March 10, 2024 • 21 mins
In this episode, Dr. Little dives deep into the world of emotions, initiating a four-part series that helps us understand what our emotions can do for us. Dr. Little challenges the way we approach emotions like fear, anger, sadness, and guilt and suggest that although we may wish to get rid of these painful emotions as quickly as possible, we are doing ourselves a disservice by not paying enough attention to them.
In this initial part of the series, Dr. Little explores fear, its physiological origins, and manifestations. She shares how to appreciate fear for what it truly is - a tool for survival. Through a balanced understanding and appreciation of fear, you can learn how to discriminate when your fear is not helpful and when it actually is providing valuable insights and information. She shares how learning to listen to, validate and honor your fear will help you make the best choices on how to proceed.
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Music: https://www.purple-planet.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to Inner Healing Intelligence. This is Dr. Lori Little.
Today I'm going to be starting a four-part series where I'm going to focus all on emotions.
When people come to see me for therapy, I could confidently say that 100% of
(00:20):
the time they're coming to me because they are struggling with their emotions
in some way, shape, or form.
It may not always be identified as such.
People might come in with different ideas about what they need from therapy,
but really the truth is when you come to therapy,
(00:40):
it's because on some level you're not feeling happy or there's something emotionally
for you that is not going exactly the way that you want to go in your life.
Maybe you're feeling more sad or down.
Maybe you're struggling with
fear or anxiety, or maybe you notice that you feel angry all the time.
(01:04):
Even if your intention in therapy is to change your behaviors,
like you're losing your temper too much or having panic attacks and you can't
get yourself out of the house or to go to work,
underneath all of these are your emotions.
Oftentimes, our conscious goal when we come into therapy is to get rid of these
(01:28):
emotions or to change these emotions in some way.
And sometimes I've even had people drop out of therapy really early because
they feel like they're not changing their emotions quickly enough.
And so they feel like, well, therapy isn't working.
In this series, I'm going to talk about another side of emotions.
(01:49):
I want to explore what our emotions are doing for us.
What value is there in better understanding our emotions and paying attention
to them rather than just quickly trying to get rid of them or to make them go away?
In the next four episodes, I'm going to take four emotions and talk about how
(02:14):
these emotions can actually help us in our lives and why we don't want to just
quickly eliminate them without first evaluating them.
Today, I'm going to start with the emotion of fear, and in the next few episodes,
I'll cover anger, sadness, and guilt and shame. So stay tuned.
(02:39):
Welcome, everyone. My name is Dr. Lori Little, and I'm a clinical psychologist,
mindfulness coach, psychedelic therapist, wife, and mom.
My passion is helping people learn to to listen to and trust their inner healing
intelligence, that part of us that is always moving towards health and growth.
(03:01):
Ultimately, when we allow our inner healing intelligence to be our guide,
we can stop looking outside of ourselves for answers.
We can experience more joy, more peace, and more connection with others than
we may have ever thought possible. Although it may sound simple, it is by no means easy.
(03:23):
Join me as we discuss the many challenges and opportunities that listening to
your inner healing intelligence can bring to your life.
Emotions are a necessary part of the human experience.
Many times I'll have patients that tell me, I wish I didn't feel so much,
(03:46):
or I wish I I didn't feel my feelings so strongly.
And believe me, I get it.
As a fellow sensitive person, I feel my feelings very deeply.
I cry at commercials or even Facebook posts.
And I have this incredible gift of being able to imagine a scenario or visualize a scenario.
(04:14):
And I can imagine a scenario so clearly that I can create tremendous anxiety
or sadness or grief within myself just by thinking.
I've always been an emotional person. And for much of my life,
I used to see this as a weakness or saw it as a flaw in my character.
(04:36):
Over time, I've come to see this really more as a gift and one of my strengths.
I believe that having strong emotions and being a more sensitive person actually
makes me a better therapist.
I feel like it makes me a better friend and certainly makes me a better wife and mom.
