If you've read much on my blog, you'll see that this subject has been one of my most challenging experiences in my life. Fearing the fear consumed my life at one time, but over the years and through my healing, I've learned more how to deal with fear.
I am not going to sit here and write that fear is an easy thing for me to overcome. I'm not going to give you some platitude or meme that says you can wave a magic wand and be in control of fear. Those things are not helpful to healing and our growth. They are stumbling blocks if we subscribe to them.
When I was in a healing session the other day, I started to notice the little things where fear would come on strong in me. In these Unified Therapy healing sessions, we are encouraged to bring the fear up, not shove it down or hide from it or numb it. It is the time to bring it up.
The "oh no" mode...
For me that day, the office air conditioning kicking on sent the fear going sky high. It wasn't easy, and at first, I could notice my breath going into fear mode. I could feel my body begin to tense up. I could see that my mind was starting to go into the "oh no" mode. It felt like everything was going to come crashing down on me and that my life at that moment would come to an end.
Fearing the fear was where I was in that particular moment. There are reasons that all of this was coming up, but that detail is for another blog post. Just recognizing how strong the fear was getting and how much was coming at me, my body went into the defensive mode of survival.
In a Unified Therapy healing session, you don't stay in this moment. You are taken through it by Dr. Canali gently guiding you to feel in your body, sense what is going on, and remind yourself that it is fear, not the end of the world.
As you go in and begin to connect with the fear in your body, there are often emotions or physical sensations that appear as they did for me that day. The anger and pain surfaced. The emotions of sadness and grief showed up. The point of not being able to stop what had happened to me as a kid was the dynamite ready to ignite.
In this session, I also did one more thing, and that was telling myself that what happened to me many years ago is not happening now. Dr. Canali, of course, was coaching me through this, but just that realization in that particular moment was a big one for me. It helped me to connect reality with fear. It helped me to see that I feared the fear, but that the current reality was different.
Yes, there is a mental exercise in stopping how you deal with fear, but this approach that is so healing and empowering is body centered. If I didn't deal with what was going on in my body, it would be nothing more than platitudes about how to treat fear.
Most of the time in healing, we deal with fear from an intellectual mind-centered level. However,
fear resides in the body, and if you fail to go in and touch the depths of it within the cells, you're only working with half the healing potential.
The further you can go in and feel it within the body, the more you will supercharge your healing. Healing from the core of your cells in the body is lasting and life changing.
Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by
Don Shetterly
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