Who Are You Without Your Fears?

Does your childhood anxiety rule your adult interests?

When we’re born into this world we are aligned with God-Source in a way adults are no longer. Children’s optimism (God-Source’s perspective) is seen as naïve. Cynical adults teach children to be increasingly pessimistic. We’re taught to ignore the God-Source vibration through relational pressures. If you align more with that higher perspective, your peers and elders will see you as idealistic, having your head in the clouds (or sand), or naïve.

We are taught by our elders to fear everything from the dirt below us to the sun above us, our climate, our neighbors, and even our emotions. Many parents don't like having to deal with angry or sad children, so their children may be taught that having emotions (like anger or sadness) is bad. They’re taught to stuff those emotions down and put on a calm, brave face. That has been described as living in a glass house and burying the “negative” emotions under the ground you walk on so that no one else can see them. The problem with that is eventually you forget they’re down there too.

Most parents don’t face their own fears, and so they can’t pass down the benefits of facing fears to their children. This means most people have a bunch of stuffed-down emotions that they are too afraid to face head-on. When they’re afraid, rather than acknowledge that fear, many people will play the victim and scapegoat someone else as a “persecutor” who is supposedly the one at fault. That’s actually responsibility shifting because that person has the responsibility to face their fears, rather than take out their fear on other people via authoritarian laws or mandates.

Most people are so busy and scared to face these things that they don’t even consciously know it’s happening. They project their issues onto other people instead. For instance, a person afraid of gun violence has a problem with feeling safe (that likely originated in their early home life). Rather than deal with those fears, they simply project the responsibility to keep them feeling safe onto their elected politicians. They may become an activist lobbying for heavier gun control. Even if that person got what they wanted and the country banned guns completely, it wouldn’t actually make them feel safe. It’s essentially like chasing a rainbow. They will still have the vibration of fear until they decide to face the fear and let it go.

I’ve also written about how people who identify as “transgender” are chasing after feeling comfortable with their desire (and sometimes demands) for the use of their “preferred” pronouns. If they get everything they’re asking for, it still won’t fill the childhood hole inside of them that keeps them feeling uncomfortable with their identity. They will keep that vibration of discomfort in who they were born as until they face it.

There is help available for them if they would be willing to look at the root causes and look back to the start of the uncomfortable feelings and meditate and visualize being comfortable with who they were born as. Our society and mental health services are doing them a disservice by not looking at the original cause. Affirmation of an incorrect identity is not “safe and effective” as activists claim.

Samskaras: Emotional Wounds

When a child has a moment where they’ve suppressed a strong emotion due to some traumatic event in their life it creates an emotional wound. I refer to the emotional trauma left behind as samskaras.

In Indian philosophy and some Indian religions, samskaras or sanskaras (Sanskrit: संस्कार) are mental impressions, recollections, or psychological imprints. In Hindu philosophies, samskaras are a basis for the development of karma theory.^[1][2]

In Buddhism, the Sanskrit term samskara is used to describe "mental formations"

Taken from Wikipedia

You can get a samskara stuck in your “vibration.” To release them, you have to be willing to feel them and let those emotions up and out of you. That is terrifying. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. But when you are triggered you will benefit from sitting with those emotions more than attempting to run away from them because as you allow them up, they get released.

Releasing Samskaras: Purging the Toxins

If you’re anything like me you’ve had plenty of those moments where you’ve pushed an emotion down to focus on something else or to try to ignore them. But that’s like eating toxins. It just stays within you making life more and more difficult the more times you do it.

The process of purging toxins is not pleasant. As I said it can be terrifying. But when you release the old negative emotions, they will no longer be a part of what you’re attracting into your life.

Back to the gun example. If you’re afraid of guns, you will attract things/stories that remind you that “guns are unsafe.” What you resist, persists. The more fear you have of something specific, the more you will see that thing in your life because where your attention goes, energy flows and that keeps attracting it back to you. When you rid yourself of the fear, that attraction will disappear. When you feel safe, you will attract things that remind you of how safe you are.

Carefully Release Samskaras

You release them by sitting with the emotions rather than fighting or suppressing them. What I’ve learned is that just sitting with them can be harmful as well because of an overload of adrenaline is not good. You’re basically sitting in the fear response soaking in adrenaline and the body wants to fight or flee. So what I do now is I go for a walk or to the gym after (or during) a stressful situation like this. That allows the body to release the excess energy.

I’ve heard that walking (or running) is good for stress because it helps you feel like you’re getting away from the threat physically. Many of the original wounds were caused when children were unable to get away. Allowing yourself to revisit those emotions and combining it with the knowledge that you can get away now while also using up that adrenaline the stress caused can bring some closure to the event.

EMDR - Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing

EMDR is a therapy used for people who have PTSD. You move your eyes to the left and right, back and forth, while revisiting the traumatic event, feelings, and beliefs. In the video below, Dr. Andrew Huberman says:

“These lateral eye movements quiet the amygdala. They actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala. Turns out—the way that we view the visual world when we move through space-when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space, when you’re walking, when you’re moving forward toward something. And that suppresses activation of the amygdala.”

“When we move forward in the face of a threat - and obviously we want to do this in healthy adaptive ways - we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward and there is a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dompamine reward. Those reward centers then trigger the release of domaine to reward forward effort in the face of stress or threat.”

The amygdala senses that you’re moving forward through eye movement, so you can get the benefits from walking or running, but you can also get some from looking back and forth. To release excess energy you should still try to get some exercise in.

Who Are You Without These Fears?

Would you still be an activist? Would you still be interested in the things you cling to that help you feel a little bit safer?