(04:58):
I'm very attuned to not only my own emotions, but the emotions of others around me.
For me, learning boundaries has been especially important for me to do the type
of work that I do because I can feel the feelings of my patients.
When my patients are profoundly profoundly sad or grieving, I feel that too.
(05:23):
And so I have had to learn through my own supervision and therapy how to separate
my feelings from my patient's feelings and to be able to put them away at the end of the day.
Because otherwise, if I couldn't do that, I wouldn't be able to stay in the field for very long.
It really is challenging to sit with and be truly present with so much much
(05:46):
pain in other people day in and day out as part of your job. It's a hard job.
Emotions are experienced as felt sensations in our body, as well as the thoughts
that we have, or another way to say that are the stories that we tell ourselves about a situation.
(06:06):
If we have a thought that something bad is going to happen, or we're going to
experience something painful or difficult, it is normal to have a fear response.
Fear is the emotion that we have when we anticipate that something bad or dangerous
is going to happen to ourselves or to someone that we care about.
(06:31):
Fear is our brain's response to a perceived threat to our safety or well-being.
So if I see a bear in the woods, I'm going to have an immediate thought that I'm in danger,
and my brain will actually give me a tremendously valuable gift,
(06:52):
which we can call the fight, flight, or freeze response.
This means that a series of biological changes are going to happen in my body.
My brain will tell my heart,
for example, to start beating really quickly so that it can begin to pump more
(07:13):
blood to my large muscle groups in preparation for, again, either fighting or fleeing.
It tells my brain to start breathing faster so I can get more oxygen.
And as this blood and oxygen are strengthening my large muscle groups,
it's minimizing the oxygen that's going to my smaller muscles and to my brain.
(07:38):
When I'm having a strong fear response, my body intuitively knows that I don't
need to logically think my way into safety.
What I really need at this moment is to engage in action.
What's important to remember is that all of this happens outside of our awareness.
(08:00):
I'm not telling my body to do this.
It just does it. And the reality is if we don't have this response,
if we didn't feel fear, we wouldn't survive the bear.
So this response is evolutionarily adaptive for us to survive as a species. she's.
(08:22):
I personally have never encountered a bear,
thank God, and hopefully I never will, but I certainly have encountered many
situations that have felt like bears,
or at the very least that my brain was perceiving as if it were a bear when it really wasn't.
And this is actually the origin of panic disorder or having panic attacks.
(08:46):
Panic attacks are just awful if you have them or or you know someone who has
them, they're very, very painful.
But really, panic attacks are just the body's normal and healthy response to a perceived threat.
And although most people who have panic disorder often feel as if their panic
(09:09):
attack is coming out of nowhere, it never is.
It is always preceded by some sort of thought or perception of a threat or danger.
I had a brief period in college where I almost developed panic disorder. order.
And thankfully, through some quick counseling, I was able to thwart it.
(09:33):
But I remember very clearly how I was sitting in a large lecture class,
one of those classes that had like two or three hundred students in it.
It's this big auditorium. I remember it was a philosophy class and I was super bored.
And I was sitting in the middle of a row in the middle of the auditorium.
(09:57):
And there were students everywhere students in front
of me behind me on both sides of me and all of a sudden I
had the thought if I have to get out
of here in a hurry I would not be able to do it without making a scene or people
looking at me and it would be very disruptive to the whole class if I had to
(10:18):
leave and immediately I had this feeling or this sensation or the thought that that I was trapped.
And then I began to notice all these changes in my body that felt spontaneous
or all of a sudden I just got hot and sweaty and I started to breathe rapidly
and my heart was pounding and I was so focused on my body and all of these symptoms.
(10:43):
I really for a moment thought, oh my gosh, I'm having a heart attack. What is going on?
Am I sick? Do I have the flu? and I started to feel nauseous.
And eventually I just, I got up and left.
And yeah, it did feel disruptive and awful. But at that moment,
I didn't have any other choice. My brain was like, get out.
