Hey there, Brighid here. And this week is a week where we are focusing on an aspect of healing. Spirit and healing are super connected. And as we move along a path, connecting with spirit, it is inevitable that some of the things that we need to take a look at, come up. Some of the things that need to be healed or reminded of their wholeness are going to come up.
And this post is inspired by one of our members who asked if we could talk about taking risks and overcoming fear. And I think that is such a really good topic. So I wanna focus on that this week.
So if you’re human, you have at some point had a fear that you need to get over. If you’re human, there is some point in your life where you took a risk or didn’t take a risk. And I wanna talk a bit about the risks, why we don’t take them, and the fear that’s connected to the risks that we don’t take.
And I first want to say that there’s a healthy fear, right? Fear that says, don’t do that; you’re gonna get hurt by it. That type of fear, we need that. It’s important to listen to that.
The kind of fear that I’m talking about is not a healthy fear. It’s the fear that comes from anxiety. It’s the fear that comes from a deep place where we are insecure or unsettled about something. And so a fear arises because there’s something deep inside of us that is scared to move. That’s what I wanna talk about.
And so we all have that place inside of us that gets where we get stuck, where we know we wanna move forward, we know we wanna take a risk. We know that by doing it, we’re gonna learn something or get to the next level. But the fear of moving forward is so strong that we can become frozen or paralyzed and in a place of inaction. And so I know that a lot of times we’re told that we need to accept the fear and we need to understand the fear or release the fear. And I feel like it’s super important to acknowledge that releasing the fear is impossible to do unless we acknowledge where the fear comes from and actually spend some time honoring the fear because the fear that you have – the fear of moving forward, the fear of taking risks, the fears that you have – come from a place deep within you where there was pain or where that fear was real. And if we don’t honor that place, it’s really hard to move forward and to create a relationship with the part of yourself that holds the fear, if you’re trying to get rid of it, release it or ignore it.
So, honoring the fear and an easy way to do that is to just when fear comes up, honor that fear, recognize like, ok, I’m afraid and I’m afraid for a reason. I might not know what that reason is. That’s ok. Honor the fact that this comes from a place inside of me where the fear was about a real thing.
I wanna talk about where the fear comes from. Where the fear comes from is often something that happened in our past most of the time when we’re afraid of something. It’s not something that actually is going to happen. It’s something that has happened and we programmed ourselves to remember that it happened and we want to do whatever we can so that it doesn’t happen again. And so what we do is, we start to manage the risks that we take because of the fear that came in a long time ago. So what do we do about that? What can we do about it now?
What we can do about it is we can look back, and trace back to the place where the time in our lives when the fear came, sometimes we have access to that and sometimes we don’t. But if you sit in a quiet space, open up your space with spirit, and take yourself back to a place when the fear came, you will find that there’s a part of you that began to protect yourself from whatever the danger was in your life at that time. And the part of you that protects yourself, that started protecting yourself so long ago, that part of you was given a job and it did its job, it did its job well. The thing about the parts that protect us is that they don’t understand when to stop doing the job. So that part of you that protected you for good reason is still continuing to protect you.
When you want to take a risk and move forward, try something new, go out of your comfort zone, that part of you that started protecting you a long time ago comes up and it says, wait a minute, we cannot have this risk come up. This is too dangerous. Even though the risk to move forward, the risk to take to try something new isn’t really a real danger to it. The protector has perceived danger and will do whatever it can to shut you down and put you in a safe place. So what do we do about that?
The first thing that we need to do is we need to acknowledge that it’s happening. We need to acknowledge that there is a part of us that’s protecting us. When we acknowledge that and realize that there is a part of us that’s doing a job that we no longer need it to do. We can then decide, how do I want to work with that part of me? How do I want to negotiate with that part of me so that I’m able to take risks and not be held by the protections of the past?
So again, I’m gonna go back to honoring, honoring that part of you. You can do that in a meditation. You can do that by writing a letter honoring that part of you that is the protector and saying:
Thank you. I really appreciate that you protected me for all these years. It must have been really challenging to have to, you know, keep everything tight, keep everything safe, keep me safe. I wanna thank you for doing that whether or not, you know what your protector was protecting you from, you can do this.
Doing that is the first piece. The next piece is to let that protector know that you need help. You need its help to move forward because there are things you wanna do, there are things you wanna try. There’s new stuff on the horizon and you need that protector online and onboard to help you experience the new things that you need.
So that is a way to work with the fear and work with overcoming the fear of taking risks. And I wanna share with you a little example of a recent client that I have worked with who was in this type of situation.
She’s been working on herself and wanting to really express her feelings for a while and she finds it really hard to express her feelings. She knows that she feels a certain way because she knows it in here (her mind), but she doesn’t actually feel it in here (her body) and she doesn’t know why she cannot figure out why. And she’s trying. She’s in therapy and she does some self-healing work. She does lots of things to try to figure out why she doesn’t feel. And she asked me to do some shamanic healing work with her.
And what we found, when we did that work, was that she had such a protection in place that the protection that she had, not only was it not allowing people in her life to access her, it was not allowing her to access her own feelings. And so what we did was we did some work to connect her with her younger self. And then she went in and negotiated with the protectors.
She negotiated with the protectors and they told her when and why they came online and started to protect her and she was actually taken aback because she didn’t know that there was a situation that was traumatic that caused them to come online. She viewed the situation as just something that happened, but that was done because they came in to protect her from even feeling the intensity or the feelings in that situation.
So she was being protected from her own feelings. So, as much as she tried and tried to feel and do all the things and eat all the right foods and open her heart. It wasn’t working because her protectors were online. So she found out that information and then began negotiating with that protection with those protectors so that she could move forward in her life and start feeling more.
So that is, I think, a really good example of what happens when we are really protected or protection comes on or into our lives. We create protection when we’re younger for a reason, we grow up or we move forward and our protection doesn’t recognize that we’re actually safe. So we need to do some work with that.
I hope that’s helpful. I’d love to talk more with you about that. Join us in the free online community Awaken Your Medicine. Bring your questions and we’ll talk more.
I hope you have a beautiful day and bye for now.
