LET YOUR FEAR GUIDE YOU BACK TO FREEDOM

Changing our relationship with FEAR so that we can move through our walls of protection and find the FREEDOM waiting on the other side.

Looking at Fear Differently

In the first part of the Freedom Series, we explored Understanding the Inner Child and began to recognize how our younger selves learned to protect us when belonging, safety, and connection felt threatened.

In the second part, Break Free from Your Protective Patterns, we looked at what can happen when those protective responses remain with us into adulthood. Protection can become a pattern, a pattern can become an identity, and eventually we can find ourselves protecting the identity itself.

Together, these two healing efforts can change the way we experience ourselves and our lives. But there is another step we can take. We can begin to reshape our relationship with fear.

The first two parts of this journey showed us that on the other side of some of the walls we have placed around ourselves is something other than the dreadful outcome we once feared. We may discover new forms of self-expression, learn to love ourselves through discomfort, find more truth about who we are, develop a greater sense of internal safety, and experience more freedom to be ourselves.

But if we continue to organize our lives around avoiding fear, those walls can remain. Freedom asks us to develop a different relationship with fear.

Fear Is Not the Enemy

Fear has an important place in our lives. There are times when fear is a valuable response to something that could genuinely threaten our safety. Our bodies are designed to recognize danger, and fear can alert us to situations where we need to protect ourselves. This kind of fear can be useful toward helping us to survive. It can alert us as to when to stop, pay attention, and notice something potentially harmful or dangerous. Our body can muscle guard and brace us for impact increasing the delivery of blood, cortisol, and adrenaline.

But there is another kind of fear that can begin to limit our lives. It appears when there is no immediate danger, but our mind is telling us of what might happen if we express ourselves, make a different choice, disappoint or anger someone, take a risk, speak our truth, or step outside of an identity that others have come to expect from us. This fear will have our body behaving to protect our survival when it is not connected to our survival at all. This fear can become a barrier and limit our expression and our lives.

It can keep us from moving when and where we wish to go. It can keep us from seeing something we are being shown. It can cause us to suppress love to protect from hurt. And over time, as it limits our full expression of who we are, our identities create a prison around us and we can become a much smaller version of ourselves than we were ever meant to be.

So how do we begin to know the difference when we experience a feeling of fear?

When is Fear Really Protecting Us?

One question we can ask ourselves is, “Am I in any immediate danger?”.

If the answer is yes, then the body’s heightened response is appropriate and you can use this energy to help remove yourself from any danger your body and survival are in. We must remember that although as a child our survival was connected to belonging, as an adult is it not.

If our body and survival are not in immediate danger, but there is fear present, we may be subconsciously responding to a past situation or old wound instead of immediate danger. Something that threatens our connection or belonging as an adult can create the same response in our body and mind as it did when we were a child and our survival was threatened. This type of fear can have us repeating old survival patterns, that we developed in response to hurtful and scary situations as children, well into our adult life. These patterns become the walls that restrict our expression and our lives.

When Fear Becomes a Wall

The hurtful or fearful moments we experienced as a child were moments when clever adaptations to our self-expression and behaviour took place. They worked well to protect our belonging and survival but most often, we do not go back to that fear to heal the wound, restore our full expression and break the survival pattern. These patterns represent fears that have become a wall of restriction around us.

For example, shrinking ourselves down so that another person feels better about themselves is not necessarily a survival response as an adult. We may be afraid that if we don't shrink, we will weaken the connection, lose approval or likeability, and in the worst case sever the connection or be cast out the group. We may become agreeable or stay quiet. We might take responsibility for someone else's feelings and abandon our own and our full expression in order to preserve the connection.

The cost of securing the connection with the abandonment of our own authentic expression takes its toll and we often don’t recognize how draining it is on our energy and life. We make this self-abandonment easier to accept by attaching it to a virtue and never look there for the source of our suffering.

I'm just being a good person. I'm just being kind. I'm just keeping the peace. I'm just being generous.

There is nothing wrong with kindness, peace, or generosity. They are wonderful qualities and so why would we look here for what is causing us pain and restriction within our lives? The question is not whether is it good or helpful to us to be kind. Surely it is. The question is whether we are able to offer these things to ourselves and other in balance. Are we able to embody these qualities without abandoning ourselves in the process.

