One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
What’s your deepest fear? Losing all your money, the loss of a family member, disability, death?
Everyone is one phone call or breaking news message away from dropping into fight, flight or freeze mode. Yes, fear is a motivator and it’s vital to keeping us safe. Yet chronic fear or anxiety results in energy being trapped in our first couple of chakras (energy centers of our body), causing us to cease being fully resourceful, creative and able to see the big picture.
Fear is Calling, Answer the Phone
The early stage of a potential pandemic is an excellent time to test your emotional intelligence. Like any emotion, fear is like a ringing phone. Feeling fear is our psyche’s way of trying to get our attention. Our emotions can be very effective at pointing us to useful information. Unfortunately, most people are conditioned to either to ignore or obsess about the ringing and forget to answer the phone.
Now is an excellent time to get into the right relationship with fear. Ask yourself: What am I reacting to? What’s fact? What’s distortion and projection? What are my feelings trying to tell me?
Accessing Your Higher Self
Now is an excellent time to access that part of you that can put your fear into context. The part of you that can answer the ringing phone and explore just what it is that you’re afraid of. There is an inner sovereign part of you that can self-soothe, that sees the big picture, that can tap your courage (not suppressing or denying fear but experiencing it and using it as a guide), that understands the interconnection among everything in a system, and can feel grateful at the same time you feel fearful.
Now is an excellent time to lead from this strong, enlightened place in your center. Last week I felt embarrassed when I realized how initially fearful and then confident I felt about how mild my symptoms might be if I picked up COVID-19. I forgot about my responsibility to not risk spreading the darn thing to others, especially someone who could die from it. Fear had me focused solely on my self-preservation.
Pain is Inevitable
Whether it hits our health, financial capacity, family or community, there are times that we will be unable to buy, work, vote, litigate, or talk our way out of something. It’s what we do during these periods of no escape and no control that transform us while we call on a capability deep inside us. Now is an excellent time to lean into your angst, to let it liberate you from unhealthy fear.
You Got This
I don’t know your situation, life may already be plenty scary and painful, or you may have been blessed with a smooth road. But I do know that now is an excellent time to pull up the strength and wisdom of your inner king or inner queen and operate from a higher place within you; it’s the most useful tool you have when life feels out of your control. Those around you don’t need more fear. They may need more compassion and support. They need visionaries who see the long-term, big picture.
Now is an excellent time to stay present and not just accept reality but agree to face it. It’s also an excellent time for your grounding practices. Yoga, walking your dog, meditating, journaling, gratitude practice, praying, connecting, conscious breathing will keep you resourceful and awake to take the action you need to.
Now is always an excellent time, it’s the only time we have.