I saw this extremely helpful suggestion in a blog post today. It was number 1 out of 2 helpful tips for overcoming procrastination. It said:

“Eliminate Your Fear”

Oh, THANKS! Is that ALL?! I’ll get right on that… HA!

This makes me cringe, growl and laugh out loud, all at the same time.

If we could JUST eliminate fear, we’d all have done it by now.

The word JUST has become one of my biggest pet peeves (second only to “woo woo” of course). It’s often used in personal development articles that are attempting to give how-to advice on something.

But as soon as the word JUST appears, they’ve given you advice on one hand and totally minimized the steps and the amount of real work it’s going to take to implement it on the other.

Thus setting you up for failure or at the very least feeling like crap when you can’t seem to roll out of bed and JUST do it.
(No disrespect to Nike.)

When it comes to fear, none of us are supposed to be able to JUST eliminate it.

I don’t want this kind of advice and thinking out there convincing you that you are somehow not up to your goals or dreams or whatever task you’ve set yourself.

So listen to me very closely here…

You can’t JUST eliminate something that you have NO conscious control over.

Yes, you can eliminate all the black clothes in your wardrobe, or all the red meat purchases from your weekly shopping trips.

You have control of those and you have conscious choice.

But when it comes to fear you have neither of these things (at least not without training.)

Your brain’s fear response is a miracle of evolutionary brilliance. And it operates by shutting OFF your ability to think and choose.

You can no more eliminate fear than you can eliminate breathing.  They’re both controlled by the same part of your brain.

So does this mean you’re doomed to live inside your fears forever?

Definitely NOT.

Lucky for us, we have the ability to bring things that used to be UN-conscious into our conscious control.

Anyone who’s been potty trained can do it.
(And truly, this was NO small feat for any one of us!)

So when fear comes up, here’s what you CAN do:

• You CAN learn to become aware of the signs that it’s been triggered.

• You CAN learn to maintain your ability to think  and make clear choices when fear is present.

• You CAN learn  how to find the core imprint or memory at the root of your fear through spacious compassion.

• You CAN learn how to resolve your fears by bringing their wisdom into the light of your awareness.

But I’m not going to tell you to JUST do any of these things.

You might get to the first two today with no problem.

But the second two will take lots of practice and time, not to mention skills, steps, knowledge and guidance.

Something the “JUST do it” articles are often pretty short on.

And knowing all that in advance  is a GOOD thing.

That knowledge sets you up for success and for the long haul. It tells you to muster your desire and your willingness for something that will be eminently worth it in the end.

It doesn’t minimize the work OR the benefits of being able to achieve these things.

So next time someone’s blog or website tells you to JUST get over your fear, take that with a BIG grain of salt or, better yet… leave a comment and ask them to explain HOW.

I’d love to hear your thought on this. How do you take this kind of advice? And how does it make you feel? Let us know in the comments below.

And if it would totally jazz you to bring your fears under conscious control with compassion and awareness, shoot me an email at :
susan AT theheartsvoice DOT com
I’m currently thinking about how and when I’ll be teaching this and I’d love to hear of your interest!

Seth Godin just released his new book called “Linchpin – Are You Indispensible?” and from what I’m hearing it’s  another great offering. And lucky for us, he spends a significant number of pages on the concept of resistance and the lizard brain – what we here at The Heart’s Voice call the “safety brain”, the source of our resistance and defenses.

And suddenly everyone is talking about it! Up until now doing a Google search on the term “resistance” would mostly generate pages only a licensed electrician would understand.

In a recent guest post on Leo Babauta’s  Zen Habits Blog, Seth says this at the very end:

The resistance is powerful, so powerful that all the shortcuts, time savers and focusing tools are powerless in its path. Now you know its name. Now you know how it sneaks in under the radar and sounds quite sensible as it undermines your work and compromises your vision. When the resistance appears, you must call it out. Call it by name. Recognize it for what it is and then defeat it. You will defeat it not by rationalization or even a calm discussion. You will defeat it with single-minded effort, effort so deep and dedicated that it might exhaust you.

So what is it about dealing with resistance that’s so exhausting? And does it have to be this way?

And the answer is – it’s awareness and intention that require so much of our energy when we’re trying to get past our own resistance. And I’m convinced, through my own direct experience and that of others, that any one of us can learn the skills to handle our resistance much more easily!

If you’ve ever done any kind of mindfulness practice – breathing, a mantra, yoga or meditation – you know that it takes energy to watch your thoughts, your state or your body.  And it takes energy to stay awake and to notice when you’ve strayed from being present. And it takes energy to bring yourself back to the practice again.

We can expend a lot of energy just being aware and holding our intention.

And that’s just for 20 or 60 minutes or so. Magnify that by the weeks or months that it might take to complete a project that we’re resisting, and we can see the huge amount of energy that it takes to be present and focused for that long.

Add to that the fact that our resistance is constantly trying to derail us from our goal in order to keep us safe from some imagined danger, and we can see how much energy this takes when we approach it like a battle!

