Fear On The Path Of Awakening

Fear is an emotion I've been working with for a couple of years now. I hardly hear anyone who's on a path of deep awakening and transformation, talk about this phase of healing.

Today I felt like coming back to my blog to write about it, perhaps more for me to help make sense of it myself and maybe it helps you in some way as well.

Fear is a tricky emotion. This is what Ive come to realise these last couple of years.

It can be convinced it isn't fear. It can convince that it knows the right thing to do. It can even be convinced that there is nothing you can do about feeling the fear as well.

Ive experienced all of these things and more.

After a few years of healing grief, sadness, and all other types of painful experiences....it was like fear was just waiting there underneath. And I came to realise that I was not good at detecting the many flavours of fear, and being able to just "be" with it, like all of my other emotions.

So I had a crash course in fear. It was like my soul had decided that it was time to shift my relationship and perspective on fear, and face them all one by one. Starting with mysterious physical ailments. Not entirely painful, but disturbing enough for me to have panic attacks and start to fear that my life might be heading down a very hard road. Harder than what I had already experienced. That also triggered a lot of fears about my path, my future, past regrets, the things Ive put my body through, and so on a so forth. At some point I thought I was losing my mind and I'll never come out of this.

Then this spiralled into more fear, about never having the life I thought I was creating through my healing. This fear was convincing me my healing wasn't "working", that nothing in my life was changing...that things were getting worse. And ultimately that Ive made the wrong choices.

It was A LOT.

Then came more fears when I moved to my hometown to help look after my aging mother. The fears got bigger and louder. Now more layers came up regarding my mother dying eventually....the fears I have within my family dynamics...and the fear that this will be me for the rest of my life.

And I felt STUCK. Stuck in a compounding situation of stress, fear, depression, hopelessness, and deep deep powerlessness.

I collapsed many times, but the more challenging times were when I genuinely felt and knew...I couldn't collapse....I had no support to do so. I had nothing to fall back on. There was no one to help me or catch me...because I was in the position of having to be that for my mum.

Thinking back on to that now....it seriously was like one of my nightmares. That I wasn't able to hold it all together and no matter where I turned, I couldn't get the reprieve I so needed. Every avenue looked bad for me. If I looked after my mum, I became exhausted easily and had no time to look after myself. If I didn't help her, something would happen to her and I got family projections on top of that. If I asked for a break, I got more projections and guilt trips. All the while Im in my secret hell of fear that I had already been trying to deal with, and I got no relief.

Many times I snapped and "lost it". I screamed in the granny flat when I had time to do some healing. I was in deep anguish and I couldn't, for the life of me, explain what I was going through to anyone. I felt utterly alone, abandoned by spirit, and my soul. And I went into a deep spiritual disillusionment.

This will sound spiritually cliche, but I know, somewhere in my being, that I was being led (and still am) to Surrender more deeply and find a true state of Trust in my path.

Because if I am to be really honest. Im afraid of surrendering that much. Of trusting again...that MUCH.

Trusting that I'll be taken care of. Trusting that things will work out the best way. Trusting I AM deeply loved by my soul and spirit. Trusting I do have power somehow, in someway.

Trusting in the knowing. Trusting in the power of healing. Trusting this is all heading somewhere magnificent. Trusting I am connected, and I will experience love again.

And not to just know this in my head. But my whole being. An embodied sense of Trust.

Once I stopped resisting the feeling of fear, and recognised that is was safe and ok to just feel it. And that was all that was required, (with the help of other healers and spiritual teachers of course!), I started to shift my perspective and relationship with my fear. I had to start owning that fear was a part of my power (like all emotions), and that it had a purpose for me. I had to recognise that I was allowing fear to dictate a lot of what I was deciding to do or not deciding to do. That fear had a powerful hold on my life, and that resisting the fear, or believing in it 100%, was what I needed to let go of first. And boy that hasn't been easy.

You see I had made a deep decision to align with love and act from that alignment. I no longer wanted to do things because or out of fear anymore. I wanted to live from a place of genuine love inside of me. That is the most important thing that has come from my awakening. And so I see now, that I had to, at some point, take responsibility for the energy of fear inside of me. And to no longer be afraid of it.

And that is what I am doing now. As challenging as that is.