The law of attraction has been bringing me many opportunities lately to work with and communicate with people in a lot of fear.
I am myself a person who still has many (many) fears.
But in recent time I have been dealing with people who have somewhat different fears to my own or in situations that I don’t find as scary as they do. This has been an immense gift as it has allowed me to see what it must be like for people around me when I resist experiencing my fears and instead live in them and let them direct my thinking and actions.
I have been given insights into just how damaging living in fear really is and how much fear impairs our perceptions of reality.
I wrote a note to a friend about some of this and I thought others might find it useful as a tool for their own self-reflection.
Dear Sister,
I think that the major lesson or emotion I would encourage you towards is to see how much you feel controlled and pushed when a situation is simply triggering one or more of your fears.
Often the communication or events that are triggering your fears are not controlling or bullying but you feel that they are. This happens because you are resisting your fear. Internally you still believe that feeling fear is ‘impossible’ so you interpret that the person or event is being unreasonable and ‘pushing’ you toward something that is crazy and unloving. In reality they are often just being logical or direct.
I’ve noticed this dynamic in my own life a lot. That is, how I often feel pressured or controlled when fear is triggered. If I allow myself to soften to fear or sometimes even just recognise the fear, I see things far more clearly. Feeling and releasing our fears is definitely the best and most loving thing we can do. It allows us to see reality, not just interpret events through our investment in avoiding fear.
Love,
Mary
Notes Along The Way 
Thanks for sharing Mary because I have had some significant experiences in allowing myself to feel fear in the last couple of weeks. I never knew why I became so angry and mentally distressed during my period ever since I was younger…until I allowed myself to feel the physical pain of it for the first time in 22 years two weeks ago. I decided to not take any pain killers and sit with the pain. When I did that I felt a crippling fear come over me and for the first time, yes things did become so clear to me about what is was that I really needed to feel about. I realised that my anger was because I wasn’t letting myself feel the fear, and my fear was capping the grief of my causal emotional injury. It lasted for 24hrs and then finally I was able to feel some of the grief. Its not finished yet tho but I learnt so much from that one experience about how powerful it is to let yourself feel the fear and the positive that can come from it. It was a small shift but things are moving at least and I do recognise each day that there are more fears to face that Im not willing to just yet. One day at a time ….
Thanks Mary for this note, I am more motivated about feeling fear, than I ever was, I think, but I don’t love it yet by far. So in your note, you mean that, let’s say I, would feel angry towards the person who is actually wanting to help me, just because their advise or help seem to be overly challenging for me? It happens to me a lot!
I believe I feel some degree of this level of resistance every time when a feeling of fear is stirred up even a little in me. However I recognise I feel like this a lot, when I am actually paralysed by terror. So my body is locked up and I have no ability to think (even for just a moment), so seems like no suggestion could help me in that moment, or that I could even hear a suggestion, you have mentioned that being in that state isn’t feeling the fear, so I am still to discover how in that very moment to come to be feeling the feeling instead if being locked up in it. Funny the picture at the end, as it is exactly what happens with me when I am in fear, plus lots of sweating :-Z
Yes Lena I see that people often feel angry towards a person who is just trying to point out something logical, loving or reasonable simply because they feel a ‘pressure’. A lot of times what they perceive as ‘pressure’ is their resistance to the fear that is being triggered by the suggestion. Truth is always trying to expose error and when we resist this we can feel that someone or something is trying to push us – when it is really just the natural working of truth upon our soul that we are resisting.
People feel controlled just learning about God’s Laws – which is kind of crazy because all of God’s Laws are Loving and designed to foster our growth. But growth means moving towards our fears (instead of living in them) and when people have the false belief that feeling fear is unloving or unreasonable they then feel that God is trying to control them somehow. There is probably lots more I could say about this 🙂 perhaps I’ll leave it for another post.
Also, I plan to write a post about the second question you asked regarding surrender to terror as opposed to freezing-up in it.
Thanks for engaging – I love how you have been looking more honestly at your fears this past year. I’ve seen a change in you sister. xo
Yes, I have felt the resistance to submitting to my fealings which were there as truth was coming in, and have felt the pressure to either to submit to the feeling or fight it. So I completely hear what you mean. I know now I do this to myself, along with this interesting quality the Truth has when it rubs our souls hehe
Since my last post I’ve had every night terror, so I have been experimenting, and found that while every time in the past I woke up froze in it, and I was also semi back in my body, and what felt like, I had little control of the terror. So I have forced myself to come back fully into my body last time, and really desired to connect to the feeling of terror instead if being init, and somehow I came out of the freeze and was more connected to the feeling of it instead. Wooahh I thought, I got so excited!! Not sure if this is the way, but the following 2 nights after, I haven’t had the terror 🙂 (:
Thanks again Mary, I would love to hear what you have to share about the terror and freeze and the workings of truth on the soul!! x
this is the perfect thing for me to read this morning as I have just received guidance to go TOWARDS something that I have been resisting. I was resisting for the very reason you mentioned…I felt controlled, bullied, pushed…but as I sat with it I saw it was just my FEAR getting triggered, irrational fear. The thing to do now is the “Opposite Action,” go INTO the situation which I fear and sit directly IN it. See that it is only fear and I have no reason to fear the situation (which is, truly, benign…if you knew what I was avoiding you would laugh 😉 ) This is the only way to true Freedom.
thank you Mary!
