The Crazy Dance Of Fear

 "We are boxed in by the boundary conditions of our thinking"

-Einstein

As an ontological coach, one of the things I have been trained to do with people is to separate out the essence of who people really are from their crap(that's a technical term by the way).  Our 'crap' is basically everything we do and say that is not particularly useful to us, other people, or the planet.  Our essential self is the us that was there when we were born, that part of us that is pure love and being.  Here are a few of the names people give to this distinction: Essence vs Survival Mechanism, Spirit vs Ego, Love vs Fear,  and Unconditioned Self vs Conditioned Self... just to name a few.  Personally, I love these distinctions because their purpose is to recognize the truth of who we are, which is beautiful, peaceful, loving, creative, and joyful.  Anything not that, is just the thing we learned very early on in an attempt to escape our fears when the big scary world seemed... well, big and scary.  It's not who you really are.  Let me repeat... IT'S NOT YOU!  When people no longer identify themselves with their crap, they get to suffer less and enjoy life more. (Warning: This does not mean you no longer have to take responsibility for your actions)

However, the problem with this distinction is that the way the 'survival mechanism', and the 'ego' are often talked about can make them seem really scary, permanent, and overly complicated.  These aspects of the mind we often liken to big scary shadow figures of ourselves that just come to life randomly and take over control of our mind and body.  As coaches we even give them silly names in an attempt separate ourselves from them and create awareness.  Mine are, 'people pleasing wimp', and 'invisible wizard'.  These are wonderful and can be extremely useful, but they can actually add to the complication and seeming hopelessness of our unwanted thoughts and behaviors.

The good news is, it's not complicated at all.  The simple truth is that we as human beings think.  That's pretty straight forward, is it not?  I don't know anyone who doesn't have thoughts. And from there we create habits of thought, which are just thoughts we've had over and over again, which we call beliefs.  There's no big scary mechanism that takes over our minds.  What happens is, we think thoughts that  then appear real to us. We 'believe' these thoughts to be important and meaningful, so we invest our time and energy into them, in turn, scaring ourselves with them.  One of my very favorite analogies for this I first heard from the brilliant coach Steve Chandler, and he asks people to imagine a child who draws a scary looking picture on a piece of paper and then suddenly runs out of the room screaming because he thought it was real.  A scary movie is another wonderful metaphor.  It's only truly scary when we get caught up in it, and forget that it's just a movie.  When in reality, if you zoomed the camera out, you'd see the make-up artists, the director and stage crew, the boom microphone, and the props.  It's awfully hard to be scared when we see it for what it really is, just a movie.  Our minds are the same, we have these thoughts, and we forget they are just thoughts, and that's where the train comes off the tracks.

It's also worth keeping in mind that not all thoughts are created equal.  Our thoughts can be boiled down into essentially two categories: 'love based thoughts', and 'fear based thoughts'(To learn more read my past article Love vs. Fear).  When you are in any unpleasant emotional state, anger, sadness, guilt, regret; you can look a little deeper and you will always find fear underneath.  Conversely, all of your wonderful thoughts are based in love.

Here's where we as coaches and helping professionals sometimes make things complicated.  We focus on the content of thoughts and specific unproductive behaviors, and forget that they are simply manifestations of thought in general.  When we have fearful and insecure thoughts running through our heads and we forget that they're just thoughts, we often act on them.  This can lead to a whole lot of seemingly crazy behaviors. Some people lash out physically or verbally.  Some people hide from the world.  Some people take drugs.  Some people punish themselves. Some people eat excessively, or hardly at all.  Some people obsessively clean or create routines.  Some people take massive action.  Some people get depressed and suicidal.  All of these behaviors are simply different manifestations of the same thing... mistaking our fearful insecure thinking for being real and important.

When we observe the people who are doing that crazy stuff they do... the behavior seems insane, does it not?  We take their behaviors personally. We don't understand that everyone is just doing what they learned how to do when they feel afraid.  All we need to do is simply understand that when we are thinking fearful thoughts and we identify with those thoughts, we will feel afraid and do our own version of the crazy dance. When we know this is all that is happening, it allows us to open up to compassion for others and compassion for ourselves(To learn more read my article on It's Never Personal).  We all have a different flavor of behavior that we learned when we were young.  The problem is, we can't actually ACT our way out of fear because fear doesn't come from outside of us; it comes from our thinking... 100% of the time. And, as one of my mentors Michael Neill says, "The worst way to try and change how we feel, is to try and change the world."

The beauty of it all is that in order to move passed the fear, all it really requires is waiting and letting go.  Awareness and understanding can be useful but they are not necessary because Fear is not our natural state, love is.  Now, it might feel normal because you are in the habit of buying into your fear based thinking, but we have to actually think our way into being afraid.  When there is nothing in particular on our minds that we are caught up in, we feel a sense of peace and well-being.  Whether it's unconscious or conscious, the thought has to be there for us to feel fear.  Just play around with taking your thinking less seriously, and your life experience will shift dramatically.

To wrap up this article, I want to invite you to kick the tires with me on this metaphor.  Imagine your sense of well-being, love, peace, joy, and wisdom all came in the form of a giant colorful beach ball.  Now you might remember from physics class that when a big ball full of air is placed in the water it just floats there comfortably on the surface.  Now, from time to time, it will likely bob a little up and down with the natural ebb and flow of the tide.  As we go the way of life, a wave will inevitably hit and the ball will dip a little lower than normal. The first time this happens when we are very young and don't understand the nature of our well-being, we panic and get the crazy idea that we need to do something to get the ball back to the surface quicker.  We don't know what to do, so we look around and see the big people around us wrestling with their beach balls and struggling to push them under the water, so we simply follow suite; after all they are the big people, they must know what they are doing. We of course don't realize that they learned the same thing when they were little watching their parents.   The beauty is, the second we understand that just like the beach ball, our well-beings' natural state is to float right up to the surface, it becomes obvious that we don't need to do anything except stop wrestling with it. We don't need years of therapy to find what's already there, we simply need to see that often the only thing keeping us from our essence and our well-being is our own struggle to get back to it.

My invitation to you as you go the way of life this week is to notice the wrestling match that you've been engaged in for years, and give it up for a little while.  See what happens.  You might be pleasantly surprised when your inner peace and wisdom float right back up to the surface.  Don't get discouraged if the ball has been pushed under pretty deep, it will make it's way back up.  And as you look around and see everybody else in your life locked in this ridiculous battle royale, struggling to push their beach balls' under the surface, see if you can support just one other person this week to see the insanity for themselves. Then, perhaps, they too can easily and effortlessly let go of the reins and return to themselves.

Just in case that all zoomed right over your head, here's a brief summary:

• We do crazy stuff when we get afraid and insecure
• We get afraid and insecure when we have fearful insecure thinking, and then mistake it for being real and important.  
• The world does not create our fear, we do.
• We have either fear based thoughts, or love based thoughts, that's it.
• Understanding this allows us to generate compassion for ourselves and others.
• There's nothing you need to do to return to your essence, it is your very nature.
• Your nature is Love, peace, joy, and well-being.
• Relax, and rest easy in that.

Until next week, Love and Light,

Coach Ty