Before the pandemic, Vicki used to go out with people all the time—for meals, drinks, coffees, whatever was suggested.  If somebody invited her, she just said yes. She never stopped to ask herself if she wanted to go, she just went because “it’s what you did.”  Yes was a habit; more socializing meant she was living a better, more exciting life.  But since the pandemic, since stepping off the social treadmill, Vicki’s changed.

Throughout this shutdown, so many of us have realized that a lot of what we were doing pre-Covid, how we filled our time, was simply because we’d been conditioned to do it that way, because we were following social norms that told us we should live that way, and everyone else was living that way.  Pre-pandemic, we were busy doing a lot of things because it’s just what we did, but not necessarily because it’s what we wanted to do, or for that matter, what actually made us feel well.

The cultural narrative running right now is that we all can’t wait to get back to our busy social lives, to fill up our social calendars.  But in fact, many people, maybe you included, feel something very different; many report being surprised by how much they’ve enjoyed not having to socialize, not being on the go all the time, and not doing everything that might potentially be interesting—getting off the doing horse.

When what you should do is off the table because it’s no longer possible, often, you discover something truly remarkable, namely, what you want to do.  What many people have realized over this time is that what they want to do is a whole lot less than what they were doing pre-pandemic.  It may have felt like a great relief to not have to run around and see everyone, to get to have time to yourself, to pay attention to your own wants and needs.  If so, you’re more normal than you think.

This is one of the true silver linings in this pandemic. We’ve become more aware of what’s true for us, and how we actually want and like to spend our time.  This time off the grid has made it clear that our life would look a whole lot different if we were given (or gave ourselves) permission to consult our own gut for how we want to spend our time and with whom, as opposed to just following the rules, acting from conditioning, and doing what we think is normal.

You may also feel a sense of dread in returning to your social calendar.  There may be anxiety around getting back to regular social interacting, fear that you no longer know how to be with other people, what to say or how to behave.  Or, that you won’t be able to bear small talk anymore.  As if the time away has rendered you socially disabled.  This, too, is normal.  You’ve gone into your cave and it can feel hard to come back out.  You may like it there.  Rest assured, your social skills will return and you will remember how to talk to people.  As you get back into the world, it will feel less daunting and laborious.  And yet, as it gets easier and more second nature, what’s important is that you stay awake to how much socializing, what sorts of it, and with whom you actually want in your life.  As getting together with other people becomes more routine, don’t lose the precious question that’s in front of you right now: How do you actually want to do this thing we call socializing?

As you prepare to launch back into the world, don’t squander the glorious silver lining this pandemic has offered.  Don’t just mindlessly throw yourself back into the same life you were living before Covid, before you were given this profound opportunity to stop and see what kind of life you really want.  If you choose to get back on the social hamster wheel, the doing treadmill, do it mindfully, because you want to do it.  In this moment, you are standing at a crossroads, choose wisely how you want to proceed.  You are about to start building new habits so let them be habits you want to create.

You’ve discovered how you want to spend your time, who you want to see, and how often.  Consider how much should you want in your calendar, and how much want; perhaps the balance has shifted.  Contemplate what you’ve learned about your own attention and whether you are someone you want to spend time with going forward.  Hold onto this newfound reverence for your own company, and heed it.  Put time with yourself in your calendar as you reenter your social world.

The post Has the Pandemic Changed Your Desire to Socialize? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

So, what are we to do with all this anxiety? When the new normal is anxious, when living with a constant sense of fear is just how it is, can we, also, feel peaceful and even well (without being delusional or in denial)?

While it may not be what we want to hear, the only way through our anxiety is through it. In order to ease our anxiety, we have to stop running from it and actually experience it.

Amped up on caffeine, I had spent the morning busying myself with one task after another. With a hyper-zealous, Virgo-style efficiency, I was getting an inordinate amount done, which was good, but I could also sense a kind of franticness in myself. As productive as I felt, I also knew that it wouldn’t have been possible to stop moving, stop getting stuff done, stop accomplishing, stop checking the boxes, just plain stop. I could tell that I was running, internally and externally. And so, after 400 years of spiritual practice, lo and behold, it occurred to me to stop and ask myself what I was running from.