So I ran to the bathroom and I remember it took me like 20 minutes in order
(11:08):
for me to just breathe and calm myself down.
And I didn't realize it then, but I had had my first panic attack.
And And in the days and weeks following that panic attack,
I noticed that it was really difficult for me to go back to that class where
(11:29):
that had happened because the whole thing had felt really out of nowhere for
me. Like, where did this even happen?
And so thankfully, in college, we had a college counseling center and I went
to a therapist and he just very calmly explained to me, yeah, you had a panic attack.
And he educated me on what a panic attack was. was, why it happened,
(11:50):
what was going on in my body, and I think he gave me like some breathing exercises
or something for me to try.
But truly, for me, just to learn, hey, that wasn't dangerous.
You weren't having a heart attack. You had a panic attack.
It happens. Other people have had panic attacks.
Kind of validating and normalizing that was enough for me. And,
(12:13):
you know, I probably used some of the breathing exercises, too.
Fortunately, I was able to get help right away and nip it in the bud so that
maybe just Just a couple other times in my life have I actually had panic attacks,
but I didn't fortunately develop panic disorder.
But many people don't get the help right away, and so they suffer with symptoms
(12:38):
of panic and panic attacks and anxiety and fear.
And unfortunately, without treatment, we know that it just gets worse and worse.
And sometimes people will become housebound or what we call agoraphobic because
they're They're so fearful of having another panic attack because they are so painful.
(12:59):
The good thing is, is that panic disorder, panic attacks are very treatable,
but we do know that the longer one has it without treatment,
the harder it is to just unlearn those thoughts and responses.
So again, notice how the fear I was having was a healthy body response.
(13:20):
What was unhealthy or inaccurate was my thought, it would be difficult for me
to get out of here if I had to.
But at the time, had I been able to challenge that thought with,
okay, so what? Who cares if people look at me? It's no big deal.
Or why would I need to leave? There's no reason for me to leave.
(13:40):
Just pay attention to the professor.
If I had been able to talk to myself that way, then I probably would have not
had the panic attack response.
However, if I were in in actual danger,
so say the auditorium all of a sudden just caught on fire and we all had to
(14:01):
leave quickly, my body would have been prepared and ready to run out as quickly as I could.
What I really want you to hear from this is that fear and your body's response
to a perceived threat is not bad, it's not unhealthy, and it's not dangerous in and of itself.
(14:24):
It actually is a gift. It is meant to help you survive.
We don't necessarily need to be eliminating the fear or the body's fear response.
What we need to be doing is to focus on what are the thoughts that that are driving that fear?
(14:46):
Am I really in danger?
Is there really a threat? And if there is a threat, is the threat as big as I'm imagining it to be?
Is it as likely as I'm imagining it to be? And keep in mind that,
Anxiety and worry are just forms of fear.
(15:08):
You may not really think of yourself or perceive yourself as a fearful person
or dealing with fear, but if you struggle with anxiety or chronic worrying,
then you are dealing with that core emotion of fear.
If you notice that you have fear or worry or anxiety.
(15:31):
Rather than immediately trying to fix it or eliminate it, I believe it is first
helpful to better understand it.
Can we meet our fear with love and compassion and understanding?
What thoughts are you having? Or another way to say that is what stories are
(15:53):
Are you telling yourself that is driving that fear?
What is the threat that you're perceiving?
Ask yourself, what is the worst
thing that could happen? And if it did happen, how would I deal with it?
Maybe my situation that I'm imagining is very, very unlikely to happen.
(16:15):
And so even thinking about it right now is totally irrelevant and unnecessary.
Or maybe I'm catastrophizing and making something into a bigger deal than it really is.
Here's an important one, though. Maybe there are aspects of my situation that
(16:36):
I should actually be paying attention to that I'm not yet thinking through.
What if my body is aware of a danger that I haven't really processed yet logically?
Have you ever had that experience where you felt uneasy or hesitant about a
situation or maybe even a person and you really couldn't exactly put your finger
(17:01):
on what was making you feel uneasy?
