I can’t even begin to tell you how much of my life in the last decade has centered around breaking down fears. One after another, chop-chop-chop. Dead trees falling.
I’ve been stumbling through the downed logs (and even getting lost), but somehow, I’ve still been getting somewhere”¦and not just anywhere”¦but to someplace wild and fantastic and fulfilling. Each month breaks new ground for me, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and even financially.
It never feels right to keep my secrets for success to myself. I want to shout them to everybody.
For instance, this last week, I’ve realized that Flow has purposely kept me on this hamster wheel of “fear breaking.” After all, whenever I break past one of my own blocks, I’m able to help someone else break past theirs. “Oh,” I said, no longer upset. “I get it.”
Fear, I’ve learned, has so many disguises. Just when I think I’ve pinned it down, it pops up in another costume. It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole.
For example, I might be helping a Flowdreaming student who’s been hemming and hawing. They’re suffering from indecision. We’re four months into our mentoring, and nothing has happened.
They’re aligned to their purpose – I can feel it. They’ve felt their flow and the feelings they’re generating in their life – I know since I’ve helped them feel those. But they’re still stuck.
When I ask them what action they’ve taken toward their Flow goals, they say they’ve done a few things, but mostly they just feel a steady, churning tumult of frustration inside while they wait for something to happen to them.
That frustration is the sound of fear meeting action. It’s the churning, clashing middle, where action meets restraint. It’s nowhere zone. And it’s really, really tiring.
Frustration is the “squeezed and ground up middle” of fear meeting action. Wherever you have frustration, you’ll find fear.
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My Best Fear-Breaking & Block-Finding Resources
Be decisive. Feel how to make a choice and not doubt it, since you trust Flow to direct you through it.
Strength + Self-Love, an unbeatable combo.
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“It’s not indecision or being stuck,” I continue, “it’s fear. Fear is pretending that you’re unsure, confused, don’t know what you want, not sure what to do next. Frankly, it almost doesn’t matter what you do next, as long as it’s something. Flow will pick up the tail of whatever you do and spin it in the right direction. But you’ve got to DO something. And with it, you’ve got to know that by doing, you’re changing things. They will not be as they were. And you’ve got to be cool with that.”
At some point, the impasse breaks. Fear can’t sustain the constant onslaught of purposeful, directed Flow. Something happens – a weird turn of events, a miraculous offer, a sudden new option that wasn’t there before. What tips the balance is decision.
“I decide to have this.”
That is a crazy powerful statement.
Do have any idea how energetically charged that statement is, when taken deep within your gut? It becomes your North Star, your compass needle. You and everything you are swings around to align to it.
My frustrated student is a creaky wheel beginning to turn. It takes a few sessions and some hardcore Flowdreaming to fire up the locomotive again and get her train running, but one day, there it is: She has decided. She has action, again, in her life.
We are starting from zero and revving up to speed. She knows, she tells me, that she wants clarity in her relationship. She wants to be loved and nurtured through and through. Understood, supported, cheered on, by a partner who is secure and emotionally ready.
She has constraints though, she says – restrictions: she has kids and wants them happy and supported. She needs to financially take care of herself. She needs this, or that. “No problem, that’s easy,” I say. “Stick with the feeling of what this relationship gives you. There are no ‘conditions’ – just essentials that need to fulfill your desires in a certain way.”
Or”¦maybe she’s a totally different student, and this one needs a job that pays commensurate to her experience. She needs a new direction, meaning a job that isn’t the same as the last job. Frankly, she just needs some kickass FUN too. Her life is a re-tread of sameness and resignation.
“Ok,” I say, to either or both students. “Those are pretty real, concrete desires. We will do this. You just need to truly, hugely, and completely decide. Be open and allow. Don’t reflexively reject change, or repulse possibility.”
But then fear pipes up, in its sassy, sneaky voice, “You don’t know what’ll happen if you upset things. You might never find those things in any other job, or partner. Here, have some confusion. Be indecisive. Be stuck. Wait a little while. Wait for a sign. That way, I can keep you exactly where you are. No change. I got you.”