When I asked myself this question, however, I was careful not to frame it as an intellectual quandary. Such an inquiry can easily become an invitation to describe (to ourselves) all the things we’re anxious about, to mentally regurgitate the list of scary things and remind ourselves why we have a right to be afraid. But ultimately, this is not helpful, not in any deep sense. We already know what we’re afraid of and why. Naming it may be helpful for our mind, but it doesn’t usually make us feel any better at a gut level.

When we become aware of the fact that we’re running from something inside ourselves, when we feel like we can’t stop or desperately don’t want to stop doing or “tasking,” that’s our cue that we really do need to stop. We have to (compassionately) override the instinctive part of our brain that’s desperately trying to keep us away from what scares us.

My advice is the last thing on earth you want to hear. I get it. I spent years, even decades, running, literally and figuratively, moving and doing, accomplishing anything and everything. I got all sorts of accolades for my running, but my real work was in learning to stop. That is, to get inside here and feel its edges, no matter what here contains.

When we feel the anxiety of what’s happening in our world these days, we can invite ourselves, albeit counterintuitively, directly into the experience of what we’re calling anxiety. Not our story or narrative on it, but the experience itself, what it feels like in our senses. We can literally say to ourselves, feel this, feel its edges, feel its uncomfortableness. Simultaneously, we can give ourselves permission to not have to understand it, figure it out, solve it, make it feel better, or make it go away. But simply to get inside it, step into it like a wet suit you wear scuba diving.

Maybe it’s all my years of being a serious athlete, of pushing my body and mind past what felt possible, but there’s something challenging (in a good way) and even exciting about experiencing something hard, about getting inside the experience of uncomfortableness. There’s a real payoff when we do hard things and stretch outside our comfort zone. Dropping into our actual experience, whether it’s anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, whatever it is, can in fact be a fascinating and beneficial exercise.

And here’s the thing: When we stop running and drop into whatever is here under all the running; when we let ourselves travel into the eye of the storm and the center of our experience, remarkably, we feel better. It’s the paradox of all paradoxes: When we allow ourselves to experience our anxiety, we feel less anxious (and that’s true for most everything). It’s as if the anxiety benefits or is soothed by our own presence.

But, I repeat, experiencing it is not telling ourselves about it, listing its causes, or trying to solve it. Experiencing it is not blaming ourselves or anyone else for it. Experiencing it is not collapsing into our emotional storylines about it. It is just (and yes, I’m laughing as I write “just”) a matter of inhabiting the experience itself, getting inside it, and if it works for you to imagine, feeling its edges.

So, give it a whirl. The next time you feel anxious or any other unwanted emotion, try thinking of it as a challenge. If you’re like me, you can make it a kind of athletic or spiritual challenge, like climbing Mount Everest. Instead of distracting yourself from the emotion, do the least intuitive thing possible: Stop and drop into the experience itself, lean into the feeling you’re running from. Feel what it’s like, get inside its edges. Wear it. Hey, if the experiment is a disaster and experiencing it proves worse than running from it, you can always peel off the wetsuit and put your sneakers back on (and unsubscribe from my blog). Let me know how it goes.

The post Surviving 2020, One Panic Attack at a Time appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Our basic state of wellbeing is obscured because of the essential paradigm (or misunderstanding) we live by, namely, that we are human doings, not human beings.  We see ourselves, our value, as being the sum total of our experiences and accomplishments—what we’ve gotten done.  Many people grow up with parents who, in trying to do right by their kids, are constantly showing them how to improve themselves and find better ways to be productive.  On its face there’s nothing wrong with wanting to teach our kids to make things happen or be good at doing things, but children often grow up feeling that they are loved precisely because of their ability to do, accomplish, and succeed.  That if they were to stop being productive, they would cease to belong and be loved.

