I’ve been saying for years that fear & resistance are the hardest things to work with in yourself because they have the power to shut off your thinking brain, and once that happens you can no longer work with them effectively on your own.

Yet, at the same time, I absolutely KNOW that it IS possible for you to get to the bottom of your fears, doubts and  resistance and permanently transform them – because I do it myself on a regular basis and I’ve worked with many others who can now do it too.

This is what I’ve come to call “fear-whispering”.

The biggest surprise to me, since I started this blog, has been how hard it’s been to get people to believe me when I say that this can be done permanently (and its shown me how much more learning I have yet to do around how to communicate this stuff well!)

People either think I’m making some kind of magical claim or that it’s a superpower only I possess or that it’s a quick fix and therefore it falls under the heading of “too good to be true”.

So here’s the secret:

It’s not a quick fix…it’s ALL about the right SKILLS!

There are 3 skills required to become your own fear-whisperer, and you definitely can learn them.

However, they do require practice and you won’t necessarily get to the bottom of your deepest fear on the first try – just like you wouldn’t expect to be able to play a violin the first time you pick it up.

But once you get even a little bit good at this, your results are permanent and you can calm and work through your fears anytime, anywhere – which is TOTALLY worth the effort, in my book.

Here are the 3 skills:

1. The ability to STAY – to stay with your breath, stay in the moment, stay in your body, stay with what you’re feeling. This means gradually training yourself not to run away inwardly from whatever is going on.

2. The ability to SOFTEN – this is all about compassion, kindness and letting go of the need to MAKE something happen or rush the process.

3. The ability to NOTICE – this is an inner curiosity that leads to awareness of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, needs, desires, etc. This also helps you to step back and not identify completely with whatever you’re experiencing – so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

That’s it!

I’ve combined these 3 skills into a step-by-step 3-10 minute process.

If you practice this even 10 times, you’ll start to see a major difference in your awareness and ability to stay present with fear and keep it from taking over your life and your actions!

Then you learn to use your compassion and curiosity to open a conversation with your fear and that’s when you start to get to the bottom of it and understand what’s it’s been trying to protect you from and why.

But the process isn’t meant to END with the conversation!

This is the biggest mistake I see people making when it comes to opening a dialogue with their fear or their scared inner child or their inner monster.

The conversation ends up being an endless negotiation in the mind that gives the fearful part WAY too much power to determine your course of action.

And when the fearful part gets to stay in ANY kind of control, it ends up demanding a certain amount of your energy all the time, to manage and deal with it and keep it from getting in the way.

The only part of you strong enough and spacious enough to fully RESOLVE a fear is your heart.

Your heart generates an electromagnetic field that’s 5000 times stronger than the field of your brain, where your fear comes from! (Thanks to Doc Childre and the HeartMath Institute for figuring that out.)

That’s why the process I use trains you to stay in your heart and identify yourself AS the spacious, larger Self that lives centered there ALL the time.

From this place, you CAN permanently resolve any fear, doubt or limitation.

Because it’s ONLY your heart that knows the real truth behind the fear. And that truth is ALWAYS beautiful and loving and will carry you into your life, never away from it.

On one level, this is SO simple.

And yet, the more you practice this, the deeper you can go and the more easily you can see through and resolve anything that’s keeping you from what you truly desire.

So this is why my latest report called:
(click the link to get it)

9 Confidence Busters & How to Vanquish Them Once & For All

can talk about permanently releasing fears, doubts and confidence-limiting beliefs.

It really IS possible.

And I’m going to be teaching the Fear-Whispering process to a group for the very first time in the Brand New Confidence 8-week program starting this Monday, October 10th, 2011.

Brand New Confidence is the first program of it’s kind to help people who’ve been hiding out or holding back from fully promoting themselves and their business through building both a great outer brand AND the inner confidence to promote fully.

Of course, I’m bringing the inner confidence part (and the fabulous Pamela Wilson is bringing the branding) and we’ll be working through and resolving all KINDS of fears, resistance, doubts, and limiting beliefs and it’s SO exciting I can hardly WAIT to get started on Monday!

Want to join us?

Get all the details, plus a $100 dollar discount ’til this Friday, Oct. 7th (2011) at 10 pm Eastern.

Click Below to Get Brand New Confidence

It really is possible and I plan to prove it to the 50 people who join us before  Monday!

It’s so easy to get caught up in our stories! The ones about who we are, how life is, how others treat us, how successful (or not) we are…and on and on.

I can easily get triggered into one of my stories and lose a whole evening harrumphing around in it – like I did last night.

But lately, I’m noticing a new kind of energy that seems intent on showing me my stories and helping me get over them already. And I’m seeing this show up in 2 different ways:

First, every state I’m in is slightly amplified.

So when I’m sad, it’s really obvious that I’m sad and when I’m distracted and not present with the people right in front of me, it’s so abundantly visible.

I’m describing it these days like “bat sonar” sending out my energies and emotional state and immediately sensing them “pinging” them back to me.

