Love or Fear

All of life comes down to one thing. Choosing love or choosing fear.

So how do we learn how to deal with fear and choose love? Here are three ways to do this.

Recognize its voice

To know if you are in love or in fear, listen to how you are talking to yourself. The voice of fear is always rushed, fast paced. The thoughts come quickly, and the questions are never followed up with possible solutions, just more questions. For example,

You are working on starting a blog. Fear will start talking down to you as such,

You are never going to finish that piece. You do this every time. Why don’t you just give up, you are going to fail. You are going to amount to nothing. (Laughter)

Fear blows things way out of proportion and speaks in absolutes like always and never. You’ll notice your stomach start to tighten. Fear demands big, overnight success type progress. It’s all or nothing.

Love speaks more slowly. It will give you a glimpse of joy so pure it’s scary, like a flash of your book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Your stomach tenses but in an excited/nervous way. Love will try to charm you and say,

Look, you aren’t writing because you are scared and that’s okay. You always get scared but you always manage to do a little bit. Maybe you should go outside for a walk and come back to it. 

Love doesn’t badger you, it offers suggestions and yet, it is firm and will not let you off the hook. Love points to other people who started small and had huge success.

Stop Blame and Criticism

One of fear’s favorite aliases is blame. It works like this. You’ve got a deadline to meet or a great new opportunity presents itself to you. You are scared you might not be able to pull it off. The fear will lurk silently until your significant other innocently comes home from the office and you read them the riot act about embellished offenses such as:

1. We never do anything together anymore
2. Your mother/brother/boss has an attitude towards me
3. You never help me

Fear wants to take away our biggest supporters and waste our time and creativity on arguing.

We have to praise our allies and commit to ourselves that we will not blame them. This can be extremely challenging at first, sort of like cutting off a drink from a drunk. Take this option off the table though, and you are back in your personal power.

Take action – any action

Linda Joy spoke yesterday on Positive Mental Shift about being invited to an author conference in New York City. It was celebrating one of her spiritual mentors, Louise Hay, and was a dream come true for her. However, her fear stepped right in to try to mess it up for her. It tried to tell her she couldn’t get there because she wasn’t a big city girl.

But Linda took a baby step and booked her Amtrak ticket. And guess what?  She “suddenly” remembered a close friend who lived there who said Linda could stay with her. And, the friend drove her to the event! So, as Linda said, she took a baby step (buying the train ticket) and the universe lined up all of the other support.

This works even if you are not being invited to author parties in NYC {yet}. If you are very depressed, than your action step might be taking a shower or throwing on sweats and going out for a coffee.

It might be crying yourself to sleep tonight but deciding not to drink for 24 hours.

Sometimes, our only next step is to set an intention or to pray for help.

But we always have a next move.

Take it and step into Love!

Live Faithfully,
Mal