Our doings are what we believe we have to offer, what make people proud of us, love us, and even more fundamentally, what we think we are made of, the very substance of our being.  Who we are, our identity, is what we accomplish, what we can do and have done. We are good, lovable and important if we are productive; if we’re productive, we matter.  I have seen countless people living on the anxious treadmill of productivity, terrified to step off and pause—to stop doing—and thus risk losing their basic sense of worth.

If we even dare to think about stopping, stepping off the wheel of productivity, our mind tells us that we will be lazy, passive, taking the easy way out, getting nothing done, being worthless.  Boiled down, the mind convinces us that if we stop doing, we’re bad.  If we stop striving, we will end up with nothing—doing nothing, getting nothing, being nothing.  We are conditioned to believe that if we don’t whip ourselves into action, don’t demand continual accomplishment and forward movement, we will collapse into sloth and torpor as it’s the only other option to the wheel we’re trapped on.

We don’t trust that if we were to allow ourselves to stop, to be where we are without trying to get somewhere else, that our own organic desire to do, create and take action would naturally arise, that life would continue happening and we would continue being part of that flow. We have not been taught to trust what’s actually true, namely, that something in us longs to do and create; it doesn’t need to be threatened and corralled into productivity in order to save us from being bad or worthless.

Linking our value and existence to perpetual doing keeps us in a state of fear, terrified to unhitch from the wagon of productivity, the drive to keep moving forward, not trusting who we will be or even if we will be when we unhitch.  In this modern paradigm, we see life itself as an act of doing, something we have to make happen, by continually doing and kicking the wheel of experience and what’s next.  Our life, as we experience it, is created through the accumulation of experiences we generate. Life is something we have to do something with, as in, What are you going to do with your life? As such, it feels as if doing is necessary to keep ourselves in actual existence.  Stillness, on the other hand—not getting somewhere, not getting something done, not being productive, is imagined as a kind of void or absence, a place where we don’t experience life.  The way we learn it, doing equals life.  Not doing, when the wheel stops, equals death, or non-existence.

We live as human doings in part because we’re not taught that just being is a something, a place, an experience of its own.  We’re not taught that our own presence, our being, is a destination, a place of value, a place to inhabit that has its own sensory aliveness.

From the time we’re very young we learn that our head or mind is where life happens, where the action is, where the pilot sits.  We award our mind with the throne of life, king/queen of all domains. Our body, on the other hand, we relate to as a functional object, a Sherpa that transports our head from one place to another, thanklessly facilitating the doing that the mind commands.  If not simply moving the mind around, the body is something we use as another agent of doing, to achieve excellence in sport or other such endeavors, thereby adding to the pile of accomplishments and experiences that make up our sense of worthiness.  In addition, our body is viewed as an entity that for the most part doesn’t exist other than to provide us with pleasure or pain.  The body is an object that appears out of oblivion only when directly stimulated, or when a disruption occurs and thus interrupts its basic invisibility, as is the case with illness, injury, and aging.

But the problem is that when we ignore the body and relate to it as a non-entity, a non-place, undeserving of our own attention except when absolutely necessary, we effectively sever access to our inherent un-produced sense of worth.  Disconnected from the body, we become untethered from a sense of fundamental mattering, not because of what we do, but just because we are. The body is the portal to experiencing our aliveness, one that precedes and outlives any and all accomplishment, an aliveness that remains constant even when we step off the wheel of doing.  It’s through the body that we directly experience a sure sense of our own wholeness, and the knowing that we are already everything we need to be, and we already matter.

When we drop out of the head and into the body, pouring our attention out of mind, without an agenda and without trying to make something happen that the mind is dictating, we immediately feel a sense of just being.  Inside the body, we experience the hum of life, an energy, something that’s happening on its own without our having to manage, control, force or do it.  Through meditation, body practice, or simply choosing to experience the body from the inside out, we can learn to ride the waves of the breath, sense the body breathing itself. The practice of just encountering what’s here that requires no effort, builds a trust in us, that there exists a life force bigger than us, an aliveness that we exist within and are made of, and perhaps most importantly in this context, for which we are not in charge.

