Are You Keeping Your Fears In-Check?
I'm keeping this week's email short and sweet so you have plenty of time to do this fear journaling exercise. If you’ve been reading my recent emails you’ve heard me talking about how important it is to acknowledge our fears. So, today I’m sharing with you a journaling exercise to help you to keep your fears in-check + ease anxiety you might be experiencing around them. Once you’ve finished writing I highly recommend doing a meditation (you can try my Grounding Meditation) to get the FULL EFFECT. Expressing and processing your fears + allowing yourself at least 10 minutes to go within would leave you calmer and more grounded.
Some notes before you start:
If you think you aren’t experiencing fear, take a moment to check in with yourself, ask yourself: What am I feeling right now? All negative emotions are rooted in fear. As psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ros says:
“There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it's more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.”
I highly recommend doing this as a writing exercise, rather than just processing it in your head. When you let things out on the paper not only they become clearer but you’re literally downloading your thoughts to the paper, creating headspace.
The process of labelling what you feel, naming it, decreases the intensity of those emotions.
Analysing your fears, getting specific about the outcome you are worried about, assessing their likelihood + checking for evidence can be really helpful with processing our fears. This is when our analytical minds can really serve us!
When analysing your fears isn’t enough for you to find some ease and groundedness, there's an invitation to work on your mindset. Go back to the first email I’ve sent about COVID-19 to help you working through your perception of fear.
At the end of this exercise you're called to take action. If you find yourself stuck here from any reason, please email me, I’m would love to personally support you with that via email.
For those of you who aren't on social media / not active, here are two posts I've shared that might be helpful: How I cope with uncertainty Shifting from DOING / THINKING TO BEING I’d love to hear from you! How are you doing? What’s most challenging for you these days? Lots of love, Naama
