Break Free from FEAR

🤔 What if F.E.A.R. (False Evidence Appearing Real) is easier to combat than you think?

In our STUDY, SAVOR, & SUPPORT Each Other CHAT☕️🍵, we’re doing a deep-dive into our Book Club selection! This week is Chapter 8 of REWIRED: The Breakthrough Tapping Method to Stop Overthinking, Calm Your Body, and Finally Feel at Ease by Nick, Jessica, & Alex Ortner.

In Chapter 8, we learn what to do 🤔 When Fear Stops You Cold.

This is such a critical concept that I’m going to dive deep into our greatest challenge: F.E.A.R. — False Evidence Appearing Real — and what we can do together, to stop thinking and actually take action to combat it this month.

I invite you to join me because I’m deciding right here & right now to TAKE CONCRETE ACTION to overcome 4 of my F.E.A.R.s for the next 4 Weeks, and I strongly believe that taking action together — in community with other people who “get it” — makes a tremendous difference. It takes the sting out of doing anything new. It’s fun. And we can keep each other accountable.

And, to show you and me that I mean business, I will be forcing myself to post Recordings in my FREE Private Skool Community: The Mindful VICTUS Playscape.

Please join me there if you want to overcome one of your own F.E.A.R.s. No pressure to post a Recording of your own. Please post what you feel comfortable posting. Even if it’s a simple comment to document what you did to move past your own fear that week. Or you just want to see…to imagine what’s possible if you join us, to conquer your own fear. Or, you can just watch me succeed or flop 🤣! In any event, here are…

The 4 F.E.A.R.s I’ll be battling in these Recordings:

1. Stage Fright — Combat the fear of showing myself playing piano, after not taking any piano lessons for years

2. Perfectionism — Overcome the fear of showing myself singing while I play piano at my current not-that-good level

3. Humor, Joy, Community — Singing karaoke, as a way to embrace Joy with others who want to do it with me

4. Meditation / EFT / Music — blending meditation with EFT tapping & music for fully-embodied tactile & auditory nervous system regulation

So, STAY TUNED…Wish me luck…& Come join me!

Now, let’s get to the meat & potatoes:

What’s the best way to combat our F.E.A.R.s?

You Bypass Thinking: UNLOCK Courage In the Body

Many times, when fear rears its ugly head, the logical part of our minds knows that our fear is irrational. But, as the Ortners point out, thinking that we’re just being “silly,” compounds the problem: it makes us feel shame.

THE TRUTH:

Despite how it might feel to us — especially if we experience the fear again and again, for days, weeks, months, or years — the Ortners remind us of this fundamental truth: “That [fear is] not your permanent identity. That’s just a Fear-Based Reactive Loop….”

It’s critical for us to actively remind ourselves that the basis of our F.E.A.R. is just “old programming that can be updated” (emphasis added).

THE PROBLEM:

Problem is: Our body often vetoes the brain.

The Ortners have a name for this predicament:

“The Law of Somatic Priority — When your logical mind and your survival brain (nervous system) disagree, the survival brain always wins. You cannot think your way out of a feeling problem. Your conscious mind can have all the statistics about flight safety, but if your body feels unsafe, your body will win that argument 100 percent of the time. It has veto power. This is why positive thinking and logical reassurances fail against deep fear.”

MY MINDFUL REFLECTION:

We’ve all experienced this.

Whenever we want to accomplish a goal — especially if it’s related to something new that we’ve never done before, or even things that we have done before, but have not become a part of our regular routine — we can find ourselves in the mental trap of spending too long preparing or practicing or thinking or ruminating about it.

For example, let’s consider the all two common scenario of wanting to get fit as a New Year’s resolution.

Imagine we’re someone who doesn’t feel comfortable going to the gym. Perhaps we have overindulged over the holidays. Or maybe we have failed to prioritize our health for years. We’ve morphed into the quintessential couch potato. We could stand to lose 30 pounds which isn’t that much weight. Aside from our close family and friends, not very many people would even have noticed that our pants are fitting a bit tighter around our waist.