Joining with the body and experiencing how it is right now, feeling what’s actually happening inside you, without writing a narrative about what’s happening, or constructing a story about what it says about you or anyone else, but just experiencing now as it is in your body, is a courageous and profoundly radical choice. When we make our body a destination, make the choice to inhabit the body with kindness and curiosity, in stillness, without demanding anything from it, or judging what we find, we can know a direct experience of being, a sensation of our own existence, which doesn’t require any action to create or maintain. It takes courage to leave the mind and drop into the body, a willingness to reject or doubt what the mind tells us will happen to us if we leave it for even a moment.  But for that courage, we are rewarded with a deep trust in and intimacy with our own being, and a knowing of its inherent worth.  Just the opposite of the idea of absence that the mind scares us with, what we find in the body, away from the mind, is presence.

In experiencing the sensations of the body, not noticing them from the head but allowing ourselves to actually feel them directly from inside the body, we discover that life is happening here, now, without our help.  And in fact, we don’t need to keep kicking the wheel, creating life.  Tuning into the hum of just being, we uncover a sense of wholeness and worth that is inherent, un-earned, un-manufactured, un-efforted, and utterly unrelated to accomplishment.  We discover a sense of our own value that just is, a gift of being alive.

The post Do You Have the Courage to Stop Doing? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

For a long time, I worked like hell to provide what she wanted, what she was demanding, not necessarily because I wanted to, but because I felt I should.  But no matter how much I gave, it was never enough and I was never acknowledged or experienced by her as the person who was offering what she needed.  I was constantly arguing my case for why she was wrong about me, wrong for blaming me; I continued telling her how much I was doing, why she should appreciate me.  But it never made a difference.  I was forever stuck in the role of the one who wouldn’t provide what she really needed.

After what felt like eons of giving and giving and continually being told and experienced as the one that wasn’t giving, I started to feel differently.  I started to feel like I shouldn’t have to provide these things that she demanded from me and felt entitled to.  I started to argue with my own sense of should and rethink what I should be willing to offer.  I also started to argue with her about whether or not it was right or fair for her to expect this service from me.

And so, for the next few years, we remained locked in a new battle, namely, who was right about whether or not I should have to offer the kind of help she required.  I said I shouldn’t have to and she said I should.  What was the truth?

More time passed but we both held our ground, each of us growing more stuck in our positions, convinced of our rightness.  Resentment infiltrated our relationship from top to bottom.

But then something truly unexpected happened, for me.  Something simple but utterly profound.  I don’t know what it will mean for the relationship, but I know that it’s opened up infinite space inside me, a deep okayness and strength, and thoroughly changed my reality.

What happened was this: I realized that at the bottom of this lifelong battle with this woman was a simple truth, a truth that had been shunned, stepped over, stepped around, ignored, and never allowed to the table.  I can say it out loud now, scream it from the rooftops, and here’s what it sounds like: I do not want to be responsible for providing what she needs.  It’s not that I shouldn’t have to (that’s a truth that depends on one’s inner universe), it’s not that I have been responsible and it’s gone unacknowledged; it’s far simpler than all that.  I don’t want it—that’s the whole story.  I don’t want to requires no further dialogue, explanation, or justification.  It sounds like a small turn, like something I already knew, but it was a revelation.  It was a truth that for decades had been forced to hide in the shadows of should and shouldn’t; buried under all the effort, the thousands of words, arguments, and tsunamis of fear and guilt. This truth had been denied permission to be heard or even to exist.

As long as I was still relying on the argument that I shouldn’t have to, I was still dependent on her and everyone else to feel solid in my choice.  The strength of my own truth didn’t yet belong to me.  It was still a truth of consensus, one that had to be agreed upon, and thus something that her rejection was able to undermine.  That I could never be validated in the idea that it wasn’t fair to ask this of me, that I shouldn’t have to, meant that I could never really stand in my own shoes. I could never not feel guilty for my choice even with the awareness that all the doing in the world would still not earn me the place of the one who was doing it.

