Lessons in Fear
2 ways to transmute it + the bridge from Fear to Love
My family and I recently had the amazing opportunity to visit Kona, Hawaii. Have you been? What a magical, spiritual place.
We took a short, guided hike to unpopulated waterfalls that gathered water into small, neck-deep pools.
I’ve always dreamed of swimming under a waterfall.
In my dreams these waterfalls and pools were the temperature of bath water.
Not these ones!
I’ve never cold-plunged.
I’m already always cold. Yes, even in a tropical place!
I bought the biggest winter coat I could find when we moved from Vancouver to Saskatoon, and I started wearing it in Vancouver before we left.
I got comments, but I was finally warm. I remember thinking, “I can’t wait until we move to Saskatoon where no one will judge me and my big coat.” (LOL – they still did)
Now, I’m known for wearing this coat into June (sometimes).
Stepping into the cold waterfall I thought, “it’s too cold, I’m getting out”. It was also very rocky, not the soft, white sand I was expecting.
I waded in up to my shins and quickly got out.
“It’s too cold! I don’t want my shorts to be wet all day!”
My husband teased me a little, but he wasn’t getting in either. Nor was my 7-year-old, who runs the opposite of me - always hot, always in shorts (even in -20 winters) (yes, he wears ski pants over the shorts when he’s outside, don’t report me).
The hiking group was getting ready to move on and there wasn’t time to jump back in or change my mind.
The moment had passed.
I put my shoes back on.
Something inside me was lost.
My words repeated in my head like a broken record, “It’s too cold, rocky, I don’t want wet shorts all day…”
I remembered my dream of swimming in a waterfall.
I thought about how unlikely it would be that I’d ever be here again.
How fleeting this moment was.
I got sad.
Disappointed.
We kept hiking.
I thought about all the fears and discomfort I’ve experienced in my business over the years.
All the decisions I made from fear, choosing to comfort myself by saying I was listening to my intuition.
Fear is an incredibly overwhelming feeling to feel.
It’s so uncomfortable, it creates an impulse to make decisions that bring quick relief.
From personal experience, I can say that relief is also a symptom of staying small.
When it’s overwhelming, we can’t name it, pull it apart or understand it, which is a recipe for staying stuck.
Without that awareness, we have limited choices.
It feels powerless.
As we hiked, we came to one more waterfall. I understood this was my last chance.
My shoes were off before we even got close.
I didn’t think about it.
I knew what I had to do.
I walked in, dipped my shoulders under, and the cold absolutely took my breath away.
Taking back my power felt incredible.
Things start to shift when you reach under the overwhelm of fear.
You could call that accepting or acknowledging the fear, or maybe you would just call it BRAVE.
The layers underneath are likely unique to your story, perspectives, and experiences.
I do have a hunch, though, that many of us share a similar root cause: low self-worth and minimal self-acceptance. Always giving our power away to external things in exchange for some sort of attachment; fitting in, disguised as belonging.
My business is taking me on a new journey, and I’ve been resisting it out of fear.
It’s not the 1:1 or group work I imagined it would be. The models I was taught.
The coaching industry has changed so much since I started, and I don’t find the old models sustainable in any way. Maybe it’s from being highly sensitive, empathic, or maybe it’s just because it simply wasn’t a sustainable model in the first place. I’ve written more about this in previous posts – Re-imagining Work for the Highly Sensitive.
The new way my business wants to run is bringing up a lot of discomfort. A lot of what-ifs. A lot of “but it’s cold, rocky, and I don’t want wet shorts all day” kind of feelings.
This is what I was feeling before Kona.
That fear got transmuted in that waterfall that day.
I came home and it felt washed away.
In it’s wake I noticed all the opportunity, abundance, growth, potential in my new journey. I couldn’t see it before.
Then, in came the gratitude.
Then, the love.
It surprised me, to be honest.
I’ll have to write one day about my complicated experience with gratitude.
But I felt so much love for this new opportunity.
A few days after coming home I caught up with my Shaman @blue_thunder_bird_woman. She had two timely teachings for me around fear.
There are two ways to transmute fear, she told me.
One is slower, but effective, and it’s through a fire ceremony. We’ve done this many times together in studying the Munay-Ki.
The second is the fastest way to transmute fear.
The second way is through love.
~
The waterfall washed away my fear; however, because I’d been doing some deep healing work around fear for years, the water was able to transmute it.
Through my personal experience, I can share a possible framework of bridging the gap between fear and love; consider if it resonates for you.
First: acknowledging the feeling / sensations of fear can be incredibly overwhelming.
Second: practicing naming the sensations (Vibration? Temperature? Color? Size? Where in the body?). Maybe moving the body (stretch, dance).
Third: what is the fear actually afraid of? It helps if you can vocalize it.
-A fear of being misunderstood?
-Not accepted?
-Making the "wrong" choice?
-Regrets?
-Doing something wrong, getting called out?
-Wasting time?
-Not accepting your self?
-What others will think?
-Alienating yourself?
-Fear of being seen trying or struggling or not knowing?
Sometimes fear is connected to shame, which is connected to self-worth.
Keeping a secret that you could be exposed at any moment as not good enough has the ability to create an abundance of overwhelming fear.
Naming fears is a way back to our inherent self-worth, our inner power, our authenticity. It’s a bridge.
Fear takes us out of our power.
Love brings us back into our power.
Naming fear has the potential to neutralize and disarm it, so you can cross the bridge to Love.
Or, maybe your bridge is your version of a cold waterfall.
What do you think?
What I’ve come to know is this:
With awareness comes choice, and with choice comes change; but it starts with awareness. Even if that awareness is, “holy F$%^&* this is an intense feeling” and all you can do is breathe.
What is your fear voice saying?
What’s your metaphorical bridge to Love?