POTENTIAL & FEAR
1. What does potential have to do with me?
Potential & Self Expression
Potential is a lovely word. Don’t you think so? It seems so full of promise and possibility. I like it particularly because when I see or use it I am actually thinking of you. Yes, that’s right. You, the person searching for more, or different, or meaning—a place in the world that says, “I was here and it shows!”
How do we live our full-fledged potential? Easy, really, because we can only do it one step at a time and all of us can take one step at a time. And those steps are, yes, you guessed it, choice. See how powerful your power is?
What happens, you might ask, if I make a choice and nothing happens, or I am met with difficulties because of that choice? Ah, the difficulties. And the nothing, that one has seemed even more difficult to me at times.
First of all, there is never a nothing when we choose. But there are what I will call “real” choices and “pretend” choices.
A “real” choice is the one you feel or know all the way to your toes. There is no question; there is no if, only how. When we are ready to choose for real we do not question the consequences, or what it will cost, or whether we can afford it, or if it will rain. We just choose.
If you have been making ends meet all your life and your parents were poorer than church mice and you’ve had enough of that paradigm of reality and choose: “I will have prosperity!” then you don’t care what you thought, what you lived before, what your parents thought, your teachers, the neighbor, my dog. You are not concerned at that point as to how this will happen. All that is important in the choice is that it is being made, that it is certain; it is an absolute. You will have prosperity because when you make this “real” choice you are creating the reality you have chosen.
Pretend choices are more like “If only!” If I had enough money in the bank I would leave my job and exercise, then I would be healthy. Pretend choices are also silently backed by, “Yes, but that is never going to happen, the world does not work that way, that is too hard, too easy, no one has ever done it, I don’t have the money…”
I would like to underline the power of this labeled “real” choice. Think about it. Really think about it…if when you choose at this level you actually create what you are choosing…what is the limit of what you could create?
Ah…think Nicola Tesla, think Wright brothers, think steam engine, think world peace, fulfillment, joy, clean air, whatever. What is the limit of what you could make happen in YOUR life if you CHOSE?
So, you get it, choose away, make all these things happen one step at a time and then one day you look back on your life and realize, oh yes, you just realize, “I am living my full potential!”
Funny thing is that when you are living this way you have not arrived anywhere in particular, there is more there to express; more to discover, give, live, experience…and, you will be doing it full-blown, all there: living beyond fear, beyond anxiety of any kind.
It’s beautiful and it’s yours, when you choose
Fear & Self-Expression
What is fear? Have you asked yourself that question? What is this numbing thing that holds us in a cage while insisting it alone knows what is real?
Fear is an emotional shutdown mechanism; specifically, an emotional web that when touched, stops other emotions from reaching our awareness and causes us to focus entirely on its center: the perceived danger that built the web.
This can happen consciously or without our awareness. The conscious one, we have all experienced at some point, right? The unconscious looks like forgetting, avoiding, or depression.
Think about how this mechanism might affect our ability to choose if what we are choosing today touches on an old choice we made to protect ourselves from “danger.”
Let’s say that when you were small and your family had the minister over for dinner, you noticed that his toupee was slipping of his head and told him that his piece of hair was falling off. Your parents, for reasons of their own, decided to punish you for this by making you stay in your room alone for some time that to you, who was scared of the noises you could not identify, seemed like forever.
If during this punishment you experienced things impossible to reference in your experience, like being alone for the first time, or the dark—you would have felt fear and also you would have come to conclusions about what was happening.
The emotion of fear uses the conclusions we make about what is happening when we feel fear and builds a web. From that moment on, until this fear is overcome or abandoned through new choices (conclusions), every time an associated image is experienced, fear comes up.
What do we do with fear when our choices trigger its web? We make the choice to see beyond its mirage and move forward anyway.
I spent two years unconsciously avoiding our local ice-skating arena. My youngest daughter kept asking for us to go ice-skating and I kept finding great excuses not to, until the third winter, when my daughter became so insistent I relented and we went.
When I stepped onto the ice I was gripped with terror. Terror is an interesting experience. It is fear taken to its highest possible scream. I was having a hard time breathing. I froze in place and held on to the bar with such force that my fingers went to sleep.
Did I go back inside and take my skates off? What do you think I should have done?
I remembered that fear is itself, not me. I knew that if I moved and kept on moving, one step at a time, I would push through it. My brain was screaming I was crazy, turn back, etc. My will, that place where choice comes from? It simply stated I could and would do it.
The area I covered was about the size of a hockey ring, maybe smaller. It took me one and a half hours to inch around it. My oldest daughter held my hand and kept reminding me to breathe the whole time.
The next time I went back, yes, I went back, my daughter helped me again but I inched along on my own here and there and the process took 45 minutes.
This is the process of moving through fear. Fear breaks; it crumbles; it goes away.
Remember “real” choices? Do you know why they are so powerful? Because very often when we choose we choose away from where we have been. And when we choose away from where we have been, we trigger fear webs. And when fear webs are activated it can be very immobilizing. The only thing that moves us through it is choice. The choice that knows it will do whatever it takes.
What was the choice that moved me through my fear of ice? I chose to know that I could, to see what it was like, to be more than fear was telling me I was.
Once upon a time, I wrote the following poem about fear.
When I Am Afraid
When I am slightly afraid
Life and its possibilities
Move outside the window
Of the room that defines my safety.
When I am afraid,
This room grows dark
As the shutters snap shut.
When I am very afraid
My room looses the window,
Its door closes,
The air begins to bear down.
When I’ve been afraid for a long, long time,
I forget there was a window,
I am convinced the light is gone
The air is stale,
All I see is the walls
Keeping me safe.
What is fear to you? Or does it matter, once you know you can move through it?