What freed me was that simple but awe-inspiring shift in awareness and perspective, the appearing of the real truth, the I don’t want to reality.  In that moment of awakening to my own not wanting, I realized that this truth more than any other had been the unacknowledged, unsafe to acknowledge key to unraveling the whole knot.  It wasn’t about not being appreciated for it; it wasn’t about winning the fight that I shouldn’t have to.  It was just about discovering the plain and simple “I don’t want to.”

Remarkably, “I don’t want to” is not up for dialogue, discussion, or agreement.  This truth is not a truth by consensus.  It’s mine wholly, and to some degree, non-negotiable.  When I found my I don’t want to, I found my own two feet planted firmly on the ground, weighted and strong.  I found clarity and with it, freedom.  This other person no longer held the power to allow or deny me my truth.

What I’ve noticed since this awakening is that I am far more able to look at this other person without resentment.  What is is and I don’t have to defend it anymore.  And simultaneously, I don’t feel the same fear, fear of the guilt inspired by her belief about what I should be willing to offer, fear of being accused of being bad.  Oddly, it actually feels like I can enjoy her a whole lot more as well.  The truth, awakened in me, allows me to look at this other person in the eyes, and stand in the light of what’s true, for me.  Where it will take us in the relationship, I have no idea, but whatever happens, I don’t want to has, for me, turned out to be the get out of jail key to freedom.

The post When the Truth Sets You Free appeared first on Nancy Colier.

On a recent Friday afternoon, I was having a conversation with this person and she casually mentioned another symptom that she experiences. She had never brought this to my attention because she just assumed everybody felt the same thing.

In that moment, I was slightly alarmed by the symptom she mentioned as it was definitely not a sensation most people have and certainly not one that people get on a regular basis.  It was also, I knew, a symptom associated with some pretty terrible things.  I said nothing about my concern but calmly inquired more into her experience, When does she get this sensation and what if anything brings it on and other questions.  On the outside, I probably appeared quite nonchalant, but on the inside, a small tsunami was forming in my chest.

Immediately following our conversation, I made a beeline to hell, otherwise known as Google.  I feverishly punched in her symptoms.  What I found was, not surprisingly, both horrifying and terrifying.  Her symptoms happened to be the first two on every list for one particularly dreadful and life-destroying condition.  And, as luck would have it, the third most common symptom listed as evidence of this particular disease turned out to be another symptom that my loved one had in fact mentioned experiencing over the last couple years, but which I had also dismissed and assumed would disappear on its own.

Within three hours of our initial conversation, I was disabled with enough information to be utterly consumed with fear.  I had three symptoms to work with now, and three symptoms which were the first three on every list describing the early signs of one particular horrifying fate.  Fear had not only arrived at my front door but had broken the door down and taken me hostage.

The more afraid I became, the more frantically I researched the internet, reading everything available on the condition I had diagnosed, looking for anything that would give me a different list of symptoms or at least a list where her symptoms were further down from the top.  I read about treatments, now and future, trial studies, ways that people self-care once diagnosed, the psychological effects of the disease, how early one should start taking the medication, and what the final stages look like. I read testimonials from people living with the disease, everything I could get my hands on.  By Sunday night I had five Ph.D.’s in this condition.

I was in a state of panic, heartbroken, and truly unable to get okay.  If a moment of serenity appeared, I would remember the shock of what I knew, that this person I love beyond anything, beyond everything, had no future.  I would remember that I could never be happy again.  Each moment I spent with my family member that weekend felt like the last, weighted with melancholy and finality.

I was living a narrative of fear and despair, a narrative I had written in less than 48 hours.  I was sure that the worst thing I could ever imagine happening was happening. I wondered, how was it possible that I had spent my whole life working on getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, okay with the not okay of life, accepting reality as it is, and yet here I was screaming, No, this reality is the one reality that’s not okay!  This reality I cannot bear.  I was in a thought-constructed hell, which felt real, inarguable, and true.

