diseases in the body.
When we live in this constant powerlessness, we affirm to ourselves that we are separate from life and it is against our very existence. In this state we no longer trust in the flow of life. We forget that life is not a series of past events constantly repeating themselves, and consequently we leave ourselves stagnant through the power of our thoughts.
These states of fear commonly arise out of traumas, which most often occur in childhood. Sometimes the trauma is as subtle as being prevented from watching TV as a child and sometimes it is as explicit as being physically abused. This is why it is helpful to heal trauma as it comes up. And it comes up as a subtle action of fear.
Through practicing being embodied, I have become more aware of my subtle actions of fear. For example, when someone close to me suggests that I am mistaken, I tend to resist immediately. I am not sure how this began, but I know this resistance comes from the fear of being corrected, perhaps as I was corrected as a child. Another example is feeling unworthy of sharing my views, because I believe that I am inconveniencing others. This rose out of being told as a young boy that it was not my time to speak. I then developed the belief that my views are not worth listening to, and from that developed an acute timidness.
When we are children we generally do not have the tools, environment or support to process our difficult experiences. It is also possible that, despite having the tools and the knowhow, we do not want to process these difficult experiences and their resulting emotions. Therefore many of us are likely walking around feeling unworthy, distrustful, and in resistance to the now.
So I would like this blog post to serve as a reminder that you are worthy of being alive; that you can trust life because you are life; that life is fresh in every moment; and that life is embracing you already and all you have to do is sink into it.