Maybe it was Is your body or your intuition or your wise mind actually trying
to tell you something important for you to slow down,
for you to notice something and pay attention to it?
I want to be very clear. I don't mean to imply that if you feel danger, then you are in danger.
(17:27):
Because as you can see, we can think of a lot of situations where we might be
feeling danger when there's no danger present.
But I do believe there are also times when we feel danger because danger is
actually present, but we don't consciously know yet what that danger is.
Our inner wisdom is showing us something very important.
(17:51):
So how can you tell? How do you determine if your fear is valid or not?
It really just takes self-inquiry. It takes mindfulness. It really takes self-awareness
and time to sit and explore.
(18:11):
So before immediately jumping into eliminating our emotions,
take the time first to understand them with loving compassion. passion.
And you might need to journal about it.
Maybe it would be helpful to talk with a trusted friend or even your therapist,
or maybe even just to sit in silence to explore.
(18:36):
Ask yourself questions like, what is my fear trying to tell me?
What does my fear want me to know?
How can I I honor and love my fear, but not let it be my guide.
My best childhood friend, Jennifer, told me 25 years ago, don't live your life
(19:00):
making decisions solely out of fear.
And I never forgot it. I always come back to her telling me that because in that moment,
I realized how much fear was my guide in life, how many decisions I was making
or not making out of fear. Fear is important.
(19:21):
It is necessary. It's essential to our survival. But yet, it cannot be our guide.
If we use fear as our guide, think about it, we'd never try new things.
We'd never explore the world. We'd never take any risks.
We'd live a very boring, limited, uninspired life.
(19:46):
And for me, that's just not the the life that I want to live.
Let's take a moment to thank our fear.
So as you're going through your week and notice moments where you're feeling
anxiety, stress, or full-blown fear,
take a moment to try to just honor it and to listen to it.
(20:09):
Take some time to actually express gratitude to our our fears and our anxieties
and worries when they arise.
Let's meet our fear with love and compassion and listen to them and respect them.
Take the time to be truly present with them so that you can learn and grow from them.
(20:32):
And then listen to your inner wisdom or your inner healing intelligence to choose
how you want to move forward.
I hope this episode has been helpful for you today. I look forward to exploring
this more with you with some other emotions, and I will see you in the next episode.
(21:08):
Music.
Welcome back to Inner Healing Intelligence. This is Dr. Lori Little.
Today I'm going to be starting a four-part series where I'm going to focus all on emotions.
When people come to see me for therapy, I could confidently say that 100% of
(00:20):
the time they're coming to me because they are struggling with their emotions
in some way, shape, or form.
It may not always be identified as such.
People might come in with different ideas about what they need from therapy,
but really the truth is when you come to therapy,
(00:40):
it's because on some level you're not feeling happy or there's something emotionally
for you that is not going exactly the way that you want to go in your life.
Maybe you're feeling more sad or down.
Maybe you're struggling with
fear or anxiety, or maybe you notice that you feel angry all the time.
(01:04):
Even if your intention in therapy is to change your behaviors,
like you're losing your temper too much or having panic attacks and you can't
get yourself out of the house or to go to work,
underneath all of these are your emotions.
Oftentimes, our conscious goal when we come into therapy is to get rid of these
(01:28):
emotions or to change these emotions in some way.
And sometimes I've even had people drop out of therapy really early because
they feel like they're not changing their emotions quickly enough.
And so they feel like, well, therapy isn't working.
In this series, I'm going to talk about another side of emotions.
(01:49):
I want to explore what our emotions are doing for us.
What value is there in better understanding our emotions and paying attention
to them rather than just quickly trying to get rid of them or to make them go away?
In the next four episodes, I'm going to take four emotions and talk about how
(02:14):
these emotions can actually help us in our lives and why we don't want to just
quickly eliminate them without first evaluating them.
