The Problem of Fear

Emotions are reactions that human beings experience in response to thoughts, events, or situations. If you are here reading this, you already know that I am an individual who believes that we all are spiritual beings - a soul that is having a human experience. With this in mind, I believe that we are not our bodies, our thoughts, or our experiences. We are divine souls, here on Earth to experience the excitement of being a human, and to gain knowledge and expansion through our experiences. I understand that not everyone holds these beliefs the way that I do, so take from this post what resonates with you, and leave behind that which does not. 

I believe that our souls are originally pure, and are made up of only the frequency of unconditional love. I also believe that unconditional love is the highest frequency of God/Source. (Do not pair my usage of the title ‘God’ to any religion - I do not hold a singular religious belief system. I believe truth can be found in all religions, but no one religion holds the entire truth. God, for me, is a term synonymous with Source, Creator, Oneness.) During our human experiences/lives, we put conditions on love, whether we are conscious of this or not. We place conditions on love so that we can guard our human hearts - to manage our emotional responses and keep connections that align with our personal values, morals, and ethics. When we experience a thought, event, or situation that makes us feel less than the default state of our unconditional love, or one that challenges or opposes our belief systems - that’s when our human emotions kick in. Conditions, which are also referred to as boundaries, are put in place by each individual to help keep our souls safe. According to Sigmund Freud, this is how our human ego is formed. 

Our soul, according to the Greek philosopher Plato, is a simple, pure, unorganized, uncompounded, invisible, and rational entity. In his theory of the soul, heavily discussed in Phaedrus, he discusses his belief that the soul is simple in its true nature and cannot be composed of many elements. Additionally, he discusses how the soul is pure in its original, divine state, and any impurity in the soul is from its contact with the Earth. In Plato’s work titled The Republic, he characterizes the “spirited” part of the soul as the “ally of reason”, where the spirit’s distinctive role in the soul is to support and defend the practical decisions and commands of the reason. 

To expand on these ideas, the soul and the spirit are separate from each other, and also intricately connected. The soul is the repository of all lives we have lived - it stores our values, morals, ethics, attitudes, and memories of all lives - past, present, and future. Additionally, all of our ailments are stored in the soul, which makes it the ‘home’ of the ego. The ego isn’t a bad thing, it is our protection as humans. While we hear the term ‘ego death’ thrown around a lot in the spiritual community, I encourage you to become curious about this. I cannot tell you whether or not to believe in this idea of an ‘ego death’, each person has their own beliefs and ways of identifying whether or not this is true for them. For me, it is not the term I choose to use. Instead, I call it an ‘ego upgrade’ - where I may have gained new knowledge that challenges my belief systems, and instead of getting triggered and remaining in a state of cognitive dissonance, I choose to get curious and ask myself whether or not my belief systems need to change due to this new information that I have gathered. If my belief systems do change, I call this the ‘ego upgrade’ and implement the new information. If the information does not resonate with me, I simply let it go. 

The spirit, on the other hand, is the part of us that is constantly expanding. The spirit chose to come to Earth so that it could experience, learn, and grow. The spirit is directly connected to God/Source, and it is infinite: unattached to time, distance, or space. Therefore, the spirit is the aspect of us that is here to help our soul learn the emotional and physical aspects of being a human. Remember, our soul doesn’t carry emotion - it stores memories, so emotions are a major experience for the spirit. I believe that our souls came to Earth to seed unconditional love throughout the planet. This helps to raise the overall vibrational frequency of Earth, quite literally bringing “Heaven to Earth”, or a state of oneness, bliss, unconditional love, and ultimately returning us to God/Source. This is why I believe it is so important for us to remember the true feeling of unconditional love, and not let our experiences or thoughts weigh us down with emotions that are unnatural to our soul state of being. This is also why I chose to pursue my education in the field of psychology…human bodies, particularly the brain and psyche, fascinate me. Each one is extremely unique!

In my work with clients in the field of mental health, I teach my clients that ‘emotions are energies in motion’. Emotions are always in a constant state of fluctuation, depending upon what we allow into our environment, both internal and external. I teach clients that emotions are a natural part of the human experience and that we always have the full ability to control our emotions. This control of emotion is highly dependent on your state of mind - specifically, whether you choose to be an ‘optimist’ or a ‘pessimist’. Yes, YOU have the ability to choose YOUR  state of mind. 

The optimistic individual understands that emotions come and go and that the individual is able to reduce any difficult emotion they may experience by sitting with the emotion and allowing it to guide them to the place that needs healing or more attention in their lives. The optimist understands that emotions are not permanent and that they will pass. They do not allow themselves to believe that they are actually the emotion. In challenging times, when a client comes into a session and states, “I am MAD!” I calmly ask them, “Are you mad, or are you experiencing anger?” They usually respond that they are experiencing anger due to an event in their life, or a comment that was projected onto them. Together, we process this further and utilize skills or techniques to help them return to a balanced state. 