I was the only one who knew that she had all three symptoms.  Other family members knew of one or another, but I was the keeper of the full truth, the only one who knew the whole of it.  When I did finally break and tell another family member, he dismissed my fears as ridiculous, irritating, a case of bad hypochondria. I was to blame for my fear.  His impatience felt like an abandonment of sorts. I felt not only terrified but also deeply alone in my fear.  I couldn’t share my fears with the person whom they were about because I did want to frighten her; I couldn’t speak with anyone else in the family because they were angered by my fear; I couldn’t speak with her doctor about it because I didn’t want to set off further testing and thus speed the road to the eventual diagnosis. I was totally isolated; my thoughts had built a bubble of terror in which I was trapped and alone.

Source: robert zunicoff/unsplash

And then something miraculous happened, perhaps because I couldn’t bear another moment of being so afraid, or perhaps just because. Grace appeared and I heard the following: Your mind is inflicting violence on you!  And what followed from there was simply, Stop! Stop! Stop! Something in me stood up for me.  I knew that probability was still on my side and the fear I was living might well be false evidence appearing as real.

As a result of this realization, I was able to halt my mind’s projections into the future, to stop re-inventing and re-experiencing a reality that didn’t and might never exist.  I recognized that I knew nothing other than three facts and didn’t need to go one day or even five minutes into the future. I could decide to live right here, now, and construct no storyline at all.  Discomfort remained, a mild anxiety, but without the narrative connecting the dots, I was remarkably okay. With the sudden awareness of how I was torturing myself, believing my thoughts, I was able to disembark from my mind’s terror train.  I refused to participate in terrifying myself; I chose the freedom and self-compassion that comes with saying, and believing, I simply don’t know. That’s the truth.

For organizing and generating ideas, there’s no match for the human mind.  And simultaneously, for whipping up fear and creating frightening storylines that appear indisputable, there’s also no match for the human mind.  The tragic part is that by creating its narratives of terror, the mind is at some level trying to calm us down, to make sense of and know the unknown, solidify the impermanent.  The mind tries to protect us from the fear of what could happen by creating a certainty of what will happen, which paradoxically can feel less frightening.

In this recent episode, my mind was desperately searching to find proof for its wrongness, evidence that showed its thoughts were mistaken. And yet, the more my imagined storyline was confirmed, the more frantically I searched to find something else to explain the unknown.

Our mind is often the perpetrator of unimaginable violence—on ourselves.  Our thoughts are the great instigator of terror, yelling fire over and over again when a hint of smoke is detected.  At some point, the suffering that we self-inflict can become too much and an act of grace or self-compassion occurs, when we say, Stop, stop torturing me.  Stop creating stories of terror… The truth is I don’t know, that’s all.  Life is challenging enough without adding any of our own terrifying storyline to it.  We can in fact choose to live in the questions, to not know, and not fill in the blanks.  When we leave the dots not-connected and sit with the fear that may or may not exist with what is, we feel a great relief.  Not only a relief from the self-inflicted violence of the terrifying storyline, but also from the need to close up reality and know—everything—even if it’s nothing we want to know.

The post FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real: When Our Thoughts Scare Us appeared first on Nancy Colier.

The choice to reject fear and choose love can feel like something that only applies to moments of crisis, when we’re leaving a marriage, starting a new business, preparing to climb Mount Everest. But in truth, the opportunity to choose love and reject fear presents itself in the smallest moments of life, and specifically, in relationships with those closest to us. Love over fear is a choice every time someone tells us something about ourselves or has an experience of us that we don’t want to hear.

We hurt each other in intimate relationships—intentionally and unintentionally—that’s a fact. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we discover that we have hurt the other person when they come to us and share their pain, express their experience, and verbalize what we said or did that upset them. But often we discover that we have hurt the person through a different avenue, that is, when they criticize us or tell us what (they think) is wrong with us. In these cases, we generally feel blamed or attacked, and as a result, it can be more challenging to listen, imagine the situation through their eyes, and often impossible to empathize with their pain. We have a tendency in these situations to strike back (the best defense is a good offense) or alternatively, defend ourselves and prove the other person wrong. It’s a survival instinct and indeed, it can feel as if our very survival is at stake.