Today, I'm going to start with the emotion of fear, and in the next few episodes,
I'll cover anger, sadness, and guilt and shame. So stay tuned.
(02:39):
Welcome, everyone. My name is Dr. Lori Little, and I'm a clinical psychologist,
mindfulness coach, psychedelic therapist, wife, and mom.
My passion is helping people learn to to listen to and trust their inner healing
intelligence, that part of us that is always moving towards health and growth.
(03:01):
Ultimately, when we allow our inner healing intelligence to be our guide,
we can stop looking outside of ourselves for answers.
We can experience more joy, more peace, and more connection with others than
we may have ever thought possible. Although it may sound simple, it is by no means easy.
(03:23):
Join me as we discuss the many challenges and opportunities that listening to
your inner healing intelligence can bring to your life.
Emotions are a necessary part of the human experience.
Many times I'll have patients that tell me, I wish I didn't feel so much,
(03:46):
or I wish I I didn't feel my feelings so strongly.
And believe me, I get it.
As a fellow sensitive person, I feel my feelings very deeply.
I cry at commercials or even Facebook posts.
And I have this incredible gift of being able to imagine a scenario or visualize a scenario.
(04:14):
And I can imagine a scenario so clearly that I can create tremendous anxiety
or sadness or grief within myself just by thinking.
I've always been an emotional person. And for much of my life,
I used to see this as a weakness or saw it as a flaw in my character.
(04:36):
Over time, I've come to see this really more as a gift and one of my strengths.
I believe that having strong emotions and being a more sensitive person actually
makes me a better therapist.
I feel like it makes me a better friend and certainly makes me a better wife and mom.
(04:58):
I'm very attuned to not only my own emotions, but the emotions of others around me.
For me, learning boundaries has been especially important for me to do the type
of work that I do because I can feel the feelings of my patients.
When my patients are profoundly profoundly sad or grieving, I feel that too.
(05:23):
And so I have had to learn through my own supervision and therapy how to separate
my feelings from my patient's feelings and to be able to put them away at the end of the day.
Because otherwise, if I couldn't do that, I wouldn't be able to stay in the field for very long.
It really is challenging to sit with and be truly present with so much much
(05:46):
pain in other people day in and day out as part of your job. It's a hard job.
Emotions are experienced as felt sensations in our body, as well as the thoughts
that we have, or another way to say that are the stories that we tell ourselves about a situation.
(06:06):
If we have a thought that something bad is going to happen, or we're going to
experience something painful or difficult, it is normal to have a fear response.
Fear is the emotion that we have when we anticipate that something bad or dangerous
is going to happen to ourselves or to someone that we care about.
(06:31):
Fear is our brain's response to a perceived threat to our safety or well-being.
So if I see a bear in the woods, I'm going to have an immediate thought that I'm in danger,
and my brain will actually give me a tremendously valuable gift,
(06:52):
which we can call the fight, flight, or freeze response.
This means that a series of biological changes are going to happen in my body.
My brain will tell my heart,
for example, to start beating really quickly so that it can begin to pump more
(07:13):
blood to my large muscle groups in preparation for, again, either fighting or fleeing.
It tells my brain to start breathing faster so I can get more oxygen.
And as this blood and oxygen are strengthening my large muscle groups,
it's minimizing the oxygen that's going to my smaller muscles and to my brain.
(07:38):
When I'm having a strong fear response, my body intuitively knows that I don't
need to logically think my way into safety.
What I really need at this moment is to engage in action.
What's important to remember is that all of this happens outside of our awareness.
(08:00):
I'm not telling my body to do this.
It just does it. And the reality is if we don't have this response,
if we didn't feel fear, we wouldn't survive the bear.
So this response is evolutionarily adaptive for us to survive as a species. she's.
(08:22):
I personally have never encountered a bear,
thank God, and hopefully I never will, but I certainly have encountered many
situations that have felt like bears,
or at the very least that my brain was perceiving as if it were a bear when it really wasn't.
And this is actually the origin of panic disorder or having panic attacks.