We can be kind and still have boundaries. We can love someone without taking responsibility for their emotional experience. We can care about another person's feelings without making their feelings the authority over our own expression.

It is important to know this about ourselves because we must give ourselves permission to love, trust, and honour ourselves in fairness in everything we do. If we continue to abandon ourselves in virtuous behaviour then we are running our old survival programs meant to protect belonging and will continue to restrict our own freedom. Behind the protective patterns and self-abandonment is the fear we are looking for. If we choose not to address it, it will remain a prison wall around us.

Tearing Down the Walls

When we have decided we are not in immediate danger, but fear continues to restrict our expression, it can be useful to look at that fear differently. Instead of automatically turning away from it, we can become curious about it.

What am I afraid will happen if I move through this? What am I afraid I will lose? What part of myself am I protecting? What might be possible on the other side?

Even if we are unable to answer these questions it is enough to understand that there is fear present and a boundary present and that we are not putting ourselves in any danger by moving toward it and discovering what is on the other side.

There may be another aspect of ourselves waiting to be discovered. There may be an area of life we find ourselves shining in but were once to afraid to enter. When we start to perceive these moments of feeling contracted or restrictions as moments when there is some old fear or would present, we can also recognize the opportunity to become free. We can allow these feelings to guide us toward the walls that limit our expression and our life and each time we move through the fear and tear down a wall we experience the internal feeling of this freedom.

This doesn't mean that every fear needs to be confronted immediately or that we should force ourselves into situations that feel overwhelming. Fear can invite us to look at things we can let go of, change, or do differently when we are ready to walk through that door.

REFLECTION

Where Does Fear Restrict Your Expression?

Take a moment to consider where fear may be influencing your behaviour or your choices. Is there something you want to say but continually hold back? Is there a boundary you know you need to establish but feel afraid to create? Is there a part of yourself you rarely allow others to see? Where do you feel restricted or feel yourself contracting. What areas of life do you not explore that have been calling you?

Most of us have told ourselves things like:

I'm just not that kind of person. I don't believe in that. That's not really me. I could never do something like that.

These statements may become true if we continue to hold them as beliefs about ourselves. We must give ourselves permission to be anything we choose at any given time in order to surprise ourselves about who we are. We can remember that freedom is about self discovery and recognizing parts of ourselves that we had forgotten were there. We can learn to program our energy with new command statements that are more aligned with our authentic being so that we don’t have belief systems that remove our permission to walk toward our fear and become free.

HEALING

Learning to Feel Safe Within Yourself

Moving through fear becomes much easier when we begin to develop a sense of safety within ourselves. This is one of the most important pieces of the journey. If our sense of safety depends entirely upon other people approving of us, agreeing with us, staying happy with us, or remaining connected to us, then changing our behaviour can feel extremely threatening. Our nervous is being regulated by our external environment and we’re left endlessly seeking to control it.

But when we begin developing internal safety, we discover that we can remain connected to ourselves even when someone else is uncomfortable with our choices.

We can remind ourselves:

I am safe and I am loved. I love myself. I trust myself. I honour myself. I know myself.

Directing this love toward ourselves is what will allow us to take that leap of faith for ourselves. It allows us to move through the fear that has been preventing us from letting go of misaligned identities, tearing down walls of protection, and allowing our full expression to be free. We can acknowledge that we are afraid without allowing fear to automatically determine what we do. We can love the part of ourselves that is frightened while also reassuring it that we are capable of making choices from our adult understanding.

Giving yourself permission to make a change or set a boundary or being crying, laughing, and singing again, despite being afraid to do all those things and the response they get from others, is a great act of self-love. You will feel this on the other side. This feeling of returning to yourself will eventually outweigh the fear of taking that leap of faith and fear will begin to look like an opportunity. You may start seeing walls and move directly toward them, curious about what part of you is waiting on the other side.

EMBODIMENT

Moving Through Fear Toward Freedom

Eventually, understanding fear isn't enough. The reflection has been done the recurring moments of restriction and contraction have been identified. We are convinced that our survival is not attached to the outcome of our choices and we wish to break a pattern, tear down a wall, or move into an unknown area to find ourselves. There comes a moment when we have to choose something different.