Love from the USA
As a child, I was overwhelmed emotionally as I listened to my father speak in his “my way or the highway” opinionated way. The tone coming alongside his words was a very condescending one…anyone thinking differently is an idiot kind of thing. As a result of fearing being swallowed, overpowered, and ridiculed I shut down my own thoughts and feelings being expressed and usually left the room to get further away from how awful/scared I felt being in his presence. It is true now, that as I find myself in this type of conversation, I must face my fears of being willing to speak up. Will I be shamed, controlled, punished, disapproved of, ignored, treated as invisible, ridiculed? These are my childhood fears needing to be felt in the moment of feeling bullied or demanded from in the conversation. I have come to understand that I have been conditioned to live within a status of inequality from watching my mother and father’s relationship (more like a master/slave relationship). As I feel my own fears and share my own thoughts and feelings anyway, I find this may trigger the concepts of the male who I am speaking with. Without saying a word, I feel the presence of many saying “Keep your mouth shut.” Because I feel that withholding/shutting down from sharing my own thoughts/feelings freely is lying(my addiction learned during childhood), I am being challenged to work through the master/slave mentality of relating and all of my fears that come with that.
Thank you.
Hello, Mary, I have been keenly observant of your words, I find them to be poetic in their nature, as if your life itself was a poem. Not many can say that they’ve lived an interesting life, which yours is.
Hi Mary, For me I have found to feel it has not been enough,I then face it, by going and facing the fear, usually with a situation,, I experience not only the fear, but is it really true, as I experience this truth, then what the fear holds me away from starts to reveal itself. Russell
Hi Russ, I think the key thing is being willing to feel fear. When we are willing to feel it then we don’t avoid situations where it may be triggered.
I agree that sometimes it is possible to put ourselves in situations that we fear and to release fear that way but it does (crucially) require humility to that certain fear. Otherwise we just enter these situations and rigidly ‘survive’ them, no fear is actually released meaning that afterwards the fear is still within us.
Love to you and Kat,
Mary
Hi Mary
I’d love to hear more about what you have to say about softening into fear, which I think from what you said is the difference between surviving the fear experience that has been triggered, and actually releasing it. Every time I experiment with softening into fear, or pray to God to help me get deeper, I pretty much immediately start crying… and then I get concerned that I am crying about the effect of how afraid I am, or how bad the experience is that has triggered it, rather than getting into deep childhood stuff.
I expect that I’m trying to be too intellectual with the process again but I wondered if you had any tips about the difference between the two i.e. softening into fear vs. crying about the effect of the fear?
Thanks mate
Love
Luli
Hi Luster,
I’ll do my best to write more about this! As you know I am still getting used to this fear processing again myself.
One thing I would point out is that in my experience, in order to fully surrender to an emotion – which is what is needed to release it – we must allow the emotion to take the lead, ahead of our intellect. This means just FEELING without a lot of involved thought at the same time, in fact it almost feels like no thought.
While we are still intellectually analysing, or in your case, it sounds like worrying about the process, we can’t actually release anything since we are still living in fear about the actual process we are engaging.
The best and most accurate analysis comes AFTER we have allowed the emotion to overwhelm us. Then we will know for ourselves what it was we actually connected to. And if you find that you didn’t actually experience fear, but were just feeling distressed about what might happen when you actually surrender to fear, then that’s OK too. Since that is just another emotion that can leave you if you let it overwhelm you. Remember our blocks are all emotional, so we will have to release them through the same process as our causal emotions i.e. by allowing them to flow out of us as emotional experiences.
It sounds like you are stuck in the cycle of ‘trying to get it right’, rather than just allowing yourself your own experience. This is a fear in itself, so perhaps it would be good to explore that fear emotionally. Let yourself feel that you AREN’T getting it and have a good cry about that?
When we want a lot of reassurance about our progress (as you and I are prone to want at various times – not in this comment but just, you know, at other times) we are acting in addiction. This addiction is usually in place because we have a lot of fear about the alternative i.e. that we aren’t progressing. We need to discover EMOTIONALLY why we fear this. It is a fear in this case and not a sincere desire.
I emphasize that the discovery must be EMOTIONAL because you have a brawny brain (smile) that can figure things out pretty quickly – but when it comes to unfelt emotions doesn’t always get it right – and even if it does this intellectual awareness doesn’t take the place (as you know) of connecting to the reasons emotionally.
Anyway – hopefully there will be more to come from me on fear and softening to it over the coming months….
Love you,
Mary
Thank you. xx
Thanks for this asking this question Luli, and for your answer Mary!
As someone who likes to live in my intellect and ‘am I doing it right?’/wanting reassurance addict this was really helpful. Thanks.
I also have a fabulous image of a ‘brawny brain’…smile
Love
E
p.s. Luster, I think that I need to add here that when we do release fear its not uncommon to cry. I think its easy to get caught up in thinking that fear release has to be shaking and while I definitely feel that is a part of it some of the only times I think I’ve actually released fear in this life I have been crying.
(It might have been easier to say that in the first place rather than my long response above!)
Sorry about that,
M xo
Hmm yes I have had some experiences of crying and feeling terrified at the same time, when I have felt the age I was as a child and at the same have remembered the events or projections from my parents that created my fear and grief. After that I have felt different and things have changed, so I think I know what you mean there.
However there seems to me to be an area in between the fear getting exposed by an event and that childhood place. The feelings in that area range from feeling uneasy/unrelaxed/stressed/panicked/shaking to convulsing etc, and I’m not sure which of those are living in fear and which are releasing it.
I’ll try to put together some general questions for your FAQ sessions about that.
THANK YOU BOTH for doing an FAQ on this.
Love
Luli