Shared Wisdom Guest Post
Featuring Anna Conlan from Psychic But Sane

Life expands or contracts in proportion to one’s courage. – Anais Nin.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could put aside all our fears and pursue our dreams fearlessly? Imagine how much more you could achieve and experience if you had no fear at all to go after whatever you wanted.

If fear/love is a spectrum, it’s certainly more helpful to be more towards the love end of the spectrum than the fear end. But most of us consider fear to be a natural, built-in human response that drives our most basic actions. And we’d probably feel some resistance to eliminating our fear altogether, as the accepted idea is that fear serves us in some cases – that it’s “better to be safe than sorry.”

But, from a spiritual perspective, fear is:

False
E
vidence
A
ppearing
R
eal

(That’s Neale Donald Walsch’s clever acronym, not mine!)

Spiritually, fear is never grounded in truth. Rather, it is an illusion – the domain of the ego and a conditioned response. As babies, fresh from the spiritual realm, we have no fear. Instead, as we grow, we learn fear and absorb it from our environments. We are told not to touch that, not to do that, not to talk to strangers. We indirectly learn to fear the consequences of everything we do. Then, as we get older and understand the world and pay attention to the media, we add even more fears: death, destruction, evil, and disasters.

Some people buy into their fears to such an extent that they get to the point where they’re unable to move forward in life – they are paralyzed by their fear. One major fear that keeps people stuck (and I personally see a lot of it in my sessions) is the very understandable fear of the unknown and a fear of the future – or rather, a fear of bad things happening in the future.

At the end of a session with me, people get to ask questions of their guides or higher self and they often ask things like, “I want to leave my spouse, but if I do, will I ever find someone else?” or “If I quit my job and start my new business, will I pay be able to pay the bills?”

I’m sure we’ve all asked questions like those before (I know I have!), as we’re all conditioned to fear lack, pain, struggle, and being alone.

It’s interesting to hear the guides’ answers to such questions. Usually, rather than giving predictions to reassure people, the guides tend to deconstruct people’s fear. I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned from the guides’ spiritual perspectives about our human fears.

Deconstructing fear

The most important information from the guides is that in spite of what we’ve learned, our fears are never beneficial – they are in every case totally out of resonance with who we are as spiritual beings. When we’re living 100% in alignment with our spirit, we have no fear. We are like intrepid children. The soul does not even fear death because it knows, on a deep level, that we can never be harmed or hurt in any way. The soul knows that your consciousness – the energy that is you – can never be destroyed. Of course, we know the physical body can be damaged and die, but on a soul level, the impermanence of our physical being is something we embrace. Our souls choose to come into this world because we have a hunger for growth, for experience, for expansion, not because we want to avoid death, or discomfort, or pain.

Taking the sting out of “negative” experiences

The second reason why living in fear makes little sense from a spiritual perspective is because we are always in control of every experience that comes our way. Before you even incarnate, you choose the family you will incarnate into. When you’re here in a body, the principal mechanism by which you choose all your experiences is the law of attraction, although some major experiences you may have chosen for yourself long before you incarnated.

And because you are a being of love, you, in your wisdom, always choose for yourself the most loving experiences possible. You may be thinking – hang on a moment, I didn’t send myself the bankruptcy or my illness. But sending yourself loving experiences does not mean that you always send yourself the most enjoyable, pleasant experiences. It does mean that you send yourself exactly the right experiences needed in order to grow, expand and learn what you need to. We choose all our experiences with a deep knowing of our own inner strength and the power of our spirit. We have no doubt about our capability to draw something good and learn something, even when the going gets really tough.

A recent example of this that I came across in my own life was at a recent workshop when I heard a very moving and inspiring story from a lady who had breast cancer. She told the group that she felt that she was meant to have cancer, and that it changed her life for the better. After her illness, as she realized that life was fleeting and precious, she quit her “boring” job (her words) and began training as a nurse, which she had always wanted to do. She also volunteered to act as a mentor to other women with cancer. Her marriage was stronger because of the experience, and she had a renewed lust for life. She said that if she could choose again, she would choose the cancer because it shook her out of an existence that she wasn’t particularly enjoying or valuing.

