
Note: I shared this on Facebook one year ago (thank you FB memories!), but it still holds true today—perhaps even moreso. It’s a beautiful reminder of how much I’ve transformed—how much fear I’ve let go of through this inner healing and soul journey and how I’ve learned to trust my intuition and let my heart lead me. Love is what is true, what is real, and in times of lack of faith and trust and yes, even fear, this is what I hold onto...
“My friend shared a recent experience that left her feeling unsettled. In recounting the experience, she wrote something that made me catch my breath:
‘I know bad things can and do happen. They already have to me many times. But I also know what living in fear has robbed from me. It has robbed me of my ability to trust my gut and to make calm, calculated, common sense decisions. It has made my brain jump to every possible worst case scenario. Fear makes me think of all the angles I can imagine to avoid any pain yet it has spared me no pain and only stolen my in-the-present-moment joy.’
I can't even begin to explain how true this is and how much it breaks my heart because this fear that I carry with me has taken so much joy, so much happiness, so much love away from me. It has kept me locked in my own head, reliving the past, worrying about the future, making me unable to appreciate what is.
The thing is, fear is what I've known. When you're chronically ill, your life becomes about survival. I have lived the majority of my life with this illness, adapting as best I could as new symptoms cropped up until I couldn't adapt anymore--until this disease came out in full swing and tried to take me down, trying to kill me without ever granting me that peace. My everyday is now listening to my intuition so that I can know how to take care of myself. My intuition therefore becomes only about survival, self-preservation.
But how do I learn to trust my intuition when there is something good, when it's always trying to protect me from the bad? How do I trust myself enough to let down my guard and open my heart and welcome in the positive when my fight or flight instinct is always ramped up to a level 100. When I want to run from everything as a method of self-preservation, when I feel like I need to protect everyone I love from myself. When I need to protect me from me.
How do I clear these fears that seem to be programmed inside of me from years and years of self and societal conditioning? How do I shift out of this fear-based paradigm--this physical survival--and into acceptance that I am here. I am loved. I am.
Fear is what I've known. But I also know love. And I know that the two cannot coexist.
So maybe it starts with this: acknowledgment that fear is false. Insecurity is false. Doubt is false. The only truth is love and when there's love, fear cannot exist within the same space.
I choose love. Fear will come around again, I know. I'm not immune to it. But I'm making the conscious effort to choose love. Again and again and again.
Love infinity.”