Loose watercolour abstract ‘Beauty and Chaos’ — Image by the author
But HOW do you trust like that…?
People have told me to trust the universe, when I was feeling afraid. They didn’t ever seem to give the instructions . They always left me asking, But how do you actually do it…?
They’ve said all the usual things during challenge— ‘You’re going to emerge as a butterfly!’ ‘You’ll never be given more than you can handle,’ and ‘The universe has a purpose for you or you wouldn’t be here,’ to mention a few.
My internal response at the time, (never voiced, of course) would sully this pristine page...
When you’re in fear, you can’t welcome those words. And it’ll take effort not to go ugly…
I was given a copy of Gabrielle Bernstein’s ‘The Universe Has Your Back’ a decade ago. The title alone was a trigger. It was so opposite to the way I felt about life at the time.
But Bernstein said she could give me those instructions, she would show me how to build trust.
For a moment, there was hope.
Back then, I related to this piece from her introduction:
“You may be doing all you can to create freedom, connect to flow and release your fear-based habits, but it’s likely that the moment you feel some sense of relief, you’re blindsided by the shadow of fear that dwells below the surface.”
I read on, tentatively…
Hope died abruptly as she described her early experiences with meditation:
“I felt a warm blanket of loving energy wrap around me. My extremities began to tingle, and my anxiety and depression lifted. It was the greatest peace I’d ever experienced. I was in tune with a presence far greater than anything I’d ever known. I’d found my hidden power.”
Well, bully for you! I thought, I’ve tried meditation. It never does that for me. And it never will.
I cast the book aside.
I couldn’t read it then.
I can now. If I want to. It’s got some lovely ideas and exercises within it. But now, I don’t pick it up from a sense of need or lack.
Now I can read a book like this one, knowing that I’m already there. Knowing that the larger part of me is already trusting, appreciating, expanding into each new adventure. The knowing is there, even when I’m feeling weighed down with worry.
Trust in the universe doesn’t bring immunity to fear. We still feel fear. Worry. Anxiety. Doubt. The emotional collywobbles come to us all.
But when we know how to create trust in life, we can genuinely embrace the collywobbles. We can smile and guide ourselves Home.
Then the books add interesting new approaches, but we don’t need the advice of others. Our guidance lies within.
Navigating fear…
Yes, I can read that book now.
But only when I’ve navigated the waves of fear, doubt and worry.
If I go to that book, or any book or person like it when I’m worried, or fearful or sad, I am plunged into greater despair. It helps not one little bit.
I have to ride the waves of emotion, come back into balance and then I can access the advice of the sage. When I’m already smiling, the gurus don’t sicken… they beckon.
I know how to navigate those waves now. When they arise — and oh boy do they ever — I bring myself back to calm waters once again.
Now I know how, trust is mine for the building.
Here’s how I do it for myself and with clients.
You can do it too, if you like.
Making the most of our fear
I don’t find the ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ approach appealing. And I find my clients are the same.
Therapeutic training taught me to value all emotion. For a long time, I still couldn’t stop myself wanting to push fear away. It feels so acute, so awful, when you’re in it.
I wanted to appreciate fear, rather than to ‘push on through’ it. I knew that, for my system, only learning to love this emotion would do.
So how do we make the most of fear, instead of trying to wrestle it to the ground?
Let’s look closer at the fear response
Taking a closer look gives us more respect for its value, even if we’re not at the point of loving it yet…
First, let’s understand what’s going on when we’re in fear — most of us are familiar with the terms: fight/flight/freeze, when that emotion hits the system. We all know the overpowering urge to do one or other, when in trauma — including the ‘little t’ traumas like thinking we’ve lost our phone…
And our system — mind-body-emotions et al — is always trying to take care of us. Fear has a positive intention. Looking at animals in the wild, all three responses make good sense.
From our complex human perspective, fear can be harder to handle. Most of our fear is cerebral. Threats are generally not imminent and physical. Mostly, fear causes us to freeze because punching someone or legging it doesn’t often help us much.
Fear comes from thought, as all emotions do. Even if the thought is lightening fast and we’ve no way of catching it.
Fearful thoughts build quickly on a subject. We talk about following trains of thought. Our emotions hitch us to the back of these trains.