(08:46):
Panic attacks are just awful if you have them or or you know someone who has
them, they're very, very painful.
But really, panic attacks are just the body's normal and healthy response to a perceived threat.
And although most people who have panic disorder often feel as if their panic
(09:09):
attack is coming out of nowhere, it never is.
It is always preceded by some sort of thought or perception of a threat or danger.
I had a brief period in college where I almost developed panic disorder. order.
And thankfully, through some quick counseling, I was able to thwart it.
(09:33):
But I remember very clearly how I was sitting in a large lecture class,
one of those classes that had like two or three hundred students in it.
It's this big auditorium. I remember it was a philosophy class and I was super bored.
And I was sitting in the middle of a row in the middle of the auditorium.
(09:57):
And there were students everywhere students in front
of me behind me on both sides of me and all of a sudden I
had the thought if I have to get out
of here in a hurry I would not be able to do it without making a scene or people
looking at me and it would be very disruptive to the whole class if I had to
(10:18):
leave and immediately I had this feeling or this sensation or the thought that that I was trapped.
And then I began to notice all these changes in my body that felt spontaneous
or all of a sudden I just got hot and sweaty and I started to breathe rapidly
and my heart was pounding and I was so focused on my body and all of these symptoms.
(10:43):
I really for a moment thought, oh my gosh, I'm having a heart attack. What is going on?
Am I sick? Do I have the flu? and I started to feel nauseous.
And eventually I just, I got up and left.
And yeah, it did feel disruptive and awful. But at that moment,
I didn't have any other choice. My brain was like, get out.
So I ran to the bathroom and I remember it took me like 20 minutes in order
(11:08):
for me to just breathe and calm myself down.
And I didn't realize it then, but I had had my first panic attack.
And And in the days and weeks following that panic attack,
I noticed that it was really difficult for me to go back to that class where
(11:29):
that had happened because the whole thing had felt really out of nowhere for
me. Like, where did this even happen?
And so thankfully, in college, we had a college counseling center and I went
to a therapist and he just very calmly explained to me, yeah, you had a panic attack.
And he educated me on what a panic attack was. was, why it happened,
(11:50):
what was going on in my body, and I think he gave me like some breathing exercises
or something for me to try.
But truly, for me, just to learn, hey, that wasn't dangerous.
You weren't having a heart attack. You had a panic attack.
It happens. Other people have had panic attacks.
Kind of validating and normalizing that was enough for me. And,
(12:13):
you know, I probably used some of the breathing exercises, too.
Fortunately, I was able to get help right away and nip it in the bud so that
maybe just Just a couple other times in my life have I actually had panic attacks,
but I didn't fortunately develop panic disorder.
But many people don't get the help right away, and so they suffer with symptoms
(12:38):
of panic and panic attacks and anxiety and fear.
And unfortunately, without treatment, we know that it just gets worse and worse.
And sometimes people will become housebound or what we call agoraphobic because
they're They're so fearful of having another panic attack because they are so painful.
(12:59):
The good thing is, is that panic disorder, panic attacks are very treatable,
but we do know that the longer one has it without treatment,
the harder it is to just unlearn those thoughts and responses.
So again, notice how the fear I was having was a healthy body response.
(13:20):
What was unhealthy or inaccurate was my thought, it would be difficult for me
to get out of here if I had to.
But at the time, had I been able to challenge that thought with,
okay, so what? Who cares if people look at me? It's no big deal.
Or why would I need to leave? There's no reason for me to leave.
(13:40):
Just pay attention to the professor.
If I had been able to talk to myself that way, then I probably would have not
had the panic attack response.
However, if I were in in actual danger,
so say the auditorium all of a sudden just caught on fire and we all had to
(14:01):
leave quickly, my body would have been prepared and ready to run out as quickly as I could.
What I really want you to hear from this is that fear and your body's response
to a perceived threat is not bad, it's not unhealthy, and it's not dangerous in and of itself.
