Butterflies: To Harness and Ride

From Lissa Rankin's The Fear Cure:

99% of fears are false fears that exist solely in the imagination where there’s no real threat. False fears trigger the fight-or-flight stress response unnecessarily, which not only disables the body’s natural self-healing mechanisms and predisposes us to illness – it also limits our capacity to step fully into our life’s purpose, when our radiance, talents, love, brilliance, and creativity are desperately needed in a world that needs all hands on deck as we collectively wake up.

When you think a fearful thought, how does your body feel? Do you feel relaxed and grounded when you think the thought? Or do you feel tightness in your chest or gripping in your solar plexus? Intuition (one form of true fear) tends to come with a very relaxed physical feeling, accompanied by a sense of direct knowing, whereas false fear tends to feel tense in a body and panicky in the mind.

True fear is here to protect you, and even false fear is something to be grateful for. I think of false fear as the finger pointing towards everything in need of healing in your life. Physical therapist Val Zajicek defines “PAIN” as Pay Attention Inside Now, and I think false fear is just such a pain, an uncomfortable emotion that invites us to Pay Attention Inside Now.

Common fear-inducing beliefs in Western Culture and 

Possible Brave New Belief alternatives:

• Uncertainty is unsafe (so I have to do everything I can to control my life)
• Uncertainty is the gateway to possibility (when we don’t know what the future holds, ANYTHING could happen! Exciting!)
• I can’t handle losing what I cherish (so I have to protect myself from loss)
• Loss is natural and can lead to growth (sometimes loss breaks us open to our true selves and opens our hearts to how fully we can love)
• It’s a hostile universe (so I’d better be on guard)
• It’s a purposeful universe (we may not understand why bad things happen to good people, but we can learn to trust that we’re always learning to be more resilient, even when we’re hurting)
• I am all alone (in a hostile, uncertain world where I might lose what I cherish)
• We are all One (mystics and sages have been saying it for years, but there’s actually evidence that we are all interconnected in ways science is only now beginning to be able to measure)

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The most important decision we make
is whether we believe
we live in a friendly
or hostile universe.
~ Albert Einstein

If only we learned how to harness and ride rather than hunt and kill the butterflies that live in the gut of every person who strives to create something extraordinary from nothing.

~ Jonathan Fields

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