Fear creates a powerful thought-train. Fast. And our world is creating like never before. On any number of subjects…
If our eyes could translate thought-form reality, we’d see mammoth Maglevs careering into the abyss all around us.
Runaway trains, unhinged and derailed — like a scene from the end of the world.
When we’re flooded by fear, anyone offering a message of trust might as well offer us a scorpion.
The world — especially the Media-portrayal of it — has a zillion terrifying stories to torture the mind.
Those aspects of reality scare us because they’re beyond our control. Never have we felt more powerless, more vulnerable. Fear is the ultimate pandemic, as we know.
What can we do with fear when it comes?
Now, like never before, more and more of us are turning to the only power we have. The power that rests inside us. The power to manage our mind.
“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Actually, ‘control’ or ‘manage’, for me, is the wrong word. It implies struggle and effort. Managing the mind is futile. Have you noticed? The mind doesn’t want to be managed. It won’t be controlled.
Soothing is a better approach.
Reassurance. That’s what our minds crave, as we battle the tsunamis inside… Like small children, our minds want to be calmed.
In order to do this, we have to build trust. Trust in ourselves to achieve this calming. Trust that in doing so, all will be well.
One day is all we ever need to live — one moment at a time
It helps to chunk life down a bit. To view it one day at a time… like the hymns and prayers of old.
Working with a client recently, the power of her storyline was breathtaking. Every word, every thought, every gesture was set to terrorise her. Exhausted, defeated, nothing soothed her nightmare tale.
I worked with her, gently talking her round. Soothing eventually calmed her.
The words of Abraham came to mind…
When you’re on your own with that degree of momentum going, there may be no real chance of stopping it before the day is done.
When you’ve the benefit of a coach to steady you, it’s a different experience. Alone, if you need to, it’s ok to cut your losses for the day.
Abraham say, at times like these,
“Don’t worry, keep going, it’ll be over soon.”
That sounds pretty callous doesn’t it? But put into the context of one day having its own, distinct momentum we can see the wisdom of just heading for bed, or a movie, or a bath, or whatever would best get you through...
A new day offers a pristine perspective, a fresh creating-ground, free from the creations of the past.
Let’s allow ourselves to imagine that tomorrow offers fresh possibilities.
Then we can allow today to go pear-shaped if it must, and allow the sweet release of sleep to reset.
What if your fear is keeping you from sleep?
If sleep doesn’t come easily right now, it’s okay. Be where you are. Know that it is enough to gently focus on slowing the mind, pausing thought, even for a moment.
It’s okay to give up the struggle.
Stop trying.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Give yourself permission for a few moments to put the storyline down.
As Mooji says, imagine coming into the meditation room, leaving your mind, with your shoes, at the door.
Thoughts may come, but you can stop engaging with them.
Stop.
Stop trying. Stop all effort. Stop thinking.
Stop.
Breathe.
Still your body.
Still your mind.
Know that you are not your thoughts. You are not your emotions. You are the focuser of same.
Bring your attention to your power in this moment
Fear, more than any emotion, I’d say, needs firm focus in the now.
The great news is you have power in this moment.
You really do.
Here’s how I access that power. Here’s how clients do too.
Using this approach, I build trust, deliberately. Piece by piece by piece.
We all have our worries. And, I know, I know, they’re based on what’s ‘true’. We’re not making up those threats and challenges. But spending this moment flooding with fear does not empower us to face them.
If we try to build trust by focusing on the big things, the time frame’s too long, there’s too much momentum. It’s too easy for the collywobbles to take hold.
Fear is a Shanghai Maglev train. Travelling at 431km per hour. Into the chasm.
We build our trust in the small moments of the day, with powerful intent, so we can stay grounded when those leviathans pass by.
Build the trust. Piece by piece.
You don’t wait for trust to descend. It’s not likely to comply.
Most of us don’t have access to Bernstein’s beautiful moment. I’ve never felt ‘a warm blanket of loving energy wrap around me.’
Knowing I wasn’t a likely recipient was enough to return me to despair, all those years ago.
But what I couldn’t grasp then, and I practise daily now, is that trust can be built, simply and consciously — on a micro-scale.
Practising an attitude of trust is more accessible than you’d think.
Try this little exercise
Take a deep breath in…
And let it out…
Soften the focus of your eyes.
