Using Fear to Awaken Courage | Guided Meditation #109

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Guided meditation is for so many people, the best way to truly gain benefit in your response to personal challenges. As you invest in bringing your own experience to the guided meditations, you'll give yourself the best chance to change long standing patterns from suffering toward a state of well being, peace and healing. It's important to put yourself in a comfortable body position in a private space where you're not disturbed. Turn off your phone and be ready to really be alert.

So take a few moments, maybe even minutes, and put your hand on your heart if you feel comfortable. If you feel more comfortable, just imagine your heart and put your attention there, knowing you wish to bring tenderness to your heart. And anchor this by finding a breathing pattern that feels soothing to you. Ask yourself, where has fear most existed in your life? Because it's critical that you really identify the fears that have most affected you. Being able to sense it, maybe even have a little bit of the tremble, means you're going deeply enough into it that it helps make a deeper imprint inside not only your conscious mind, but your unconscious mind. And you're looking to see if you can have a response. When you identify the fear that you appreciate it. Maybe you have to start off with tolerating it or accepting it, but after a while you realize, if I can see my fear clearly, I'm so glad that it's not going to unconsciously rule me and I have a chance to be able to ask those critical questions of how can I care for myself, how can I soothe myself? What qualities do I need to help move me toward the courage and the strength that will allow my fear to guide me? Do you recognize that all of us, and you feel the fear because there's something important that's there that stimulates that reaction. If there's a snake out there and you're afraid of it, your safety is very important. If you're afraid you can't communicate with your lover, then that's very important. Fear comes because it's a symbol of importance. The more you get that, the more respect you'll have for any fear that you have. And when you start to realize you have a tool that's going to guide you in the direction toward courage or safety, you'll be more bold and more qualitatively accepting the fear itself. You may even say something like, may I have the courage to. To feel the fear and humbly accept it and inquire, what would I think? What can I do to support myself to move toward courage? And how do I access as much of the quality of Courage as possible. Now that's a mouthful but, but hopefully you're getting the meaning. I want to embrace my fear, tolerate it, accept it, appreciate it as much as possible and then guide myself with this prayer like quality of I want to move toward courage. Now I think if you look honestly in your life, you'll see that fear usually has more of a monopoly. It's not on automatic pilot, that you have this caring impulse that knows it wants to guide you toward courage or safety or at least toward being kind toward the fear at first so you can then make that extra move toward the courage and safety. This is not a John Wayne movie where you just throw away the fear and you just go straight to courage. This is a very real to life recognition that fear is hardwired in all of us. We're all mortal beings, we're all going to face illness, we're all going to face deep losses. So we're all going to have fear and we're not going to just click, make it go away. What we can do is embrace it and then recognize the second step of this questioning and guiding ourselves to the immediate thoughts. Like it's natural to have fear. It's really okay that I have fear. I want to do something with this fear. I want to move in a direction towards courage with this fear. And that you start to have a tandem reaction, a inclusive reaction that's going to guide you toward the qualities that are going to most help you really take care of yourself when you're afraid. So take a look again. Does this make sense to you? If it makes sense to you, you're going to want to bring these together. You're going to want to really embrace your fear. You're going to want to find that question of how can I take care of myself in the beginning? Those thoughts are critical, that it's okay that I have the fear and I want to move in this direction. That's the starting point. It's not the end point, but it's the critical starting point. If there's no fear in your life, that means the stakes in your life are very low. And it's pretty likely you're living a life that's really clinging to safety. So it's a badge of honor if you have fears, especially the ones that are new, because it means you're stretching in life. I want to repeat what's really like an informal prayer. May I embrace my fear with as much reverence and trust, maybe even appreciation as possible. And at the same time ask the question, how can I move toward courage, or at times, toward safety. Can you feel a rhythm, a sense of an informal prayer to your conscious mind? And really, you're also speaking to your unconscious mind. Because your unconscious mind, the part of you that you're not aware of, can be reached. When you say something to yourself over and over and over again, it imprints you, which will make it much more likely that when you're afraid, there'll be an automatic reflex that's being developed, a groove that's being developed that's asking that question, how can I move toward courage? May you do this to your capacity and plant seeds to continue to remember each time fear enters your life. See if you can see how this allows you not to be afraid of the fear. It's natural to be afraid of the fear and then to withdraw if you think that's a dead end. But when you know that your fear can be a catalyst toward you developing courage, you're going to be so much more inclined to welcome the fear and then to welcome the question. This is my wish for you, for all of us, so that we can live a life where we accept our human side, in this case fear. And we guide ourselves toward a dignified courage that allows both feeling and this quality to coexist together. May this be so more and more for your life.