Is Anxiety a Gift?
If you’ve been living on planet earth these last few “interesting” years, it’s safe to assume you have been riding a rollercoaster of justifiable anxiety. A global pandemic, a brutal coup, two endless wars, the loss of female reproductive rights, (and of course) the upcoming presidential election along with an assassination attempt, just to name a few.
This unprecedented universal shake up has been unnerving to say the least.
Perhaps you’re participating in various numbing strategies, ways to sooth that gut-wrenching, perpetual angst. Are you curled up in fetal position binge-watching Netflix? Scrolling social media posts while downing chocolate chip cookies by the handful?
Have any of those tactics worked for more than a minute? Or at all? Maybe not.
As humans, we grapple with various degrees of anxiety daily. We give it different labels: Concern, nervousness, apprehension, trepidation, worry. It’s a collective experience, a perpetual, uncomfortable, front row seat waiting to see what might happen next.
Anxiety is actually a softer euphemism for fear, what you are really feeling. Calling it anxiety makes it sound more palatable, safer, less personal, more clinical.
Fear of Fear
So, why is feeling fear, or admitting we are afraid, so scary?
As a child you may have received repeated messages giving fear a bad rap. Feeling fear means you are weak; don’t ever admit you are afraid; fear is for cowards. You learned that fear is to be resisted and conquered, not felt and embraced.
Those notions were instilled by people who had mastered ways to suppress and deny their own fear. They were brought up memorizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s commandment that “The only thing to fear is fear itself.
Your fear response is a primitive built-in tool for survival. Automatic default reactions of shock, withdraw and defend are imprinted permanently on the hard drive of your mind no matter how evolved or rational you become.
Fear’s job description is messaging you to fight, flee or freeze which came in handy back in cave-dwelling times. Now, with fewer dinosaur attacks to be concerned with, you are probably not faced with as many blatant, life-threatening situations. But that doesn’t matter to your fear-based Operating System. It’s on high alert, triggered to be on the lookout for any degree of threat.
Especially now with so much of it in your face.
These past years of uncertainty have caused this default survival mechanism to be perceiving danger everywhere. It’s thrust into hyperdrive daily, equally as strong as your desire to suppress, deny and numb to your fears.
Bravely facing your fears is vital. That can help you realize there is nothing to be afraid of and that you can handle more than you thought. You learned to rip off that band aid and survive, after all.
Feeling Fear
Since you probably have lots of fear about fear, are you allowing yourself to feel it or just tuck it away? Are you deadening to it in some way or allowing it to be present? Are you honestly feeling the fear and doing it anyway, as the saying goes, or faking it hoping no one catches on?
Perhaps the biggest lesson presented during this unprecedented time is to get in touch with fears. Not just allowing those feelings to arise but locating their subconscious triggered sources. Not so you can wallow in fear, rather so you can rise above it since you can only heal what you feel.
In other words, it is possible to change your programming about fear.
Not by suppressing it (“Everything will be just fine!”), acting-as-if (“Look at me, I’m so happy!”), using spiritual bypass clichés (“Everything happens for a reason!"), or dulling it (“Another martini, please!”).
Rather, you can choose to mindfully observe and feel fear without pushing it into a corner.
Recognizing fear allows you to be the compassionate adult for your frightened inner child and then see what it’s really about. Then, you can make other, wiser, calmer, more intuitive choices.
Another fear tactic is allowing yourself to verbally express about it, getting it all out. Choose someone who will listen compassionately, not try to fix you, save you, or tell you not to feel that way. Doing this instantly releases that angsty energy of fear since it just wants to be recognized and heard.
Simultaneously, don’t buy into or believe those chattering fears; that only makes them stronger.
Repeat this mantra: It’s just fear, False Evidence Appearing Real. It’s just your primitive survival mechanism temporarily running your show.
Even with all the drama going on far and wide, fear is still trying to show you a trigger of something unhealed from your past. By feeling and understanding what it shows you, you are brought into the present moment. Listen to its wake-up-call messages and you can receive wise lessons and intuitive guidance. Not only for yourself, but for the planet.
So, be grateful for your fear. Maybe even love it. It’s a gift from your soul trying to help you evolve by accepting unpredictability, riding the perpetual adventure called living. It is also assisting you in waking up your subconscious past, cleaning things up and discovering your unique life purpose.
Keep in mind that unrecognized, unacknowledged fear can turn into despair, which is not an option during these extraordinary times. You are here to help usher in this global transformation, one fear at a time.
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Ready to explore who you are and what you are here to do? Reach out to Royce at Royce@RoyceMorales.com website is www.RoyceMorales.com.
Royce Morales is a renowned trailblazer, creator of Perfect Life Awakening, an innovative, spiritually based approach to inner transformation. Her program emerged from a lifetime of frustration searching for inner work that worked. She discovered that by locating subconscious origins of self-sabotage, from this or prior lives, neutralizing their negative influence, life can shift.
The Perfect Life Awakening courses take place remotely and are presented in small groups to provide individual attention. Royce offers private inner discovery sessions to facilitate deeper work, utilizing her proprietary spiritual clearing technique called Spiritual Cognition Integration.
Royce is the author of three books about her teachings: Want – True Love, Past Lives and Other Complications; Know: A Spiritual Wake-up Call and Back: Rebirth After Stroke, all available on Amazon.
Royce hosts “The Perfect Life Awakening Show” on Wednesdays at 9:00 a.m. PST on Om Times Media. The Perfect Life Awakening Show on Om Times Media