Imagine for a moment that you did trust the universe. That you really did have the power to create and receive what you want.
Imagine that you knew, like a child in the care of loving parents, that what you asked for, you would receive. Not instantly, but assuredly. Every time.
You don’t know the exact hows and whens of it, but basically, the universe has your back.
You’re safe. You’re good. You’re loved. All is well.
Wouldn’t that be great?
Congratulations!
You’ve achieved significantly, even if all you did was sigh at the thought of such relief.
Building real trust isn’t harder than that.
The secret to trust is to focus on the little things… and leave the big alone
Okay. Here’s how it’s done. We chunk it down and focus on the little things…
We see this day as our trust-building workshop. Yesterday and tomorrow don’t exist. Only now is real. We’re going to come into the now, often, today.
Today, for one day only, we practise asking and receiving with short segments of time in the day. (We can repeat it tomorrow if we like.)
We focus on emotions.
We want what we want because we think it’d make us feel good. So cutting out the middle-person (the physical manifestation) takes us straight to what we want.
We ask for the way we want to feel in the next segment of time.
Then we get into ‘receiving mode’. Like a phone tuned in to WiFi — you have to connect up with the network to receive and use the signal.
Wireless Fidelity. That’s how the universe works.
The energy of the universe may seem intangible, but it’s entirely trustworthy.
If it seems to let us down it’s not because the signal is weak and can’t be trusted. It’s because our device (our mind) is clogged with other signals, or we’ve not joined the ‘receiving’ (relaxed, allowing, good feeling) network.
As we focus on asking for the feelings we want and chunk our day down to receive them, we get tangible, almost instant success.
Success builds confidence. And creates more of same.
And we wouldn’t be doing the work without the fear that drives us Home.
Remember we talked about making the most of our fear?
What if fear were a sheepdog, guiding us safely back Home?
What if the fear weren’t actually about the outer world ‘wolf at the door’ — the million and one scary truths outside of us?
What if we saw fear as our own inner sheepdog, barking and even biting to drive us to safety?
What if the fear were guiding us away from the thoughts that scare us?
What if those scary thoughts were the true wolf in this tale?
Wouldn’t we love that sheepdog then? No matter how sharp the bite?
Here are the steps you can take
I’ll couch it in my own experience of this day. This is what I wanted, before I sat to write these words to you.
For this next segment of the day, I want to feel confident, eager, loving and inspired to write something to uplift others in this blog…
To get into receiving mode I then have to:
1. Stop thinking.
I have to put the storyline down. Like dropping heavy baggage at the door. (I don’t know what I’m writing it’s taking too long I don’t know how money is going to come I have so many other things to do I really messed up yesterday and wasted a day etc)
2. Breathe.
No thinking.
Breathe.
3. Allow relief.
I always find relief when I take a break from thoughts even for a moment. I imagine a delicious, mini, out-of-body experience… I bathe in relief. Let it soak in for a bit. Soothing… easing… relaxing…
4. Then I imagine feeing what I want to feel next. And the things I’d be saying if I did…
‘Wow! I was feeling so worried! I asked to feel relief and eagerness and satisfaction and inspiration — and it all came to me! Wow! No idea how! That’s fab! So much easier than I thought it would be! Blimey! Great stuff!’
6. Stop thoughts again and listen for guidance.
I’m listening to let a higher perspective thought stream dominate… Allowing a stream of encouraging thoughts is powerful — but it can only happen when I’ve quietened the opposite stream enough to ‘hear’ it.
7. Do as prompted.
Whether that’s writing the blog or washing the dishes…
Then repeat for the next segment of time.
It helps to remember it can take a little while to move from the asking stage to receiving… We may need a simple task to bridge the gap from fear to inspiration. To calm the troubled mind.
If that seems too much, do this…
In short bursts, through the day, practise letting go of your thoughts. As Mooji says,
‘Leave your mind at the door with your shoes!’
Negative thoughts trains run amok if we aren’t staying largely in a state of leaving our ‘mind at the door’.
This blog gives you the understanding and approach I use daily — for myself and with my clients.
Fear is hard to handle on your own.
If you want some help, and you like this approach, book in and I’ll show you what’s possible.
With love and encouragement, always,
Amanda