Don’t let fear become a permanent guest in the house of your life. If you let it get too comfortable, it will refuse to leave. In the name of protection, anxiety closes the doors to the rooms of your soul, one by one. It refuses help and tells people you’re fine alone. It corners you into a self-protective refusal to trust life. Soon, you can’t distinguish dread from truth, from God.
Fear is primitive. It knows no nuance. Life is black or white. It is right or wrong. It is possible or impossible. It is good or bad. It convinces you to measure your success by how well you predict and limit loss. Panic wants things to stay the same. It’s not seeking opportunities to evolve. Quite the opposite, it turns away from mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges.
Fear is sneaky. Subjecting your spiritual nature to reason is fear of your power. Making a life for yourself by solving someone else’s problems is a fear of your own life. Making someone else responsible for your happiness is a terror of responsibility. Dwelling on the past is a fear of change. Guarding against connection is fear of abandonment.
Fear is a non-stop, delusional Tasmanian devil stomping through your brain. It requires vigilance. The energy it creates mimics that of an exciting life. But it isn’t life at all; it’s the death of reality. Fear thoughts start with “you shouldn’t” and end with something like “take a chance, rely on, love, or dare to.” It says you can’t change your mind.
Apprehension keeps your life small. It advises you to take your heart out of life and replace it with an intellectual micro-manager. It protects your ego and pride at the expense of your destiny. It wears a mask of rational argument. It hides behind pseudo-identities of affluence, accomplishment, or perfection. Fear says that controlling outcomes decreases risk.
You can try to outrun unease by staying busy. However, remaining compulsively busy in mind or body means living on the run. Your fearful thoughts chase you around in circles. You never leave fight, flight, or freeze. You react, never choose. To play along with trepidation is to create the exact circumstance you are trying to avoid.
A life-long, abusive relationship with fear bankrupts you mentally, emotionally, and physically. When you start to think you want out, fear reminds you that you don’t have a shot in hell without its protection. Get back in line, or lose.
You strip fear of its power by widening your perspective enough to see it as unproductive rather than all-powerful, persistent but insignificant, irrelevant. You have to decide you’ve had enough. You have to kick fear out of the house for good. You can’t control whether or not it continues to drive by your psychic house, but you can choose not to listen to and react to it. You can choose not to let it make your decisions for you.
You exist to risk yourself for the sake of your soul. So risk. Maintain your loyalty to your soul’s direction. Above all else, serve your heart’s permanent identity, that of your inner artist. Navigating life by your heart’s desire is to make meaning from reality. Let the voice of God drown out the voice of fear.
Song accompaniment: Tom Petty, Change the Locks
Artwork: The Art of Seth