Perhaps we say no when we would normally say yes. Perhaps we speak when we would normally remain silent. Perhaps we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Perhaps we try something new. Perhaps we stop explaining ourselves. Perhaps we allow someone else to experience their own disappointment without rushing in to make it better.

These choices may feel uncomfortable. They may even feel wrong at first, considering some of these may choices may feel as though they work in opposition of a virtuous identity we hold. That doesn't necessarily mean we've made the wrong choice, its just a normal response to being there for yourself after many years of abandoning yourself. We must learn to include ourselves in fairness when offering kind, love, and energy.  We may have spent years organizing our behaviour around maintaining connection, approval, or safety, and so choosing ourselves can initially feel like we are creating a problem for ourselves. We can remind ourselves that each time we make a choice that honours our authentic expression, we create new evidence for ourselves. We don’t lose our kindness, compassion and love for others. We use discernment to place our energy in areas of our choosing and have more of it to offer.

Fear becomes less of a command and more of a conversation. We can slow down and hold off on the knee-jerk reactions. We can listen to it and learn from it. We can decide whether it is warning us about danger or inviting us toward something we have not yet experienced. We can choose to explore it and collect the gems of our authentic self along the way.

Over time, we begin to change our relationship with fear and the feelings we have during difficult times and challenges in our lives. As more fear is process, more love flows through and more freedom is felt. We become more aligned with our authentic selves and higher frequencies of energy move through us. This heightened state of living creates new external circumstances and the external experience of our lives begins to match the authentic version of ourselves. We now have a life built around our free expression of self. This is what means to move toward fear and embody freedom.

Freedom Is Not Living Without Fear

Perhaps one of the greatest misunderstandings about freedom is the belief that we need to eliminate fear before we can be free. I don't believe that is possible, necessary, or even desired. Trying to remove fear from our lives is like trying to remove the sign pointing us toward our personal freedom and authentic life and expression.

Fear is part of being human.

There will always be circumstances that make us uncertain. There will always be moments when we don't know what will happen next. We don’t need to build enough courage so that fear can’t be felt. That will only lead to criticizing self for using feelings to guide. Freedom isn't the absence of fear.

Freedom is learning that fear is a sign, not a command.

We can feel fear and remain connected to ourselves. We can listen to fear without surrendering our freedom to it. We can allow fear to communicate something about what we need to learn, heal, understand, or experience. And sometimes, we can let fear guide us toward a part of ourselves that has been waiting on the other side of a familiar wall.

The Journey Toward Wholeness

To become whole is to become healed. And healing doesn't necessarily mean becoming someone new. It can mean becoming more fully who we already are.

We began this Freedom Series by looking back toward the inner child and understanding why some parts of ourselves may have been placed away. We then began recognizing the protective patterns that developed from those early experiences and the identities we built around them.

And now we arrive at a different kind of freedom. We don't have to spend our lives asserting control or building bigger walls to keep fear away. We can learn to recognize when fear is protecting us and when it is restricting us. We can develop safety within ourselves. We can choose to move toward what once felt impossible and discover that there is more of us waiting to be expressed.

The journey isn't about living without fear. It is about learning to live with fear while remaining connected to ourselves and path of healing and self-discovery. It is about moving through the fear toward freedom.

And perhaps, on the other side of that fear, we find what we have really been searching for all along.

Our full, complete, and authentic selves living in freedom.

Continue Your Journey Beyond the Freedom Series

The Freedom Series is an invitation to begin exploring these ideas for yourself.

If something in this journey has resonated with you, you may wish to continue through the Freedom Series Workshop, where the ideas of Reflection, Healing, and Embodiment become an experiential process.

You can also explore the accompanying healing experiences and videos as you continue your own journey toward healing, self-discovery, peace, and freedom.

Experience It: Let Your Fear Guide You Back to Freedom →
Explore the accompanying healing experience on YouTube.

Go Deeper: Freedom Series Workshop →
Experience the complete Reflection | Healing | Embodiment journey through the Freedom Series workshop.