(14:24):
It actually is a gift. It is meant to help you survive.
We don't necessarily need to be eliminating the fear or the body's fear response.
What we need to be doing is to focus on what are the thoughts that that are driving that fear?
(14:46):
Am I really in danger?
Is there really a threat? And if there is a threat, is the threat as big as I'm imagining it to be?
Is it as likely as I'm imagining it to be? And keep in mind that,
Anxiety and worry are just forms of fear.
(15:08):
You may not really think of yourself or perceive yourself as a fearful person
or dealing with fear, but if you struggle with anxiety or chronic worrying,
then you are dealing with that core emotion of fear.
If you notice that you have fear or worry or anxiety.
(15:31):
Rather than immediately trying to fix it or eliminate it, I believe it is first
helpful to better understand it.
Can we meet our fear with love and compassion and understanding?
What thoughts are you having? Or another way to say that is what stories are
(15:53):
Are you telling yourself that is driving that fear?
What is the threat that you're perceiving?
Ask yourself, what is the worst
thing that could happen? And if it did happen, how would I deal with it?
Maybe my situation that I'm imagining is very, very unlikely to happen.
(16:15):
And so even thinking about it right now is totally irrelevant and unnecessary.
Or maybe I'm catastrophizing and making something into a bigger deal than it really is.
Here's an important one, though. Maybe there are aspects of my situation that
(16:36):
I should actually be paying attention to that I'm not yet thinking through.
What if my body is aware of a danger that I haven't really processed yet logically?
Have you ever had that experience where you felt uneasy or hesitant about a
situation or maybe even a person and you really couldn't exactly put your finger
(17:01):
on what was making you feel uneasy?
Maybe it was Is your body or your intuition or your wise mind actually trying
to tell you something important for you to slow down,
for you to notice something and pay attention to it?
I want to be very clear. I don't mean to imply that if you feel danger, then you are in danger.
(17:27):
Because as you can see, we can think of a lot of situations where we might be
feeling danger when there's no danger present.
But I do believe there are also times when we feel danger because danger is
actually present, but we don't consciously know yet what that danger is.
Our inner wisdom is showing us something very important.
(17:51):
So how can you tell? How do you determine if your fear is valid or not?
It really just takes self-inquiry. It takes mindfulness. It really takes self-awareness
and time to sit and explore.
(18:11):
So before immediately jumping into eliminating our emotions,
take the time first to understand them with loving compassion. passion.
And you might need to journal about it.
Maybe it would be helpful to talk with a trusted friend or even your therapist,
or maybe even just to sit in silence to explore.
(18:36):
Ask yourself questions like, what is my fear trying to tell me?
What does my fear want me to know?
How can I I honor and love my fear, but not let it be my guide.
My best childhood friend, Jennifer, told me 25 years ago, don't live your life
(19:00):
making decisions solely out of fear.
And I never forgot it. I always come back to her telling me that because in that moment,
I realized how much fear was my guide in life, how many decisions I was making
or not making out of fear. Fear is important.
(19:21):
It is necessary. It's essential to our survival. But yet, it cannot be our guide.
If we use fear as our guide, think about it, we'd never try new things.
We'd never explore the world. We'd never take any risks.
We'd live a very boring, limited, uninspired life.
(19:46):
And for me, that's just not the the life that I want to live.
Let's take a moment to thank our fear.
So as you're going through your week and notice moments where you're feeling
anxiety, stress, or full-blown fear,
take a moment to try to just honor it and to listen to it.
(20:09):
Take some time to actually express gratitude to our our fears and our anxieties
and worries when they arise.
Let's meet our fear with love and compassion and listen to them and respect them.
Take the time to be truly present with them so that you can learn and grow from them.
(20:32):
And then listen to your inner wisdom or your inner healing intelligence to choose
how you want to move forward.
I hope this episode has been helpful for you today. I look forward to exploring
this more with you with some other emotions, and I will see you in the next episode.
(21:08):
Music.
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