How do you view change? Do you see it as frightening or as an inherent part of life?
If you have a lot of fear within you then you won’t like change, you will try to create a world around you that is very predictable, controllable, and definable.
Most people go around day to day with an internal check list of what is desirable and undesirable in their lives. They look for things that are good and actively try to avoid things that are bad.
This stems from our survival instinct. If your basic needs of food, shelter, and survival are met then this instinct will transition to psychological things.
When someone yells in your face and you feel your heart pumping and your body either collapsing into itself or posturing up in to fight back, this is a reaction to protect yourself.
The same forces that cause a deer to run away or a dog to bite are active in you, except we do it internally since it’s not socially acceptable to physically run away into the woods or punch someone in the face.
There are things that cause this reaction in us, and we go around day to day protecting ourselves from them in order to avoid opening those wounds.
You will hear things like “you know we don’t talk about that around your father”. In this case, the father’s inability to see and face his own fear is forcing everyone around him to work around it.
Your survival instinct wants you to be okay, all your preferences for what’s desirable or undesirable, good or evil come from this.
The choice you have is to either protect the blockages within you by trying to arrange the external world so it never touches them or work through them so you can just live your life.
To illustrate, let’s imagine you have a big thorn in your arm. It’s deep enough that it touches a nerve so whenever it’s even slightly grazed you feel a searing pain.
Because of it you can’t sleep comfortably, you can’t move around comfortably, and you spend all your energy making sure nothing ever touches it.
Instead of removing it and working to heal the wound most people simply try to change the external environment so that the thorn is never stimulated.
This takes tremendous effort, but if we dedicate enough energy to it we may delude ourselves and think that we have the thorn under control.
But the opposite is true, everything you do revolves around that particular thorn and you try to control the world and other people so they don’t ever hit it.
As you grow you will learn that your attempt to protect yourself from your problems actually creates more problems.
If you try to arrange the external world to fit how your fear wants it to be then it will always feel like the world is working against you. You’ll be so busy trying to control life that you won’t be able to live life.
Think about the inner thorns you have in your psyche: your insecurities, traumas, fears. When one of these is stimulated, you will feel your physiology change, maybe you’ll get a hollow sensation in your stomach or you heart will come up to your throat.
We don’t notice these unless it gets worse than usual but this is our default state. We are constantly trying to stop suffering right now, suffering about what happened in the past, or worrying about potential suffering in the future.
If you have a fear rejection you will try to manipulate the world to avoid the pain of rejection. You will avoid doing things that you think other people will reject and try to do the things that you think other people will approve of.
We don’t even notice it, but this is a cage of our own making. The bars of our cage are made from our fear and the cage expands or contracts depending on the limits of our comfort zone.
The second we hit that boundary our psyche will resist and everything in our bodies will be pushing us to run away to safety and protect ourselves.
To end our default state of fear and suffering we must first realize that it is happening. Then we must realize that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Inner sensitivity is a symptom of being unwell. Just as your body will let you know when something is wrong through pain, your psyche will let you know something is wrong through fear or discomfort.
When our bodies run a fever to get rid of an illness, it is in our best interest to allow it to do what it needs to do instead of taking medicine to suppress it.
Likewise, you don’t have to fight against the fear or discomfort when they come up, you just have to resist the urge to push them back down.
When you have a reaction observe it and ask yourself why did this particular thing trigger me?
Reframe the discomfort as healing the pain. It is being processed and purified within you so you can learn to move past it.
Awareness and surrender to the experience alone will allow these inner thorns to work through you and dissipate by themselves when it’s time.
It doesn’t happen all at once so be patient. Pushing yourself to sit with it just a bit further each time as you get accustomed to the discomfort will allow it to eventually flow through you completely.
The emotion of fear will never go away as long as you continue to grow, but this is a journey of going exactly where you’ve been trying not to go. The things you most fear can become your super power if you are able to move past them.
By doing this you will learn that facing your fear head on is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.
You will learn to flow with life instead of against it and see that the only limits in your life are those you created for yourself.
The JJ Experiment 