Fear hates change. It despises it. It distrusts it. Fear thinks that change is always bad, will always make a huge heartbreaking mess, will leave you with less money, less love, and worse health. And that’s ok. That’s fear’s job. It’s supposed to do that, because it causes you to not act rashly and to pause and consider instead.
But when you decide something, wholly, fear is defanged.
The key then becomes that you must figure out what you fear, and how that fear is disguising itself as other seemingly normal emotions or thoughts about your life.
If you’re frustrated, for instance, you know right away that there’s fear in that area of your life. But fear hides in many more feelings than frustration.
What about”¦ feeling nervous about how you appear to someone else, or worrying about what you said, or how you came across? Fear has grabbed you.
Self-doubt, insecurity, aversion to risk, and the inability to say what you want or how you feel are also all manifestations of fear in all its ugly costumes.
So is feeling stuck in life. That is fear too. Feeling stuck means you want change, you need change, but when it comes to taking action toward change”¦screech! You halt. Fear warns you that you better consider more, you better wait. Stay in that sucky job. Stay in that sucky relationship. Stay in that sucky house. Being stuck means being rooted to the safe, known place, even if that safe place is making you miserable. That’s fear holding you down, hiding beneath all those other “rationales” that you heap on top of it.
Indecision, confusion, your trouble making decisions…and your sense of doubt when you do”¦.that’s also fear again, tugging you away from risk, making you take the “safer” route to nowhere.
These feelings also often mask your fear of failure. The old saying “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” almost always triggers a huge avalanche of feelings in us. Turns out…there’s a LOT we’d be doing differently.
And how about all those vacations you never took, those books you never wrote, those conversations you never had, those relationships you never started, that “guy or girl who got away,” that business you never began…all because some part of you felt you didn’t deserve it, or couldn’t have done it…that’s fear talking again.
Once you get in the habit of peeling back the layers and looking for fear at the heart of each thing that holds you back, you’ll find fear almost everywhere. I hope it gets you rip-snortingly indignant. Anger can be an ally against fear, provoking you into action.
Fear, ultimately, is the opposite of Flow: fear says “I don’t trust that good things will happen to me. I don’t believe that God/Source/Flow is working to help me. I don’t believe that I have any control over the things that happen to me, or power to cause things to occur. I believe that the universe is bad, or at most, just random and uncaring and you have to fight for everything good.”
Fear is the ultimate way of keeping you a victim. But a victim to what? Life? Other people? “Unchangeable circumstances?” YOU are the one who picks out or “identifies” what you’re being subjugated to.
You know all those “old people,” who tell you crazy things like “just do it” and “relationships come first” and “I wish I’d pursued my dream?” Do you know why they say that? Because they took the safe route. They let fear win, then win some more. And they realized, finally, after they were much too tired and old to do much about it, that they would have actually kicked fear’s ass, had they decided to. That is what we all call “wisdom.”
If you give up to fear, you’re giving up all your Flow, power, and substance to unknowable potentials and to other people…and these other people don’t appreciate your generosity in giving your power to them, or even particularly want it.
So change. Decide.
I’ve found something I’ve started calling the “9-month miracle.” Like having a baby, for 4 out of 5 of my students, somewhere around 8-9 months, the dam suddenly breaks, and all they’ve been resisting crumbles. Fear doesn’t entirely leave, but it loses its power. Flow comes in freely and easily. We’ve hit the “miracle month.”
I feel so bad for everyone who stops the fear-breaking/manifesting/Flowdreaming process at 3 months, or even 6. “You’re almost at the finish line!” I want to shout. Once we actively begin flowing away from fear, and feeling our decisiveness toward change, fear must let go of us. And when this happens to you, the sigh of freedom you’ll breathe can be heard to the stars.
You need 9 months of real solid choosing (“I want this. I feel this.”) to change. Yes, in that 9 months, you’ll meander a bit; it takes a while for things to sink in and settle. But you’ll get there.
So get on it. Tell the Universe you’re ready for a role change. You’re ready to stop hanging back. You’re ready to live a life without fear.