So, what’s the big deal?

For whatever reason, whenever we picture ourselves going to the gym, we imagine tons of extremely fit, capital H, “Hotties” on all of the machines. Everyone using the free weights looks like they’re probably about to compete in some fitness competition where they’re striking poses on the stage.

Or we imagine that when we sit down to use a machine, somebody else is breathing down our neck because that machine’s a part of their regular circuit. So our poor nervous system is trapped in anxiety, worrying that we’re gonna take too long fiddling with the setup before we even hit our sets or reading the instructions to use the machine at all. Maybe we don’t know anything about keeping the proper form and we’re worried that we’re going to look like a chicken flapping our wings instead of doing deadlifts properly.

Who knows!

Let’s just imagine that all of these “silly” thoughts are going through our mind every single time that we picture ourselves walking into our local gym at the start of the new year.

Rather than jumping straight out of bed right into our tennis shoes and driving ourselves to the gym, to walk straight into that door to get on any machine whatsoever, even the simplest machine, we decide that we “have to” work on our nutrition first. I mean, what’s the point of walking into a gym if we haven’t ended our cravings from a fun week of holiday eating?

We tell ourselves, “It’s better to pick the best diet first.”

This sends us down the path of too many choices: there’s Low-Carb, Keto, Mediterranean, Paleo, a meat-only Carnivore diet, and everything in between.

Or, maybe we worry about our appearance so much that there’s no way we could possibly just wear a simple T-shirt and shorts to the gym. We’ve got to have matching ensembles so that we can look cute every day. Because, F.E.A.R. tells us, “That’s the way that we can make our New Year’s resolution stick.”

Or, maybe we tell ourselves we couldn’t possibly go to the gym alone, so we have to wait to get our Bestie to join us. Problem is, our best friend’s in an even worse predicament: they have even less knowledge about fitness and nutrition, and they’ve worked out even less than us, for even longer than we’ve neglected to exercise.

It’s not hard to imagine how thinking all of these “silly” thoughts might lead us down the wrong path. The path that diverts us farther and farther away from the simple task of taking the first step.

And, it’s also not hard to see how thinking these thoughts would provoke anxiety.

Personally, I don’t experience these thoughts anymore. After years of exercising, I finally feel comfortable at the gym. Yet, as I was writing this, I felt my heartbeat starting to race. My palms began to feel a bit sweaty. Isn’t that amazing? I can still picture myself using a machine for the first time, I can imagine people looking over at me, watching me fiddle around like I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, and — BAM! I can feel precisely how my body actively FEELS the anxiety described in everything I’ve written.

I can see exactly how thinking these thoughts would cause me to get trapped in an Anxiety Loop and F.E.A.R. whispers, ever so subtly, “Now is not the right time. You need to prepare more. You need to research more,” before I even open that gym door.

DUH! Of course F.E.A.R. makes us Lack Courage

It’s no wonder then that, when we’re faced with something new, we often think on some level the limiting thought, “I can’t do it, it’s just not meant for me, because I’m just not like that.”

And, when we look at other people who are successful at doing these things, we also have limiting beliefs when we automatically compare ourselves to them: We label them “Special,” and we label us as somehow “less-than.”

Like, “They know what they’re doing. They’re experts. They’re confident. Not like me.”

The reality is: they are not experts because they are confident.

They are experts because they started even when they were afraid.

And guess what? That might have been a short time ago. They might’ve just started last week!

And that distinguishing factor can be far simpler and smaller than we think:

Maybe they put in their reps for five days in a row, on this one and only machine.

They haven’t even tried the rest of the machines in the circuit, but we don’t know that.

We just think we know.

Bottom line: we assume.

And our Fear tells us that we are right.

Fear tells that we are safer doing nothing.

Fear tells us to keep doing nothing to stay safe.

Fear tells us that we just need more time to think about it, to plan and prepare and research.

And that’s precisely how Fear keeps us from…

What we actually need: to simply DO IT.

To take action.

To put on whatever sneakers we have as long as they fit.

To stop planning or preparing or making lists.

