An introduction to living fearlessly.
I’m often asked this question. The idea of being fearless evokes different thoughts and feelings for each of us.
We all experience fear sometimes, so what do I even mean by living fearlessly?
I’ll do my best to explain how I see it right now. Since embarking on my ‘Year Of Living Fearlessly,’ adventure, and writing my new book. I’ve experienced a continuous wave of insights.
They’ve ranged from the ordinary, garden variety, right through to the mind blowing, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I never saw THIS before!’ type.
It’s been an incredible year where the ground beneath my feet has shifted and tilted to the degree where I’ve sometimes observed myself thinking, ‘what the hell am I doing?’ or ‘I didn’t sign up for this!’ It turns out that when we throw our hat in the transformation ring, our lives do begin to transform in ways we never imagined possible.
It’s a bit like being caught in a storm. We yearn for our life to change and then when torrential rain hits we don’t like getting wet! We try to resist what life puts in front of us because we’re afraid of the repercussions.
We may ask questions such as, ‘Can I handle this if it really happens?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be better to play it safe so I don’t need to deal with any uncomfortable feelings?’
And for me this is the essence of living fearlessly. The more we lean into living life in the moment, not the future, or the past, the more we experience the truth of how life really works.
The more we see how it really works, the less there is to be afraid of. When we see the truth of how our experience works, we no longer need to be terrified of it. And when the sun comes out, as it always does at some point, we feel a sense of hope and renewed optimism.
Fearful thoughts are only thoughts. Contrary to the widely held belief in the law of attraction movement, it turns out that every thought doesn’t create a thing. It doesn’t work in quite the way I previously thought. Sometimes we seem to be able to cosmically order stuff and sometimes not … It doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to play the manifesting game.
On the other hand, what’s universally true is that we always create our experience of things. One day our business looks amazing. The following day it may look like a shackle around our wrist. Our business didn’t change. Our thoughts about the possibilities, shifted. And our thoughts shift continuously because that’s how humans think.
Thought is one of The Three Principles which underpins the fearless understanding. Thought creates our feelings. What we do with those feelings is up to us. We can lash out in insecurity in an innocent attempt to stop the painful feelings, or we can allow the feelings to have their way with us. They will move on of their own accord once our thoughts settle down.
Living Fearlessly can be this easy or this challenging. For me, my clients and colleagues, it seems to be a dance between the two. Sometimes we see so clearly just how simple life is. And at others, our thinking is polluted with the lies we make up about how unworthy we are and how difficult everything is.
As with all of life it’s always the meaning we assign to it that makes the difference to the joy or suffering we feel in the moment.
Living fearlessly is an effortless, intuitive way of being that changes everything.
