Fear - The gatekeeper to the next level (it's not as scary as it seems)

Let’s take a closer look at one of the recurring gatekeepers of the game: Fear.

Fear has many faces, and it tries really hard to make those faces look as scary as possible. Fear pops up regularly in life because it’s a core feature of the game – think of it like the ‘final boss’ you gotta overcome on each level, before you can access the next level.

Fear stands between you and expansion, and you can COMPLETELY kick its butt every single time. Before we go any further, please take a moment to imprint this truth-bomb into your soul…OK good.

We’re probably all well-acquainted with fear.

To be fair, fear is only trying to keep us safe. It wants us to be small.

Fear does not want us to grow. Fear does not want us to expand. Fear’s greatest desire would be for us to stay a tiny, silent and safe little blob, never moving an inch for fear of the unknown.

Fear’s mantra is: DON’T GO INTO THE UNKNOWN. SCARY SHIT COULD BE OUT THERE.

Now, this is kind of wild, because to have any kind of life that is truly worth living, we must GO INTO THE UNKNOWN. It is in the unknown that a huge chunk of fabulous things exist.

Somewhere in the game of life, well-meaning, life-preserving fear has become so distorted and all-encompassing, that it’s contaminated everything like the friggin plague.

Small sidenote: I can take a wild guess as to how the energy of fear became so distorted and ALL ENCOMPASSING, but that’s for a different post. (OK here’s a hint: A thick slathering of sneaky psychological programming to keep the humans tiny, so we stay in our low-freq existence where we have no power…. but ANYWAY….. another time, another post.)

Fear keeps our frequency low, because we cannot expand.

Fear is an energetic state of contraction. It makes us rigid and closed. We are not open to receiving new information and new experiences. Therefore we don’t expand.

Fear falls into two categories:

Conscious fears – Things we know about;

Unconscious fears – Things we’re not consciously aware of.

Our mission here, is to understand fear, reign it in, and certainly don’t EVER let it stop us from accessing the next level and expanding into higher states of consciousness. If we do? We’re stuck on the same level of the game: Stagnant-town where no one grows.

If you’re all about the next level (like I am), then best we understand the gatekeepers that hold the keys that open the door. To get through, we must first understand what block us.

Conscious fears: A fear about something we’re aware of.

This type of fear is by far the easier of the two – because we know what we’re afraid of. We can see it. Stop, now take a moment and use your critical thinking. Is this fear valid? Are you really going to be physically hurt or die? If you decide no, then move forwards and do the thing.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Don’t get stuck in the pause.

The more you push back against fear, the easier it becomes to move through it. You grow beyond the discomfort, and through repetition the fear grows smaller. You become the boss. Level completed.

It’s also useful to look at the opposite for a minute – when you give into fear? The fear grows. Your ability to push back against fear diminishes a little, and it’s harder to do next time. Fear takes up the space that your empowerment should fill. You can of course take your power back at any time, but you’ll require a little more momentum to start the longer you leave it.

Here’s a personal example: I finally got my licence and began driving when I was 44 years old. At first, every time I did something new behind the wheel, I was terrified.

I felt a lot of fear at the thought of driving on the freeway. I felt fear going fast, at over 80 kilometers an hour (certainly isn’t the case now…), and I felt fear driving through a busy intersection with no traffic lights. I often felt this fear to the point where I’d get in the car, and just thinking about what I needed to do would make me freak out and hyperventilate. It took a lot of work to calm myself before I took off.

But I could see the fear. It was obvious what I was freaking out over. Now, several years later, I’m not scared anymore. Repetition has completely normalised the discomfort I felt at doing this new, scary thing.

If I gave into fear and didn’t take the freeway? The fear remains unchallenged and would likely grow, to where I’m afraid to take another busy road next time, and so on.

I also have conscious fears regarding medical issues and test results. This is pretty normal in our society, but it can become really thick and heavy at times.

This fear pops in on a regular basis regarding my Mum’s cancer journey. Every few weeks when I call to get her blood results, I’m definitely fearful and worried they’re going to be bad (as they’ve been many times before).

