Moving Through Fear
How to Soften Resistance and Return to Trust
Fear is not your enemy; it’s the part of you that still believes safety lives in the past and familiarity. Its purpose isn’t to stop you, but to remind you that you’re expanding beyond what you’ve known. The goal of this entry is not to conquer fear, but to not allow it to stop your movement towards your desires and best possible life.
How do you move forward in surrender when your body and nervous system signal to retreat?
It is not fear that we are concerned with, but rather the unnamed fear. The automatic fear that decides before we even realize that progress has stalled, dreams have been diverted or lessened.
Recognizing the Signs of Fear
Fear is quite adept at hiding in logical, reasonable behavior. It might create a series of “what if” scenarios in the name of covering every possible scenario, when in fact the numerous potential problems stall momentum. Alternatively, fear might lead to hyper-analysis, evaluating every possible solution's facts, data, and statistics, which in turn creates subtle analysis paralysis.
At times, the mind stops progress by rolling historical footage of every time you started something and it didn't pan out. Each website, decision, and collaboration that led to frustration or failure is a critical point to examine. When, actually, it is just an excuse to return to familiarity. The mind is comfortable in your current identity because it has confused familiarity with safety. And as a warning to your system, the body responds with a dysregulated nervous system that feels uncomfortable.
Soothe the Body, Acknowledge the Fear
By acknowledging the fear, you reclaim power over your actions. The fear loses its grip, and if progress is still stalling, it may be a sign that outdated programming in the mind needs to be acknowledged.
When soothing yourself, focus on the body. A relaxed body signals safety to your mind, allowing natural and calm movement. Tasks arrive in your mind like gentle waves, showing that you can create from a sense of safety, even in the presence of fear.
Relaxing the Nervous System:
It is recommended to combine breath, movement, and mindfulness to foster a sense of safety in the body.
Breath: Breathwork [4-7-8 breathing: Inhale for a count of 4, hold for 7, and exhale for 8. ]
Mindfulness: Acknowledge the fear, Meditation, Body Scan [mentally relaxing each part of the body], and/or Presence [observing what you see, smell, hear, and feel around you]
Movement: Slow walks, gentle stretching, yoga
I personally like the mantra “this moment is brand new” to clear out any old stories or programming while deep-breathing. I will follow this practice with gentle stretching to ensure that any emotion is not stored in the body. With a relaxed mind and body, any meditation is enhanced.
The body is always listening. When you regulate your breath and ground your senses, you tell the nervous system, “We are safe now”. From that place of inner safety, intuition becomes audible again. What once sounded like doubt softens into direction.
Connect to Your Future Self
Now that your nervous system is relaxed, your body and mind feel safe to connect to your future. This connection to your inner guidance inspires you to move toward your dream timeline by imagining what your future, authentic self would do with the task at hand.
Soothe the body, and the inner self remembers where it’s going.
Once you feel the breath settle and your awareness returns to stillness, bring your attention to the body of your future self. How does she hold herself? How does the air around her feel? What expression rests naturally on her face?
Moving from your future means going with your gut without overediting your decision. Or speaking from your deep knowing, not from proof or people pleasing. Or even resting when your mind tells you to get up and work.
Every decision you make from this future, relaxed self moves your timeline away from the present one toward the one where your dream life happens.
This process of connecting deep down, despite fear, is the ideal future unfolding piece by piece. There is a timeline where you get everything you want, and understanding that fear is not truth or intuition, but contraction. And when you soothe yourself, body and mind, you can reconnect to your deep inner knowing that all is well.
Moving Past Fear
One of the excellent services that fear provides is the clear identification of our comfort zone. And all that we want in life that we are not currently living is on the other side of this comfort zone. If it weren't on the other side, you would have it.
This means that you are not fighting fear; you are integrating it. When you learn to use fear as a clear indicator of a wall that you need to climb, it can be a friend in its awareness that there is something you believe is creating bricks in the way of your future. Moving over this wall is actually much more straightforward than you might expect. It is not to fight, explain, or even get a ladder. It is to surrender. Surrender to the knowing that you are meant to have the dreams that you do. A trust in yourself that you can hold these dreams elegantly, and that you can allow them into your life.
To further solidify in your mind that you partner with fear, and are not ruled by it, take one action towards your dreams as your future self would. Each time you choose to breathe through fear instead of obeying it, you become the version of yourself who already lives beyond it.
From here, I will not offer a conclusion, but a continuation of two articles that address these next steps perfectly:
