I’ve spent my life running from my fears. Most of us have. I mean, who wants to go down the mental path of playing out a worst-case scenario to its bitter end? Seems too intense to face such harsh realities. Going deep into our fears is more than most of us are ready to embrace.

So we resist. Maybe we don’t even realize we’re resisting. We think we’ve thought about the fears, and we think they’re overwhelming, so we think we’ve gone there. Think, think, think. But thinking isn’t really going there. Thinking isn’t feeling. What we’re really afraid of is feeling those fears. So indeed, we resist them. And the cycle continues.

Fear. Resist. Control. Fear. Resist. Control.

Fear is louder than love. This is scientifically proven. We are physiologically designed to have something called a negativity bias. It’s built into our DNA to protect us from danger. The negativity bias is a result of the of the fight-or-flight response that is activated in our limbic system during negative experiences, such as being chased by a tiger (or exposure to an environmental toxin that leads to symptoms of dis-ease in someone with mystery illness). The adrenaline rush and increased heart rate that occur with the fight-or-flight response cause negative events to be experienced more intensely and imprinted on the brain more firmly than positive events.

Fear is nonsensical much of the time. Like my fear of hotels. Even fancy ones. What?! My mind knows this doesn’t make sense, but my body feels the fear. I get nauseous and spacey and a clenching in my gut when I go to hotels. I’ve tried to make logical sense of it—pinpointing the moment in time when this neurotic fear seemed to spring up, notably after a night spent in a mouse and mold infested motel that left me with an allergic reaction that made my head feel as if it was going to explode. But knowing that doesn’t make my body calm down. I’m still a work in progress.

We all have fears. Yours likely show up differently from mine, though they probably include extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego-death at their root.

I used to be a world-class hypochondriac (fear of extinction/death and mutilation), especially after my children were born and I received all the warnings about germs and newborns. It’s one thing to be worried about getting sick yourself, but that little being you spent nine months creating inside your body that now relies unequivocally on you to protect him from the myriad of dangers in the world? No amount of hand sanitizer and avoidance of sneezing family members could calm my nerves about the potential harm that could come to these little vulnerable beings.

Then I got sick. Very sick. And over a decade, I learned about the body’s innate ability to protect and heal itself when given the proper environment. As I slowly healed myself from the inside out, I began to emerge from the “safe” bubble I had concocted to protect me from the outside world. Instead, I re-entered life feeling emboldened and full of trust that my connection to the world around me—microbes and all—was precisely what would sustain me and allow me to experience a life of abundance and joy.

Back to that fear-resist-control thing. We all have our fears, as nonsensical as they may be, because we’re products of our life circumstances and programming. Pitting our fears against their fears keeps us in judgment and further from love. Understanding that it’s simply human nature to attempt to control a situation by clinging to a side or like-minded group can go a long way in helping us to be more compassionate and understand that we’re all in this together. In a world that often seems black and white, it can be scary for the mind to play in the gray because it’s so uncertain. The gray doesn’t have the answers. The gray is always changing. The gray is unknown. The gray requires trust and surrender. But the gray is most resonate with the physical body. It’s not rigid. It’s soft.

One way I’ve found to lean into the gray more is to play out my fears. To use my mind to take me down the complete path of the fear and (this is key!) allow my body to feel the emotions that come along when I engage in that mental playground. Once the emotions of the worst-case scenarios are allowed to be felt, the fear begins to lose its power.

Because on the deepest level, I know that I’m loved and held by something much greater than my mind can conceive. And I’ll be okay.

Connecting with Your Fear

Avocado to Zen