If I’m laying awake in bed at night, and these fears about her health situation are on a loop for the 50^th time? Eventually I pull the damn thing out from the shadows and look at it. Here again, the fear is pretty obvious. It’s a normal fear of suffering and death. The big guys.

Always acknowledge it’s normal to fear. Never repress it.

I’ve been there and it’ll bite you on the ass BIG TIME.

If you have recurring thoughts of the same fears, ask yourself: is fear and worry actually going to help the situation? Is thinking of it on repeat going to create a better outcome? The answer here is ALWAYS no. So now throw in an interference pattern (something different to break up the pattern). Focus on the breath. Get up and do something. Go for a walk. Drive. Meditate. Watch a series. Acknowledge that the fear is there, now move your focus onto something else.

Become aware of the fear. Chuck in an interference pattern. And repeat and repeat, until gradually, over time, this repetition will reprogram our subconscious mind and create NEW responses.

And I know this might sound weird, but have a laugh when you can. Fear is often so bloody ridiculous and over the top, sometimes it’s kind of amusing. Especially when it’s really UNFUNNY. That’s when we need to laugh the most. It diffuses heavy situations and helps us to cope. It helps lighten the often weird, challenging, kookiness of life.

Unconscious fears (the sneakier ones) – how to spot them and dissolve them, and how they affect your life.

Unconscious fears are so complex and layered, and there are so many of them programmed into ALL of our lives – on an individual level and on a collective, cultural level, that I’m not going to get stuck into this subject too much here, because I’d be typing flat out for days. I’ll write more about this in due course though, because this is where countless golden master keys exist.

I’m just going to scratch the surface here.

Unconscious fears are tricky, because until we pull them out from the shadows of our subconscious, we don’t even know they exist – yet they control many of our behaviours – the problematic ones that are steeped in low frequency.

Unconscious fears manifest outwardly through behavours like self-sabotage, addictions, distraction, endless busyness and procrastination.

Many of us have these behaviours, yet we don’t know that they’re actually hiding deeper fears.

When behaviours like these come up, if you’re really into doing your shadow work (the key to expansion), YOU KNOW IT’S HIDING SOMETHING. A great habit to get into, is to stop. Get curious, and peer closer. What is at the root of this behaviour? This is shadow work. Journalling is another great way to identify the core fear.

When you dissolve the fear (which exists at the root), the outward behaviour also changes.

Shadow work is one of my favourite subjects, and there are innumerable examples I could give, but for the sake of saving space, I’ll just reel off a couple of my own:

My old addictions were masking gigantic fears rooted in lack of self-love and abandonment issues. Fears that I am not worthy. That I am not good enough. These core fears were well-hidden for decades – until I began doing the inner work, which I accessed in the early days with mindful drawing.

Constant self-sabotage of my relationships and literally everything good, came back to fears I was not worthy again. The basic reasoning for self-sabotage here was: “How about I set this motherfucker on fire and destroy it COMPLETELY before it gets taken from me/I lose it/I don’t deserve it.” Low self-worth shit. Fear’s plan to protect me from being hurt again, is to nuke everything first.

Fear-based, survival-mode behaviours will endlessly screw us over as adults until we heal those traumas and release the fears.

For my Mum, constantly keeping busy busy busy, often cleaning (when nothing needs cleaning) – keeps her distracted from her fears and emotions. My Mum has multiple myeloma (an incurable cancer) and she understandably has very real fears about death.

She also has deeper, older fears about shame, guilt, and regrets that her particularly unfair traumas imprinted upon her, back in her teenage years. Except she doesn’t journal, or self-inquire or do shadow work. She just goes to church and keeps busy. Very busy.

Whenever I have to do something important for my work – like record a video, write a post, or do a voiceover, I find myself stalling to start. I procrastinate constantly.

