What is your relationship with Fear? How do you experience it?
Most people identify with it, take it personally, and have a story or an event attached to it that gives it meaning. They don’t realize that this makes it seem real, solidifies it, and turns it into “something”, rather than experiencing it as it truly is, impersonal and a passing emotion.
Fear, like any other emotion, sensation or thought, is energy. All too often when we have a painful or scary experience we allow fear to become a part of our personality. This shapes how we see, interpret and relate to the world. Fear and its responses becomes a habit.
On a relative level, if you are holding onto fear due to past experiences or an event, your body will become hard, less flexible, agile and resilient. This tension overtime will leave you feeling drained and no longer in sync with life. You will feel disconnected, less flow energetically, vital, balanced or grounded. The vital prana, energy that circulates and sustains the physical, mental, emotional and subtle bodies, locks into a posture called "fight or flight”.
In my journey with fear, this resulted in me being less present in my body and my life. On subtle and often unconscious levels, my body became paralyzed, numb and less responsive. I felt disconnected from the lucidity, power and intelligence of my spirit. I felt dead, lifeless and empty inside. A sense of vagueness pervaded my experience of myself which was difficult to notice or pinpoint as time went on.
For many, their experience of reality before the affects of fear is long forgotten. Prolonged fear leaves individuals feeling isolated and in their own world, separate from the people and circumstances around them. The mind becomes agitated, overactive, distracted, unclear, foggy and incoherent. The mind, body and spirit become disassociated, stuck in adaptive behavior patterns and split from present day reality; no longer functioning in coordination and collaboration with the flow of life.
Survival becomes the baseline of one's existence resulting in behavior patterns like rushing, efforting, guardedness, aggression, skittishness, hyper-vigilance and many more leading one's actions. Wisdom and intuition are elusive. It's no wonder people feel unhappy, powerless and not aligned with their purpose. Our remembrance of the delight and joy of living connected to self and in concert with our spirit and the river of life is fleeting or gone.
When fear is left unresolved the body becomes addicted to certain foods and experiences that maintain its state of uptightness and disorientation. Fear becomes our unconscious set point, and we create a life of self-fulfilling prophecies that justify our fearful identity. This identity is a constellation of memories, experiences, mental and emotional as well as biochemical loops and psycho-physiological habituations that need to be released and healed. Once these energy configurations are freed they can reorganize. It's much like pushing a reset button. For many, this healing process is gradual and step by step, requiring patience and perseverance for full resolution of mind body and spirit to be experienced.
On an ultimate level, when looked at directly with awareness, fear can be seen for what it is, an emotion, a reaction, energy. This perspective liberates you from identifying with fear and being stuck in its mental, emotional and physiological responses allowing life and your relationship with it to flow. Without this view point, fear’s expressions become repetitive, habitual and who you are. When you no longer identify with fear, then this emotion is simply experienced as a passing cloud.
The nature of energy is change. When we are constantly making everything we experience solid through identifying with it and placing an "I" onto it, we forget that the nature of reality is energetic. Life becomes a mirage. We think we see a snake when it is simply a rope. We attach solidity onto that which is impermanent. When our relationship to fear is one of flow, then fear is demystified and becomes simply one of the many emotions in the play of life.
I invite you all to reexamine your relationship with fear, open yourself and see it beyond the habit of identifying with it and making it personal. Come to enjoy and experience it as it truly is. When one is not interpreting life constantly through the dualistic mind, of "I", likes, dislikes, rejecting, resisting, grasping, labeling, then one is free to experience the beauty of the constantly changing nature of reality.
Life is energy. May you come to know and experience life as it truly is and respond to life circumstances from that place? I welcome you into a world beyond the limitations of perceptions, ideas, opinions, labels, judgments, and objects including you and me, where the underlying nature of all phenomena is energy. When you remove all barriers and perceived separations you find that life is energy expressing itself in all its variety of forms, shapes, sizes and manifestations.
Love,
Lisa
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Lisa Hartnett, D.C.
Fulfilled Living Wellness Center 503 D Street, Ste. 7 • San Rafael, CA 415-457-0155
About Me
- Helping Hands
- From a young age, I have always been inquisitive about life and its deeper meaning. At the age of twenty-two, my questions began to be answered. I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and bedridden for a year. Life, as I then knew and understood it, crumbled. This opened me to alternative ways of healing. Thus began my path of personal healing, Network Chiropractic and facilitating others in their healing. I now lead a vibrant and healthy life practicing Network Chiropractic, Embodiment Sessions and Songs from the Cells. I also travel throughout the East Bay, the South Bay and Marin helping animals and their caregivers through communication and healing. I am passionate about helping people and animals heal, and empowering them to know and experience their inherent healing power.