In this way,  I’m being shown the state I’m in and it’s effects on the world and the people around me very clearly.

It would be really easy to see this as a major downer if I was spending a lot of time judging everything that’s bouncing back to me.

But instead, I’m learning to unhook the moment of noticing from the immediate “cringe” that used to follow it. (Really I pretty much have to or I wouldn’t be getting out of bed!) And, hey…guess what? That cringing is TOTALLY optional! And now that it’s (almost) gone…

I’m learning to embrace this as a grace

I think of a grace as anything spontaneously given from Divine Love (we never EARN a grace – it just comes.)

And this is feeling like Spirit’s teaching tool because I can suddenly SEE my energy and emotions mirrored back to me so quickly and clearly. And once I can see them, I have the opportunity to make choices about them – and maybe even climb out of the ones I don’t like. Yay!

The second way this new energy is showing up is very curious indeed and I’m seeing it in more lives than just my own (which always makes me suspect that something more far reaching is afoot).

I’m calling it Divine Over-ride

It’s as though situations are coming up in our lives where we’re plunged into a set of circumstances that call us to get over things (like our stories) very, very fast.

WAY faster than we want to and way faster than we ever would on our own.

It’s not exactly “change or die” – it’s more like “change or suffer enormous unnecessary angst”.

I have a beautiful situation playing out in my own life right now in the form of someone truly wonderful who has come to live with us.

And I’ve recently discovered that the way she sees me and fully appreciates all my qualities (in ways that I rarely do myself) is completely over-riding and crashing all my internal programming about who I am and how I see myself and my place in the world.

And there’s just nothing to do in the face of this but let my story go!

In fact, the situation makes it SO obvious that hanging on to the story, habit, attachment or belief is just insane. After all, her story about me is beautiful. Why on earth would I trade it for my less glowing one?

I’m watching a similar situation playing out in my husband’s life too. He’s just started a new business and for years he was having a terrible time finding anyone interested in even talking about his work (having moved from a big city to a much smaller center).

Now suddenly, the doors are all swinging open and people are so glad he’s calling when they answer the phone.

And his old programs just don’t know what to make of this!

He said to me one day recently after a very positive phone call that a part of him is so taken aback that he wants to say to the person “Wait, let me tell you some of my story and then you won’t be so positive about me”.

Isn’t that crazy?

But that’s how our stories try to hang on.

This is our time to let go

I wrote last time about what I’m calling “The Quickening” – something that seems to be turning up the volume on the call of our hearts and on the urgency behind them.

Now it feels like we have a great opportunity to let the old stories be shown to us and the old programs Divinely and lovingly “crashed” for the sake of who we’re becoming.

Can you go with it?

Can you believe that this energy and chaos is really loving you into a new place and a new Self?

Which of your stories are going to feel SO great to let go of? Maybe it’s time for a small ritual of “write-them-down-and-burn-them” or something more appealing to your soul.

Leave them on the floor of the comment box, if that feels right. Let us know how this strikes you and/or how it’s playing out in your own life. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts below!

I wanted to wake up differently today. I wanted to be energized, refreshed, ready to get on to things.

But that’s not what’s here.

Today is dark inside. Something snide and mean is speaking, dripping little bits of acid on everything.

I’ve been waiting for something to surface.

For days my inner world has been foggy and aimless – with shades of un-named longing at the edges. I could feel an iceberg under the water, it’s tip not breaking the surface yet.

I’m almost relieved it’s finally here, ready to make itself known.

A part of me would like to push it back under, though. But I know that won’t be helpful. I know that all the energy I’ve been missing these last few days has been caught up in managing this lump of inner stuff as it’s been rising into my awareness.

And I’ve done this many, many times before. So I know a few things that make it possible to actually welcome this feeling, like:

• I will not be annihilated by this
• I will be more alive once I’ve been fully present with it
• It has something immensely wise to tell me

So I dive inside.

Breathe. Feel it.

Deeper.

I’m watching the part of me that gets off on the drama of this. I keep it in check.

I know if I really nursed this heavy, dark feeling I could be in a full blown depression within days. Part of me is SO compelled to follow it – I don’t know why.

Oh, wait….

I remember the wisest thing I was ever taught:  the part of me that’s feeling the feeling is CAUSING the feeling.

Riiiiiiiiight.

There it is…..an agenda….right behind the blackness.

I know what this is, now….this is my edge.

The place my ego doesn’t want me to go beyond.

And if it can just get me back into that old familiar sinkhole where I know that nothing is possible and it’s all crap anyway, then I won’t move forward and it won’t be scary.

But there’s a seed of something else here, too. The bitter hopelessness is just a cover.

Underneath is a pure, clear anger.

Aaaaahhhhh. Now feel that!… That’s my antidote to this sad, sinking pessimism.

That’s where all the aliveness has been hiding! It’s explosive. It can move me.

Breathe into it.

This morning’s deep disappointment must have brought this to the surface. A part of me was ready to settle and just go complacently along.

But this other part says – roars – NO!

