How To Stop Being So Afraid

As I write these words, my body is electrified with fear.

I am outside, walking my dog in an effort to clear my head and re-center myself, when suddenly I experienced an intense wave of fear rush though me. It was so intense that I needed to sit down.

I stepped away from the main road we were walking down and into a parking lot at the back of a building. With no one around, the space felt safe, so I planted my fear-riddled butt on a curb, and sat with what I was feeling.

I’m feeling fear. Intense, panicky, tears in my eyes, breathing altered, kind of fear.

I’m letting it flow through me.

Where is this fear coming from? Well, my body is in a state of overwhelm because of a decision that I am facing that could either change my life dramatically for the better, pushing me into my dreams or where the fear is running wild inside me right now — it’s telling me I could instead, fall flat on my face, and ruin my life.

Quite the opposite messages to be receiving. So what am I to do now? First, I’m choosing to sit here with this fear and let it have its voice.

I hear my fear-voice telling me that I’m not ready, that I need more time. Its telling me I’m not worthy of the greatness that saying yes to this opportunity could, and most likely, will bring me. It’s telling me I’m not good enough and that I’m going to screw this up. It’s telling me I don’t belong at the level in which the opportunity before me is inviting me to. My fear-voice is loud, swirling inside my head like a tornado, telling me all the ways I could fail, providing examples and slide-shows of all the worst case scenarios for me to see.

My mind is going wild, but not for me, more so against me. My thoughts are in panic mode, scrambling around my head looking for the nearest exit it can take me down, in order to stop me from stepping towards my greatness. My fear is asking me to detour off my path, to stop from moving towards the direction that I have been, up until this point. It’s telling me I have limits and suggesting this is definitely one of them.

So here I sit, watching the show my thoughts are putting on for me and seeing them for what they really are. Fear is nothing more than an invitation to play small, an invitation to not move towards things that are huge, things that our minds can’t fully understand.

And right now, my mind cannot understand, because it has yet to experience what it feels like to say yes to a big decision that will move me to the next step of my own divine journey.

Writing this out is allowing my fear voice to be heard, and apparently that’s all it needed because suddenly my body eased up. It exhaled and I noticed the wind on my face for the first time since I stopped to sit on this curb.

I suddenly feel safe and my own thoughts are no longer racing around in my head. Instead I now feel present.

I’m here, writing these words, sitting on a curb, with my dog, now able to enjoy the breeze where just a few minutes ago I wasn’t even aware that there was a breeze, because fear had a tight hold.

It’s quite something how our bodies work and what happens when we learn to listen to what it is saying. To stop and give it what it needs in any given moment. Mine needed me to sit down, needed me to honour how it was feeling, it needed me to listen, and when I did—the feelings and overwhelm shifted.

Fear arrives right before we make any sort of decision or move that is bigger than we have ever done before. It shows up to do its job, which is to protect us from the scary uncertainly of this new big thing we are facing. It invites us back to a space of small. A place that our mind loves to live because it’s known, it’s seen, and therefore is believed to be—safe.

But here’s the thing about this fear and it’s invite to stay—safe. Most of the time what’s inviting us to face this fear, is our heart. It’s inviting us to take a big step towards our greatness and naturally, to our mind, this is scary.

But what is truly scarier, to me, as I sit here and process things further, is if we listen to these fears that show up, and live from a place of being small, we don’t get to live our dreams and feel what it feels like to be in alignment with our highest calling. We won’t be living from our hearts.

Are you living from your heart? Can you find your heart each and every time fear shows up asking us to move away from it?

When we find our heart, we find our truth, because our heart is love and love is the only truth there is. Fear is not real, its untruth and pulls us away from our heart, every time.

Fear has a job to do, but we have an even bigger one. It’s to face these fears and not let them electrify us for too long, and instead, sit with them, listen to them. Even if it’s on a curb, in the middle of a walk, when they were running all around the inside of our head inviting us to exit the hearts truest desires.

The real exit is to take all these fears and usher them out gently in a way that appreciates them for doing their job but also honours the job we need to do too.

And that’s not letting them detour us from our hearts path. The path towards our greatest self.

Fear always shows up when there is a big decision to be made, when we are presented with an opportunity to leap towards our greatness. And that’s how we know we are about to grow our hearts bigger and our dreams too. Fear is a sign of alignment. If we are not faced with fear in any of the decisions we are making, perhaps we aren’t dreaming big enough.

So dream big, usher those fears to their exit, and leap!