A safe and easy exercise to help you access your fear
For this exercise, you’ll need a quiet place where you can sit or stand comfortably.
When you’ve found your quiet place, lean your body forward a little bit, and try to hear the quietest sound in your area. Keep your shoulders down and away from your ears; good posture helps your hearing.
You can also open your mouth a little (relaxing your jaw creates more space in your ears) and gently move your head around as you pinpoint the quietest sound and filter out the more obvious ones. Keep your eyes open, but rely on your ears for now.
When you’ve located your quiet sound, hold still for a moment. Stand up and try to locate the sound with your eyes, then move toward it – recalibrating as you near your sound. Time may seem to slow down somewhat, your skin may feel more sensitive (almost as if it’s sensing the air around you), and your mind may clear itself of anything that isn’t related to your quiet sound.
When you pinpoint the sound, thank the emotion that helped you find it. Thank your fear!
Fear is your instincts and intuition
Surprising, isn’t it? Your soft-level fear is nothing more or less than your instincts and your intuition. When you need it to, your fear focuses you and all of your senses, it scans your environment and your stored memories, and it increases your ability to respond effectively to new or changing situations.
When your fear flows nicely, you’ll feel focused, centered, capable, and agile. Thank your fear.
Your fear brings you instincts, intuition, and focus. If you can rely upon this soft form of fear when you’re confused or upset, you can access the information you need to calmly figure out what’s going on.
You don’t need to feel afraid to access the gifts of your fear
You don’t need to be in the obvious or intensified state of any emotion in order to access its gifts!
This is one of the specific things I’ve brought to the understanding of emotions, which is that all emotions flow in many different levels of intensity in every waking moment, though most of us can’t identify our emotions until they become obvious or intense (see Bringing nuance to your emotional life).
Your soft and subtle fear brings you focus, instincts, and intuition. It’s a lot like curiosity when it’s at this level. Fear hones your senses, alerts your innate survival skills, and increases your ability to respond effectively to new or changing environments.
When your fear flows freely, you’ll feel focused, centered, capable, and agile. Thank you, fear!
Learning to identify your fear
You can learn to identify your fear when it’s in a soft state. For instance, when you’re driving and checking both rear-view mirrors, easing out of the way of slowed or speeding cars, signaling your intentions, and making eye contact with other drivers – your soft fear is at work.
Your instincts are fully engaged, you’re constantly scanning your changing environment for change, novelty, and possible hazards, and you’re acting in a way that increases your likelihood of arriving at your destination in one piece.
When this subtle level of fear flows through you, it makes you focused, lucid, and able to respond effectively to your environment. If you should come upon something startling or hazardous, your focus and readiness will allow you to act in ways that protect you and the people around you.
Fear in its flowing state is your constant, helpful companion
Your fear supports you at all times – not just in potentially endangering situations like driving, but in all situations.
Your entire being is engaged and focused, you’re scanning through significant amounts of information, altering your behavior in response to changing demands, interacting with many people, machines, and processes in unique ways, and ensuring that your business (and therefore your financial survival) will continue to thrive and respond healthfully to changing market conditions.
When fear flows freely throughout your psyche, you become competent, capable, and intelligent in every area of your life. Fear gives you the capacity to identify, sort, translate, understand, and act upon the emotional and physical cues you pick up.
Your fear will make you intuitive, agile, balanced, and safe – not because you meekly tiptoe through life to avoid all possible dangers, but because you can trust yourself, your instincts, and your resourcefulness in each moment.
If you’re generally capable, naturally intuitive, and focused, you’re actually already connected to your soft and subtle fear (even though you may not think of yourself as fearful).
All you need to do now is to name your fear as itself, welcome it, and thank it for all its help.
Thank you, fear!
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