What’s at stake is not our physical survival, but the survival of our version of ourselves. The person we are being characterized or experienced as is not the person we think or believe ourselves to be. And so, we try to protect the identity of the good self, the self who is innocent, not to blame for what is being accused.

It’s a healthy instinct to question accusations that feel unfair or unwarranted. It’s also important to be able to set boundaries that prevent others’ projections and deflections from landing on us. If you are being assigned intentions that don’t belong to you, it’s important to be clear about your truth. It’s also healthy and necessary to protect yourself from pain that takes the form of emotional attack.  Emotional attacks and insults, meant to harm, are not okay, and need to be stopped. This is not an article about learning to be a doormat in service of some false spiritual goal.

And yet, there is an enormous opportunity in these relational moments, when someone we care about is hurt, and when (whether we understand it or not) we seem to be a part of their pain. There is an opportunity in these situations to choose to respond from love rather than react from fear.

When we feel emotionally attacked, blamed, or criticized in some way, we experience fear, even if we are not consciously aware of it. Our ego is threatened.  Our identity is threatened. Our narrative on our self is threatened. Conflict feels dangerous to the survival of the ego organism.  As a result, we react from the place of fear, which means defending our ego or attacking back, attempting to disable the threat. Fear, as a primal emotion, can sweep over us like a tsunami and cause us to react without thinking or consulting our more evolved and loving self. Our reaction is often out of alignment with how we feel, in our heart, about this other person.

If we want to choose love over fear as a life practice, we don’t have to wait for a crisis situation. We can simply use the opportunity presented in these tiny moments that happen every day, at all different levels—when the person we imagine ourselves to be, see ourselves as, doesn’t align with how we are being seen in that moment.

To choose love in these situations is to first, pause and take a full breath before doing anything. It is to stop and get quiet, to do our best to actually hear what the other person is saying without defending our version of who we are or what we think happened. It also means refraining from attacking back with a criticism of the other, or with something that they did or said (related or unrelated) that hurt us equally. It is to just listen—without conditions.

Operating from love is to set our own ego aside long enough to listen to the experience of the other, to be courageous enough to be willing to try and understand what the other person is experiencing, no matter how radically different it is from what we intended to happen, think happened, or believe was the cause of what happened. It is to have the strength of heart to understand and open our heart to what the pain is that the other is skillfully or unskillfully trying to express. A response (not reaction) that comes from love is listening to the other’s upset as if we were just ears hearing, ears alone, not ears attached to a head, attached to an ego, attached to an identity, attached to a person intent on remaining intact and unchanged.

To live from love not fear, on a practical level, is to shift from a goal of protecting our ego, being right, winning the argument, being not to blame, and move into actually being kind, being loving—in our actions. It is to be willing to stop proving that we’re a good person and actually be that good person—to be courageous enough to open our heart and be love even when our ego is screaming in fear.

And amazingly, in the moments when we have the strength to choose love over fear, we are rewarded not only with the knowledge and confidence that we have done something incredibly challenging and beautiful, but also, with the gift of experiencing ourselves as love, and something infinitely more than just the small, fragile ego we thought we were and so desperately needed to protect.  We are rewarded with a freedom that surpasses all other freedoms.  Ultimately, it is through our willingness to stop defending our idea of ourselves that we discover our true and indestructible self.

The post Choosing Love Over Fear: Responding From Love Not Reacting From Fear appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Upon hearing his suggestion that we “sit” with our real feelings, the journalist immediately jumped in to ask the following: How realistic was it for most people to be able to “just sit around” and feel their feelings? Was this not an issue of class in that the higher socioeconomic classes could spend their time contemplating their sadness while the rest of us regular folks had to get to work? How possible was it, really, for the average person, to be with or in their sadness, “sitting still” when things needed to get done? After all, didn’t we all need to get out the door and earn a living?