So can we ever really defeat our resistance?

I would say that the answer is no…and yes.

Bottom line, no one can be alive without their amygdala, or their “lizard brain”. So, no, we never really defeat it entirely. And it’s actually designed to shut off access to our logic and left brain functions in order to take over and get us to safety.

Our brains were perfectly designed so that when a saber-tooth tiger strolled into our village, we didn’t spend any precious escape time wondering whether to run to the left or right. The adrenaline closes a gate to our logic brain and simply reacts – fight, flight or freeze.

That’s why we call resistance “sneaky” – because it’s designed to act in a way that prevents us from being consciously aware of what it’s doing.

And that’s also why we often don’t see what it’s done except through hindsight – our left brain is quite literally disconnected while our safety brain is operating. At least it is until we have some practice.

So what’s the antidote to struggling with resistance?
Awareness.

Conscious awareness is the single only thing that trumps resistance.

It’s entirely possible to be focused on our goal and feel our resistance come up, and notice the adrenaline firing, and notice the biological cascade of symptoms that follows, and feel the emotions and hear the thoughts, all bent on stopping our current course of action….and not react at all. (Really!)

I know this because I’ve done it. And my clients and many of my friends have done it. And most long time meditators can do it.

And that’s because of awareness.

Think of awareness like a space you’re standing in. And think of your resistance like an agitated squirrel.

When you’re trapped in a 3 x 3 ft closet with your resistance, it’s pretty hard not to react to it! When we haven’t had a lot of practice developing our awareness and our capacity to not react, our inner space feels pretty tight and it takes enormous energy to stay detached and focused in that tiny space.

Now imagine standing in the center of a football stadium with the same agitated squirrel. You’d be WAY less affected by it. You could easily hold your focus and your intention, stay on a task you were doing, and not be bothered much by it. And it would hardly take you any energy at all.

That’s the power of awareness and that’s when resistance stops being exhausting!

So anything that increases your awareness will decrease the energy it takes to get past your resistance. And there are literally hundreds of ways to increase awareness and, for the first time in history, without needing to spend years in a mystery school, they’re widely available at a bookstore near you!

And I believe there are some really exciting things that become possible when lots of us gain this kind of awareness!

Tell us your thoughts, feedback and experience with this idea. by joining the discussion in the comments below.

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Most of our fears are pretty much hardwired in before we reach the age of 6 . So it’s an interesting experience to watch my brain in the process of adding a new one.

As an adult, it’s not something I get to see everyday. And I’m watching this one with the same fascination I used to approach dissection assignments in grade 8 biology!

I’ve discovered I have an allergy – a major one – to black fly bites.

Living in the woods now, I’ve just experienced my first black fly season in Nova Scotia. Actually not nearly as bad as what I’d heard about it, but I never dreamed I would react to a bite the way I did!

My first 2 bites were both on an ankle – thank goodness! One a month ago and the second 2 weeks later. I was surprised by the first reaction, but thought it was a fluke or the bite was infected. No big deal.

But the second one was worse! Within 30 hours my foot was twice it’s normal size and you couldn’t see any ankle bones at all! Plus,  I had a low grade fever and chills 6 hours after the bite.

So now, my safety brain – the fight or flight part – has added “going outside” to the list of dangerous things in it’s catalog.

What to do!

Having never had a major allergy, suddenly I’m starting to understand how it is people get more and more cautious in their life when there are things that they react to.

We all go through this process, whenever we’re hurt in our life in any way. Physically, emotionally, mentally.

Our brains are designed to remembers exactly what caused the hurt, and how it happened, and then it watches for those same circumstances and warns us with adrenaline when we get to close to them the next time.

It doesn’t matter if it’s black flies or relationships, the process is the same.

This is the very same process that, in its extreme form, results in agoraphobia, when we react to more and more things in our life and our world gets smaller and smaller until one day we just don’t leave our house anymore.

So my brain is now saying it’s wise to stay inside and that my backyard is a dangerous place. I can feel this as a kind of low level anxiety that shows up when I’m out back in the garden. (That’s the brain starting to get hyper-vigilant.)

But I LOVE the yard, and it’s finally warm enough to be out there  in shorts!

Fortunately, I’ve learned to stay detached from my safety brain, so I’m going to be able to talk myself through this fear. Mainly by staying present with it, paying attention to my breath and choosing to stay outside in spite of it’s warnings by remembering what I love about being there.

I also have an ace in the hole, when it comes to dealing with fear. I have the best tools I’ve ever found, from The Way of The Heart, and I can use them to clear the original experience so I don’t keep reacting to it.

It’s like taking the card for “going outside” right out of my brain’s card file, so it literally doesn’t warn me about that any more.

Of  course, I won’t be removing the allergy by doing that, so I’ll take some wise precautions before I go out, like putting on bug spray and staying a little more covered than I might.

I’m also going to keep some Benadryl around from now on! But at least I don’t have to let my world get smaller and stop going outside just because my brain says so.

Where has your world gotten a little smaller? Is it time to challenge your brain about that?