I get distracted with the news, Twitter and scrolling Instagram. Then finally I’ll sit down to try and work again, then I’ll get up like a friggin robot on autopilot and I’ll eat another snack when I’m not even hungry. I’m stuck in loops of procrastination and distraction on repeat. And hours later (for real), I’ll get sick of my own shit and peer closer… Ahhahhahaha. Now I can see it. I’m doing it because of fear.

There’s an old, sneaky, well-hidden background fear that I can’t do it. Some part of me thinks the job is too big, or that I’m going to fail, it’s not going to be good enough. Blah blah fucking blah. Broken record. Old stories.

For me it leads back to old narratives that we each carry as humans. Stories we drag with us from childhood. Tired old stories, that often become distorted in the shadows where they’ve been repressed for eons.

HOW TO DEAL WITH UNCONSCIOUS FEAR:

When behaviours like this come up, it really helps to get sick of your own shit (or why bother fixing it?). Now get curious and poke around. Why is it there? What am I afraid of? What is it stopping me from doing?

When you’re ready, start rewriting a NEW STORY through creating a resistance pattern. Do the hard thing. Do it again and again and again, and through repetition, and coming face to face with the fear at the root, you’ll begin to create a new program. The fears will dissolve, behaviours and traits will change and *DING* next level accomplished.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

~ Carl Jung

Drag it out of the shadows and make it conscious. Bring it out into the light of your awareness. And the fears are always unfounded anyway, because more often that not, this *thing* I’m avoiding doing turns out better than I hoped – and even if it doesn’t work out, I know it’s going to teach me something I need!

Fear is a normal part of the game of life on Earth. It’s one of the biggest challenges to leveling up and raising your frequency.

I know I’ve got loads of fears coming up ahead of me – and that’s just fine! I’m kind of secretly, weirdly excited about it – because I know it means I’m expanding.

When the time comes that I ever have to speak publicly, I’m going to be bloody petrified. When I finally get around to talking about some of my intrinsically-held beliefs that completely go against ‘reality’ as we know it? Like life expectancy is a bullshit self-fulfilling prophecy? (we can do FAR better than 100 years old within a generation or two). Or I know we can absolutely create a future world without illness and dis-ease? Or I have a growing intuitive suspicion that this ‘reality’ is actually a many-worlds simulation? And my views on God and Christ Consciousness?

Sure there’s a fear people are gonna get MAD AT ME for daring to believe such things. Really fucking mad.

They’re gonna wanna fight and leave abusive comments. They’re gonna call me names. And deep down we all want to be liked. Humans carry a fundamental fear of not being accepted.

Societal programming is very heavy on the “DON’T DARE TO BE DIFFERENT” program. That one starts early in school. BE THE SAME AS THE OTHERS lest we single you out, call you names and reject you from the tribe. Zoom back a couple of centuries and you’d get burned at the stake for being different. All those dramatic expressions of fear we carry in our DNA, and find almost anywhere we look today.

So now I know how the game works, I’m weirdly excited to go head to head with fear. “Gimme the keys to the next level you invisible bogeyman.” And now, once again *eye roll*, it’s battle-time.

I’ll feel its awful discomfort. But I’ll lean into the discomfort until it’s not uncomfortable anymore. And I’ll do it over and over, until I can shout my truth from the rooftops and people can throw tomatoes at me and I won’t care. Every tomato is validation I am honouring my truth and facing my fear. Not sure what’s with the tomato analogy, but I’m sure you get my drift.

And I accept fear’s invitation to go another round in the ring because I want my prize of expansion. I want my prize of higher frequency from learning what it is to be authentic and not shrinking to fear.

So fuck it. How important is doing the thing? If it’s important? Then feel the fear and do it anyway. Move on through the process, growing and expanding as we go. Collect those keys from fear at each round that access the portals to next level. Thank you. Next.

Boss mode.

shimmy on through to the next level.

Fear is a gatekeeper. If you can get past it, you collect a prize. Your frequency rises and you access expansion. If you lose and you let fear win, the fear will grow. You can shrink or you can grow.

You can lower your frequency or you can raise it. All by your actions.

This is your game.