This part is ready to show me how to be LESS tolerant when it’s right.

This part of me is all for going WAY beyond that edge. Because the stuff I really want is over there. And it’s not time to settle.

I’m always SO relieved once I know what’s really going on in there.

It’s like a bogey man in the closet until I can actually name it.

It’ll take a day or so for me to own and engage this new energy. I’ve learned not to push that part of the resolution. Maybe my body needs to move. This writing has helped…a lot!

I’ll take an action to honour it – to let it know that it’s wise message was felt and heard. And I’ll thank it.

And I’ll breathe with whatever shows up next….I hope.  = >

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.

If you’d like to sign up to get the next installment by email or in a feed reader, you can subscribe now.

What to do...what to do....

I’m just starting to get into exploring the whole “blogosphere” and finding like minded others to read and hang out with. And I found a gem today that I want to share with you.

Briana at Blisscovery wrote a funny and insightful post about the dialogue she had with a personal trainer trying to pressure her to commit to a contract after a free session, and also about the inner dialogue she had with herself about her right to take her own sweet time.

Take a look here:  I can make broccoli an unhealthy decision.

Then come back and leave me a comment below  and let me know if you enjoyed this.

And if you’re enjoying these posts,  go ahead, treat yourself and subscribe to receive free updates.

Today was a heavy day. And yet it was a really good day and I’m really relieved at the end of it.

You Are Here!

Today I finally made space to just be present with some things that I’ve been trying like crazy NOT to feel. And they were uncomfortable…but, as it turns out, they weren’t nearly as uncomfortable as the frantic state I was in while I was trying to avoid them!

And the thing that made the biggest difference…  today in being able to just sit and breathe and be present and feel them is this:

I finally acknowledged that where I am now is exactly right and this is just where I’m supposed to be.

You see, for weeks now, I’ve been reflecting on and processing some very difficult events that happened in November. And I’ve been saying that I should be “over them” by now – that this moping about is just silly – that it wasn’t even that bad…and on and on.

Yet when I looked at how my life is feeling to me right now, I had to admit to myself that I’m really not coping very well these days.

You can ask my husband! I’ve had a “hair trigger” lately and I seem to be just inches away from anger at any given moment. I get overwhelmed easily and I’m way more exhausted than usual and I seem to need or just want a LOT of sleep.

And when I finally gave myself full permission to be right here, not over it yet at all, it became so very clear that there’s a part of me still feeling really traumatized by these events and needing time and space for healing to occur.

I suddenly had way more compassion for the me that’s been bitchy and angry and exhausted because of a healing process that I was making silly and wrong.

And this opportunity to honour and address what’s real in my heart always feels sacred to me and I find I’m able to rest in it.

Even though feeling this stuff was just a little bit “icky” at first, I’m so relieved to finally be getting what I need, and not pushing myself to be somewhere I’m just not yet.

So today I’d like to offer you the gift of knowing the incredibly perfect and sacred “rightness” of exactly where you are right now.

What’s going on under the surface that you’ve been telling yourself “shouldn’t” be there? Take a moment and breathe with it and give yourself full permission to be right where you are now, whatever that means to you.

And, just for a little while at least, stop pushing yourself to be “farther ahead” or somewhere different and see how delicious this feels.

And then do it some more! = >

I was driving back to Halifax from Middleton, Nova Scotia the other morning and had a chance to hear Jian Ghomeshi on CBC radio interviewing John Patrick Shanley, the writer of the Pulitzer prize-winning play that was recently made into the movie Doubt.

And he said a brilliant thing : that doubt is the space where another person can touch us.

It’s a place inside where we let up on our need for total conviction and actually allow ourselves to be open and even affected by another person’s thoughts, opinions and emotions on a given topic. Even to the degree where we might actually change our own thoughts and emotions in response to theirs!

This is exactly the kind of dialogue that I’m deeply interested in, both between us and within us as well.

It’s been very interesting to watch myself getting clearer and clearer on what I’m really about just by watching what kind of things are moving me to post and how I respond to them.

And I’ve realized that my most favorite topics of resistance, desire and their alchemical meeting place is really, at its essence, an absolute love of the Dialogue. The place where one side meets the other and they transform each other.

And further still, it’s a love for the Space that makes the Dialogue possible. And this is what John Patrick Shanley is speaking to so beautifully.

He said he wrote the original play at the time when the case for the Iraq war was being made and there was a serious lack of dialogue about the evidence for “weapons of mass destruction”. He said that people would tell him that they believed the wmd’s existed but they couldn’t tell him why and he was even more troubled that the very act of doubt itself was made “unpatriotic” in that climate.

Apparently when an interviewer told Meryl Streep (who plays the main character of the school principal) that he was sure her character was right, she replied “Then we have failed.”

We’re meant NOT to know, because what John Patrick Shanley wants most is for the movie to be “the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.”

My kind of movie! I haven’t seen it yet but very soon, when I do, I’ll expect to be left wondering, and I hope I can be spacious enough to let someone else’s opinions about it truly touch me.