Shake that fear off!

Over the past year and a half there have been multiple conversations about fear I have been involved in, both in real life and online, and both with close friends and complete strangers alike. I find it very interesting that everyone I know, all over the world, have such extremely different fears and in differing levels of magnitude, too. I’ve always assumed that it just has to do with the way people grow up or what has influenced them into liking or disliking something, as well as with personal traumas, obviously. Over ten years ago I was training to become a mental health researcher, actually heading a handful of projects in a Mental Health clinic while training to become a counsellor. I collected a few diplomas in some essential areas and explored depression and addiction, as well NLP as a possible healing technique. Even though I did not continue down that path, moving instead to England and pursuing the path of the arts, as you might see from my profile, I have also used all my training to aid people with emotional and psychological afflictions, so I have also always been open about my own experiences with Mental Health and also about how I have managed the climb to my professional goals. Given that I am a self-employed actress, model and writer in the UK (a.k.a. Plague Island) during a pandemic, it certainly hasn’t been easy for me to feel as successful as by rights I feel I should be, and there has been much fear about my future in my chosen career, but one thing I can say with certainty is that I was in the right path before the pandemic hit, therefore I should hopefully still get to my goals if I continue on it.

Now that you have a bit of the context I’m coming from, let’s talk about one of the conversations I’ve had about getting rid of our fears and a tool I discovered by chance but which has been helping me for years, even during these odd last couple of years: I was very flattered a while back when I was asked exactly how I used the turbulence during a transatlantic flight in January 2015 to get rid of certain fears (an experience I mentioned in my personal blog back then) so I will go deeper into how I worked the fear out of my system. Note that in order to use this tool efficiently, people who have an actual fear of flying might want to work on clearing that fear out first.

To begin with, I will admit that my first reaction as the turbulence woke me up was fear and anger: I’d just recently been lucky enough to find the love of my life, and the thought of the plane falling just as I flew to move in with him was not something to be happy or peaceful about; but after a few moments my instincts kicked in and I realised that even though there were a couple of children screaming and people gasping, the Captain and crew were reassuringly calm and soon I was too. Now, the roots of my fears were, of course, very human: the notion of losing the happiness you’ve just found is usually enough to drive anybody to the verge of tears or anxiety. When in tears, let them flow because that means release; when anxious or stressed, speak up because that’s release as well. When the turbulence woke me, the first reaction of fear came because I felt that my whole path of years of healing had been in vain, and that I’d lose in a flash all the happiness I had finally reached. Yet, as I acknowledged that success in my healing and that consciousness of deserving true happiness, I was also able to become aware of the sensible calmness of the crew and I realised that the fear was actually there to be shaken off!

On boarding the plane, a few hours earlier, I’d already resolved that whatever fear I was still climbing onto the plane with, I would make it fall into the ocean and let it perish there. So I thought I was clean by then; however, things from the past do tend to pop up and drive us insane every now and then, don’t they? What happened in the turbulence, the overwhelming fear of losing the happiness that I’d so recently found, came all the way from the past, from that teenager that once feared that she’d never find love and thus accepted the first guy who’d paid attention to her because she was close to reaching 20 and didn’t wish to get there without having had a first boyfriend. That young woman made one too many mistakes of that sort, nearly drowning in noxious relationships. So I realised that it was that girl who was crying on the plane, the one who feared that’s what all her life would have amounted to: bad decisions and pain.

Yet, just because that’s such a human feeling, and because I’d managed to get through that murky water to get to the refreshing mountain stream that I’m in now, I knew I had amazing reasons to be proud and happy to receive my happiness with arms wide open, and that’s what got me through the initial fear. That’s why some therapists suggest that to get rid of a fear or blockage, you have to look back at your blessings and achievements and be happy that you’ve managed however much you’ve managed in life – that’s the fuel needed to warm us up and get us moving away from the obstacle.

Then I simply used the shaking to my advantage: I ordered my mind and soul to place all those fears right on my skin, so that they’d fall off with every shake. I could almost see them, as if they were bricks painted with real or fictionalized images, falling swiftly down to the sea. It was a remarkable way to feel an automatic, extraordinarily deep release. Of course there were some issues that I still had to voice; yet they were only details that needed the ears of those I love in order for me to declare: I’m safe, I’m coming home.

The body is wise, the mind and soul are also just as much, and the heart is even wiser than people give it credit for. Use it to your advantage, even with the flukes or chances that life puts before you, and you’ll keep succeeding in your healing. Also remember that there is no shame in fear – it’s a natural response to the circumstances around you, and for the most part a survival instinct, particularly fear of death, which has pretty much kept us going as a race for many millennia and there’s no reason for it to stop now, particularly at this time when a deadly and highly con contagious virus is still going around the world and many governments haven’t managed the crisis very well at all. Anyone who is still shaming anyone for fearing death should be ashamed of themselves: there are a myriad reasons why people might fear death, some of which I have already mentioned here, some which I will probably never know, but all should be respected as a reason why a particular person might fear death. The key here is to find sensible and sustainable ways to manage that fear, and to remember that we’re never really alone in this: there are millions of experts to turn to for information and millions of truly empathetic people who can provide comfort, each individual is bound to have several around them at any given time!

In the meantime, if you’re able to currently travel you can test out my technique, and if you’re not able to travel maybe you can still test it by dancing or jogging, anything that makes your body jump! And to quote glorious goddess Taylor Swift, because why not, shake it off!