So, the belief that you are selecting your own experiences and trusting in your own judgement as a soul is one way to overcome your fear of “bad” stuff happening in the future. You know you will never send yourself experiences that you can not handle.

It can help to eliminate fear even further if you can let go of your attachment that you should only choose “good” experiences and meet all experiences with the same attitude. This involves regarding anything that happens to you as a blessing, even if others label it as “bad.” (As an aside, Byron Katie’s method of inquiry “The Work” is perhaps the most effective way of letting go of attachment in this respect. She is a an amazing teacher of non-attachment – I read in her book A Thousand Names for Joy that even when she was robbed at gunpoint and was in danger of dying, she felt no fear, only fascination that she had manifested such an experience for herself. I would love to be fearless to such a degree!)

However, this idea that all experiences – including the so-called “bad” ones are always blessings – is usually met with a lot of resistance and controversy as many people are understandably attached to the fact that X, Y, or Z should not have befallen them.

If you can get past that, try examining your past and the experiences, including the seemingly negative ones, that you have chosen thus far. You might like to think about why you would have chosen to experience what you have, even if it was painful. It can be beneficial to understand your “negative” experiences even until you can safely say that you would not fear those experiences if they came around again.

As things occur in your life, try getting into the habit of thinking, “What can I learn from this?” and “why have chosen this experience?” Remember that you are the creator of your life, rather than slipping into the idea that you are at the whim and mercy of a God or a Universe which will send you misfortunes at random. (This is what most people believe and it is a recipe for living in fear.)

Take more risks

Another practical way to reconcile these spiritual ideas with your life and live fearlessly is by practicing taking risks. You do not need to begin with life-changing risks. If you’re someone who likes to remain within your comfort zone, take some small risks – even little things such as trying things that you’re not sure you will like or reach out to someone even if you doubt that your friendliness will be reciprocated. Taking risks, big or small, allows you to get a taste for how supported you are by the Universe in the outcomes you experience. It also enables you to learn non-attachment to the positive feelings/outcomes and the negative feelings/outcomes that may result from the risks you take.

One risk that I took was last February – I quit my teaching job in Spain to move to the UK to set up my full-time healing business. When I quit my job, I left with little money, no website, no knowledge of how to create a website, a tiny client base and no knowledge or experience in business. I had no steady work coming in and a need to make an income right away. The people around me thought I was crazy and I myself expected that I would probably have to get another job – maybe one which I disliked even more than the job I’d just quit.

But, shortly after leaving my job, I created this website, with the help of a friend and I acquired a business mentor, who helped me in so many ways. Everywhere I went I met people I could help or people who referred clients to me. And my business began to expand. Even when my computer broke when I was in the middle of setting up my online business, I manifested a new one very quickly!

Taking that risk, although it was not exactly a life and death situation, made me more willing to take risks in the future and less fearful about my security and that to me is quite valuable. I think that my life has indeed expanded in proportion to the courage I developed, as new avenues have opened up, which I would never have dared take before.

For me, the key to taking that risk was that I disliked my situation so much that even quitting my job and failing in my business seemed preferable to staying where I was.

What the guides say…

So, the spiritual answer to whether we should take a risk and quit our job or do whatever else we want to do (that is in our highest path and purpose) is this:

We are literally in control of all our experiences, so we do not need to ask a psychic to predict an outcome about our own lives. The real question is not “Will this happen?” but rather “What will I choose?” And even if we do not get exactly what we consciously wished for, we can be sure that we have chosen something even better for ourselves, no matter what “packaging” the experience comes in.

Have you taken any risks lately, in life or in business – and do you think they served you? Or have you learned to overcome your fears? Please leave a comment below!

***

Anna Conlan is a professional intuitive, a healer, and a teacher of intuitive development. She is known for her down-to-earth approach that demystifies intuition and demonstrates its practical uses in our lives. www.psychicbutsane.com

Thank you so much, Anna, for helping us see break down fear at the soul level. Very helpful!

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