Meeting Fear with Awareness

Contemplating all of the fear that is being generated through the financial roller coaster that is going on, I thought it would be timely to share a bit from my new book – What’s In the Way Is The Way!

It is true that fear is a part of life. In fact it is necessary for survival. Think about stepping off the curb and hearing the sound of a truck barreling down on you. Without a thought, you leap back in fear. That kind of fear is only about 1% of the fear we experience. Most of what we experience is psychological fear. It is all the stories of fear that run through our minds all the time. Sometimes there are big fears like the fear of illness and death.

Sometimes they are smaller like ‘will my pants fit?’ Whether fear shows up as the slow drip of insecurity that makes up our days or it comes to visit us in the middle of the night, shaking us to our core, fear is always talking, narrating our world.

At the core, fear causes us to contract rather than open, to protect rather than connect, to resist rather than respond, to survive rather than thrive. Fear constantly makes demands, and we have spent our lives listening to it.

We shouldn’t have to live our lives having fear be in charge. Can you feel the relief of that? It is possible to come out of the trance of fear and live from the aliveness, openness and joy of life. The way out of the trance is to get to know fear. It is possible to become honest enough with ourselves to be able to start looking at what goes on inside of us. And it is in that looking that we become free. For as soon as we can see the cloud bank of fear we crawled into, we can begin to see through the cloud bank and come back to life.