The pessimistic individual believes that the emotions they experience are their default personalities, or have become their default personalities due to unhealed trauma. In my work with clients, this presents as the client coming into session saying things such as, “This week was horrible. It’s the same shit, different day, but this is just how my life is, a perpetual series of horrible events.” Pessimistic individuals have chosen to stay in the emotions that originally caused them to guard their hearts. I believe that this type of person is stuck in a state of trauma, and lives in this state as their ‘default mode’ due to their personal choice of conditioning. In psychological terms, the amygdala was activated during the event of trauma - and the individual’s brain chose to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This emotional response was then stored in the hippocampus as a ‘default method’ when experiencing an event similar to the original traumatic event. When the memory of the emotional response is activated, this is referred to as a ‘triggering event’. When an individual is consistently exposed to a triggering event, either physical or psychological, this emotional response becomes the permanent response, which then forms the personality/ego. We all have the ability to route new neural pathways/networks in the brain. Therefore, we all have the ability to create new responses to triggering events. This requires radical honesty with ourselves, because we first have to accept that we have used our traumas as a crutch to stay stuck. I do believe that pessimistic individuals have the ability to shift into an optimistic state of mind. It is a choice. It takes recognition, acceptance, and desire for change to make this shift. 

To expand this topic to a larger scale, our emotions are heavily influenced by our external environment: our family, friends, community, and society. With the expansion of the internet, this also includes the world. At this time, we have more access to knowledge and information than ever before. We have exposure through the news media and social media to know the exact moment that any event happens in our world. This can be beneficial to us, and in many ways it is. But when it is put in front of us every single second of every single day…it makes me question if our human nervous systems actually have the capability to take on this much information all of the time? I don’t believe that we have evolved enough as a species to have this capability. I am optimistic that at some point in the future, we may evolve our nervous systems to support this, but as of right now, I don’t believe that we do. We are only now beginning to open to the understanding of our individual trauma, from which we are still learning how to process and heal. We are only now beginning to address our generational traumas and understand the impact they have on the health of our nervous systems, and physical/mental/emotional bodies. We are nowhere near ready to take on the world’s traumas, and this is why we are falling ill - mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It is irresponsible to place the responsibility of healing on the individual when it is our society, our world, that is causing us to become ill. If we want to heal: We have to slow down. We have to turn inward.

Our Earthly memories are stored in our human bodies - both the energetic and physical bodies. Western science has proven this through the studies of epigenetics, polyvagal theory, and several others. The Eastern practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a long history of successful health maintenance and the treatment of disease through natural therapeutic methods, including the balancing of Yin and Yang energies within and around the body through meridian lines. In my opinion, it’s time that we stop with all of the division and learn the magic and power of integration. We keep ourselves stuck by creating division, in every aspect of life.

I believe that our personal healing is the most necessary place to begin. Then, we can begin the cycle of passing down generational healing instead of generational trauma - this is the most critical starting point in our ability to expand our capacity to hold more space and to bring unconditional love to the world. I fully believe that with the application of individual healing and then expanding this through our children/future generations, our Earthly traumas/wars/violence, etc. will drastically decline. I believe that we will, in time, bring “Heaven to Earth”. Where we are currently in 2024 could be the soft beginning of this, if we can all begin to apply healing to the individual level by turning inward and being practicing radical honest about where/what we need to heal. We see the chaos in the world: the control, abuse of power, violence, mindlessness, hatred, negativity, FEAR. These things are in our faces 24/7 thanks to the news media, social media, and the internet. The constant push of this information is keeping us in a state of fear. It is keeping us in a perpetual state of trauma. 

And guess what? We are allowing this to happen. When do we decide that enough is enough? When do we collectively choose to stop participating in the dissemination of fear? The collective will not change until the individual decides to make a change - Carl Jung discussed this in 1957 in his work titled The Undiscovered Self , which was written as his concerns for humanity grew after observing the chaos of the Cold War, Communism, and the threat of nuclear war during his time. Sounds familiar, right? We each have to make the individual decision to return to our divine state of unconditional love. We have to stop judging people for choosing to NOT participate in disseminating fearful information. I recently saw a post on social media that read “It’s a privilege for you to be able to ignore the news and destruction in the world…” and my direct response to that is NO IT IS NOT. It is a protective measure that we must take in order to remove ourselves from things that we do not have the full capability to take on.  

We, humans, were not made to take on the traumas of the world all at once at the rate we have been. We are barely able to take on the traumas that we have been passed down through generations. Yes, the world is sad right now. No, war and violence are NEVER okay… but we also cannot individually perpetuate fear and chaos if we want to bring healing to the world. We cannot heal the world until we have done immediate healing to ourselves. We cannot heal until we reconnect to unconditional love. We cannot know true, unconditional love until we become aligned with our soul. As above, so below. As within, so without.

“Such is the power of Love - so varied and great that in all cases it might be called absolute. Yet even so it is far greater when Love is directed, in temperance and justice, toward the good, whether in heaven or on earth: happiness and good fortune, the bonds of human society, concord with the gods above - all these are among his gifts.”  Plato's “Symposium”, The Speech of Eryximachus

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that fear has its place in the psyche. Fear is a primal emotion that alerts us to the presence of danger or a threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological. It is a necessary biochemical and emotional response. It only becomes a problem when we allow fear to control every aspect of our lives. This is the problem of fear.

Please, do the work. Please, put yourself first. The Earth does not need you to repost every single negative and sad thing that you see in the world, this only lowers Her vibrational frequency. The Earth desperately needs you to use discernment and return to balance. The Earth needs you to prioritize. The Earth needs you to disconnect from judgment, fear, chaos, and negativity. The Earth is begging you to navigate home to your soul.