How to Make Peace With Your Fear

Begin by Listening to Your Body Using Your Wise Mind

  When it comes to making decisions it can become easy to feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, if we listen careful enough our bodies will hold the answer to our true discernment. In dialectical behavioral therapy, this ‘bodily intuition’ is called the ‘wise mind.’ in therapeutic speak, a mindful awareness of emotions, or ‘wise mind’ is similar to intuition (Linehan, 1993b). Often, both intuition and wise mind are described as our feeling that come from the ‘gut’ or the stomach area (ever heard of in the pit of my stomach). When we begin checking in and listening to our bodies, we are able to get more in touch with our gut feelings, both physically and mentally. Whatever experience we use to describe healthy relationships, when we’re in them, we feel nourished by them, in body as well as mind. It’s not a lustful state or a friendship state. It’s the warm quality we know from practicing lovingkindness and compassion. When we pay attention to the sensations in our bodies, we can feel love is the energetic opposite of fear. Love is the sensation that seems open and expanding right down to our cellular level. When we’re experiencing fear or doubt, we may be behaving from our ’emotion mind.’ Emotion mind occurs when we make judgments or decisions based solely on how we feel. Without keeping in mind, that emotions themselves are not bar or problematic. We can be angry, devastated and hurt it doesn’t mean we need to end the relationship in its entirety. The problems associated with emotion mind is when the emotions control our lives. This trap is especially dangerous for people with overwhelming emotions because emotion mind distorts our thoughts judgment and then these distortions make it hard to formulate healthy decisions about our lives. So how can we become so confused in love? It seems so simple, right? Love seems to open us up, while fear keeps us from being able to say YES to love – perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings. Close relationships ask us to put down our barriers and open our hearts in non-judging and critical ways. Yet if we’ve felt hurt, unseen and abused in childhood then the thought of self-disclosure and vulnerability can be almost life-threatening. Working with Our Barriers When working with the barriers, it is important to begin learning how to make ‘wise decisions’ about who we love and how we love. Now that you understand to check in with your body, you can begin to check in to the parts of yourself that feel discomfort when you’re confused or needing guidance.

• What is coming up for you?
• Why are you experiencing discomfort?
• When you begin thinking about it, what do you fear most?

When you continue checking in with yourself, does your decision or thought feel like an appropriate thought? Does it feel good to you? If so, then maybe you should do it. As we experience new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, and evaluate as we approach a topic that our emotions and feelings may be leading. When I think about this, I imagine a yogi sitting in Padmasana Four or Lotus pose. Padma means lotus and one of the most useful and important asanas. It is thought to increase the flow of energy. In the practice of yoga or mindfulness, the lotus pose is a great place to begin investigating emotions and begin a practice of self-inquiry. Through understanding our internal barriers to love, we realized that love might simply be a perceptional existence within in our one reality and it is only a matter of cleaning our closets psychically that we can begin making more room for it. As psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm said in his book “The Art of Loving: ‘Love is not a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole.”