To just get in the car, drive to the Gym, open the door, and get on the easiest machine ever: the treadmill.

Taking action is always the best option.

Because it’s the fastest way for us to actually change how we see our own identity.

So what can we do to take action NOW?

First, we can acknowledge, we all know how hard it can be to take action.

Intellectually, we know that taking action is the shortest distance between point A where we are, and point B where we want to be.

But our Monkey Mind that thrives in our amygdala will not shut up.

Like it’s playing a drum beat of war, at an increasingly frightening pace, and it’s flooding our bodies with stress hormones.

So we stay frozen.

Or, we flop.

For weeks, we find ourselves laying on the couch and decide to start watching the entire Yellowstone series, and all of its many spinoff shows (1883, 1923, Yellowstone 2018-2024, Marshalls, & Dutton Ranch), from beginning to end, in chronological order.

What I love about this chapter is how the Ortners encourage us to TAP with EFT instead.

For me, EFT is the perfect way to take back our control:

In the privacy of our own homes.

In the couple of minutes right after we wake up.

In the precise moment that we are feeling resistance.

Perhaps even at the same tempo as our Monkey Mind’s percussive beats on our amygdala’s drum.

As we say each and every fear that we are feeling with the setup statement (“Even though I feel X, I completely love and accept myself”) while tapping on the Meridian acupressure points, we are addressing our fear on a somatic level. Inside our bodies. And that’s a fast and easy way of disrupting our Reactive Loop of planning-researching-and-endlessly-preparing.

Yes, the Ortners emphasize, the Reactive Loop of more thinking is precisely what has to stop: “To change the fear, you must speak the language of the body. Tapping is that language.”

I love how tapping allows us to literally tap into our bodies long before we are standing in the middle of the gym, wondering what to do with ourselves. Long before we’ve opened the gym door. Before we sit in our car. Before we rev the ignition. Even before we get out of bed or brush our teeth.

And the best part?

EFT sends a powerful message to our mind: it is a Concrete Action we can take that proves our Self-Love, right now.

That settles the fear, because it shows our rational brain that we’ve got our own back.

The fear is simply a thought. And we get to choose which thoughts we listen to.

Plus, the more we put in those body-&-mind reps, the more we can see that our fears are false. They are not necessarily true.

And, the more we take the actions that we want to take, the more comfortable, we will become with taking those actions, the faster those actions will become habits, the quicker those habits will become our regular routine. Until we’ve allowed ourselves to get used to trying one new machine per week, the 30 pounds we’ve been lugging around our belly has long since disappeared…

Until, one day, we realize the gym has become our home away from home.

We wake up with pep in our step.

And we love the smile plastered on our face.

Every time we look in the mirror, knowing that we are who we have chosen to become: healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

Which brings us back — full circle — to the commitment I made at the start of this post:

I’ll be combating the 4 F.E.A.R.s listed above, from week to week, because I’m done Thinking. I’ve done enough of that.

I’m devoting myself to Doing — not because I feel “ready” — not because Fear isn’t there — but, precisely because the F.E.A.R. is there — and, ACTION’s necessary to UNLOCK Courage in my body.

So, starting next week, we’ll practice taking ACTION with EFT, and I’ll share a fun way we can remember to use it when we need it most!

Now, Take a Mindful Moment, to ask yourself:

⭐️ What F.E.A.R.s have been holding YOU back?

⭐️ Have you been stuck in an Anxiety Loop of thinking-studying-preparing-and-ruminating?

🤔 Are YOU ready to take ACTION with me?

🙌 Then JOIN my FREE Private Skool Community: The Mindful VICTUS Playscape! It’s FREE. It’s FUN. And it’s how we can BREAK FREE from our F.E.A.R.s, one by one!

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• Choose a creative activity to pursue alongside me. Not necessarily the same creative practice as I’m choosing (music). But, the creative practice that YOU choose.

• Together, we will experiment and PLAY.

  • P.S. No worries if you don’t have a Creative Practice yet. I’m planning fun ways to listen-to-learn piano, by going back to basics, so beginners will be right on time!

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