Subtle Fears Do The Most Damage

I've worked with a lot of beautiful souls over the years and one thing that every client has struggled with is fear. It is so prevalent that I'm thinking it must be part of the human experience.

You're in line to incarnate onto Earth? Hold up while we install the fear program.

I think there are many reasons for this fear - eons of planetary programming, hierarchy, manipulated belief systems ... to name a few. Fear is a very powerful emotion, one that has been used to rule and control humans for millennia.

This collective-level programming trickles down to the individual level where it is compounded with the addition of ancestral conditioning, societal programming, and more.

Is it any surprise, then, that so many of us walk around with fear running through our system?

People sometimes scoff at the suggestion that they have unresolved fear. They downplay it, deny it, shake their head, or flat out reject the idea. This is part of what makes it so insidious: no one wants to look at it.

So, let's pull the covers back, shall we?

Fear comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it seems reasonable, other times it seems completely bonkers. It can be loud and in your face, or it can be quiet and running in the background. The fears that present as outright terror are easy to deal with - maybe not in the moment, but they're easy to recognize afterward, and usually easy to understand where they come from.

It's the subtle fears that are the tricky ones. The refusal to stand up to your overbearing boss. The anxiety that spikes when you're asked to change your routine. The dread you feel when you're invited to a gathering with people you no longer resonate with. The irritation you feel when you get taken advantage of and you let it slide.

These quiet fears are the ones we push aside, bury deep within, or tell ourselves we'll deal with later. We cope, we adapt, we manage ... anything to keep from facing them.

But the truth is that the fear doesn't go away just because we don't look at it. It festers. It grows in size and strength. It manifests as constant sinus issues, or as an irritable bowel, or as frequent migraines.

It's the quiet fears that do the most damage. These are the fears that silently alter our behavior, inform our decisions, and limit our experiences. These fears: 

• Keep us from speaking up, from declaring our needs and desires.

• Keep us in a relationship past its expiration date.

• Keep us at a soul-sucking job.

• Make us stay hidden in the background and playing small.

• Make us give up on our dreams and pretend they weren't really that important.

If fear impacts us in all these ways, you'd think we'd want to look at it, right? We don't pause to examine our fears for a variety of reasons ... we don't know how, confronting something that we can't name is scary, we think it makes us appear weak to admit we're afraid, we have avoided it for so long that we've convinced ourselves it's no longer there.

The truth is that these are just stories we tell ourselves.

Here's another truth:  The fear itself is also a story.

The emotions generated by the fear are real - all emotions are valid. But it's the part that's underneath the fear that needs to be looked at and seen for what it is: a story.

Stories create familiarity, routine, patterns. They help us make sense of the unknown, and we find comfort in this. 

But the trick  is to be able to recognize that it's a story ... a story that usually has something underneath - a belief that you're not good enough, or that you don't matter, or that you can't succeed on your own, or that there's something wrong with you.

We get so used to living with the story - and the fear - that we forget we have a choice. 

A story can be unwound; it can be dropped. Pause and ask yourself if the story is serving you. If the answer is NO, are you ready to look at it?

You have a choice: you can continue living in the cycle of fear, or you can choose to release the stories that feed the fear.

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is permission to let go. There is so much that awaits you on the other side of fear.

If you'd like some support with releasing your fears, I can help. I've been supporting women for more than 10 years in navigating fear to a place of deep healing, rebirth, and peace. I'd love to have a conversation to see if we're a good fit for working together. You can book your Reclaim Your Inner Magic discovery call HERE.

xo, Mitzi