The word “sit” had lit this moderator on fire, and in her response, morphed into “sitting still” and “just sitting around.” She was, seemingly, quite angered by the audacity of this author to suggest that we could feel our sad feelings in addition to our happy ones. As strange as it was to hear where the moderator went with his suggestion, her reaction is in fact common. In this culture we are afraid of feelings that are not happy, and conditioned to believe that feeling anything other than pleasure will prevent us from being able to go to work, live a normal life, or take care of ourselves. Allowing difficult feelings to be present will not only prevent us from basic functioning but will also endanger any positive feelings that might exist. Happiness is an all or nothing condition. The underlying belief is that feeling our feelings as they really are will lead us to be fixated on our navel (the much maligned body-part associated with sad feelings), crying and eating chips on a dirty couch. A real life, one that includes going to work, buying groceries and being normal, and a state in which we feel our real feelings are two entirely separate things—and cannot coexist. We hold the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) belief that anyone who has the luxury of feeling their feelings must be independently wealthy and able to devote their entire life to their own struggles. And, if we are not already self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and unemployed, the privilege to experience painful feelings will lead us to become this way.
This journalist’s line of questioning clearly exposed the degree of fear and helplessness that we experience when in the face of challenging emotions. Given that difficult feelings are a part of everyone’s life, it has always amazed me that courses on learning how to be with and soothe such feelings is not required curriculum in every formal education. It is a real life skill that everyone needs. The idea that we could actually feel difficult feelings and still be strong and content is not only not taught, but instead we are encouraged to believe the opposite, that if we do allow ourselves to feel what’s inside us, our dark feelings will overwhelm and swallow us, never go away, and take us out of commission for life. And so we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to stay away from the harder feelings, fending them off, papering them over, keeping ourselves from feeling anything that we believe could disable us.
In truth, feeling our true feelings is not contradictory to living a functioning life. Quite the opposite. The more we allow our true experience to be felt, the more energy and attention we have to devote to our functioning life. We are no longer using up our energy and focus trying to push away the feelings that we don’t want and are afraid to feel. In addition, when we actually feel a feeling, we discover that no matter how strong or hard the feeling is, it has a natural life span and can only remain with intensity for a short time, far shorter than we have been led to believe. Feelings, when felt, actually pass through awareness and then ease, on their own. They may return but they will pass again, in contrast with the thoughts that we generate about the negative feelings, which continue unceasingly. Furthermore, feeling our feelings takes no effort, other than the slight effort that it is to give ourselves permission to feel them. And yet, even with no effort expended, the simple act of allowing what we feel, what is already there to be felt, has a profoundly satisfying and relaxing effect. When we stop having to fend off what we are not supposed to or allowed to feel, running from our truth, we can then relax into the embrace of our own company, and settle into our own real life.
The belief that we stay strong by ignoring our difficult emotions is false. Thinking that we must ignore how we really feel in order to make a living, be productive, get off the couch, or just plain take care of ourselves, leaves us in a state of constant fear. Every life contains happy feelings and sad ones too; such is the human condition. If we are afraid of our sadness and don’t believe we can manage or live a life with it, then our life contains a constant presence that is a threat to our basic wellbeing. As a result, we are in a state of perpetual weakness.
We are at our strongest, most high functioning and confident when we have the ability to experience whatever is passing through our feeling sky, without having to run from it, pretend it’s not there or force it away. We are most warrior-like when we learn to co-habitate with the full range of feelings, contradictory as they often are. We find our deepest confidence when we know (from lived experience) that feelings come and go and we can survive them, and will become a little bit stronger with each passage. We discover our most profound caretaker, inside ourselves, when we stop defending a single-pointed happiness, which always excludes another part of our story. We are at our most content and healthy when we give ourselves the blessing that it is to relax into what we actually feel, and live in our truth. Allowing ourselves to sit with our feelings, the ones we like and the ones we don’t, does not only not conflict with taking care of ourselves and conducting a real life—it is, in truth, our best means for taking care of ourselves and the very essence of a real life.

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