Welcome to Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow and the Divine Feminine Awakening Series.
Listen to this July 2018 re-release episode for empowering tools to move through fear more efficiently when it hijacks you. We look at the role of trauma in our fears.
Discussed in the episode:
- How to empower ourselves in the face of fear
- A story about how my fear put me straight in the line of danger
- Why fear is not usually telling you the truth and how to calm your nervous system when it is present
- Helpful tools on what to do when you feel yourself highjacked by fear
- Different ways of supporting yourself and getting support from others during times of intensity
This Divine Feminine Awakening series provides emerging wisdom from my own journey of feminine awakening delivered episode by episode in real-time over the last 5 years. Through my present-day lens, I’ve chosen the most vital topics to revisit with you.
May you recognize and receive tools, wisdom and landmarks for your own journey of awakening.
To join me in community, go here.
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Listen to Fear Less: What to Do When You’re Hijacked by Fear by clicking the play button on the audio player below.
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Read the Full Transcript Here:
Welcome to Trust your Sacred Feminine Flow. I’m your host, Joni Advent Maher. I’m a mystic, spiritual midwife and transformational guide. So glad to have you with me today. Today, we’re actually going to talk about fear and how to empower ourselves in the face of fear. And this is a subject that is important these days, because there is so much fear surfacing in the collective. The more polarized that things get, the more intense things are getting, collectively the more individual and collective fears are rising to the surface. And it really is quite a bit like walking through a dust storm and it does take some effort and some energy to stay clear and pointed and grounded in the deepest truth, both for yourself and within the larger whole. So I want to tell you a story, and this is a story about the power of fear.
So you may or may not know this about me, but one of my traits is I do tend to dive in and then learn to swim as an intuitive who did not have a great deal of support growing up, it worked for me. Oftentimes I could dive in and figure things out along the way, particularly as a young woman, this was my approach to life. And while I still will get drawn by my curiosity or my passion or a sense of adventure into things, I more and more see the value of both research and learning things before you jump into the water, but this story took place before I acquired that wisdom. So a number of years ago, my husband and I had an adventure with a friend to go snowmobiling up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous snow covered mountains with these beautiful Alpine trees and sun coming through the forest.
So I went with my husband, our dear friend, and probably half a dozen other men. And did I know how to snowmobile? No, I did not. Did that stop me? No, it did not. It seemed easy enough and they assumed that I could do it so sure. What the heck, give it a try. Going up the mountain was a joy. It was so exhilarating and so powerful and just so beautiful to be in these pristine areas on this snow covered mountain. Seeing just the greenery and the trees, just the stately trees reaching up into the sunlight. It was just magnificent. We made it all the way to the top of the mountain and I could see for miles. It was glorious and I felt so high and so invigorated and it was fantastic, but then it was time to come down the mountain.
And I have a history of having fallen down the steps as a little girl, actually as an infant and, a history of falling in a ski accident that we’re still lodged in my body. And I didn’t know that. So going down the hill was a much harder proposition because it brought up the frozen fear that was within me. And we’ll just suffice it to say that I had a few close calls with some trees. I did not seriously injure myself, but it was, it was the antithesis of the ride up the mountain. It was a very fear filled experience. And that was in part because there was trauma in the body that had not been released yet. That is not what my story is about. This just leads up to my story. So my story is about the next time I went snowmobiling, which was a few years later and I still had not dealt with the latent trauma in my body, but this time, rather than going up the steep steep mountain, we chose a more gentle and gradual path.
I was out with my husband and our friend, his wife, and his two little girls who were at the time, I think seven and nine and were snowmobiling circles literally around me. So one of the lessons I received on this next snowmobiling adventure from Curtis, our friend, was that if you see yourself heading towards a tree, I want you to roll off. I want you to jump off. Of course, take your foot off the gas and jump off. So I had that emblazoned in my brain. So the experience I want to share with you is about being in this wide open, expansive, gorgeous field, cruising down the path with my husband, my friends, their kids, huge expanse of white with the sun shining down and one, literally one tree in the field. One tree. And guess what? Guess what happened? Yes, I headed straight for the tree.
I was literally incapable of stopping myself from heading directly towards the tree. My fear had hijacked my brain, my body, my being, and despite, I don’t know, yards and yards and yards of a wide expansive snow covered field. The thing that I could not avoid was the tree. Now I will say to my credit that I did manage to jump off and roll in the snow before actually hitting it. But the point of all this is that my fear had gotten so a hold of me that despite the fact that there was ample space and opportunity for me to flourish and thrive. My fear brought me straight to the danger. It brought me straight to the very thing I was afraid of. And how often is that the case in our lives? Like how often is the power of fear that is gripping us, guiding us straight to the very thing that we are wanting to avoid.
I would dare say it’s happening more often than we think. So. I can’t share this story and talk about fear without going into the aspect of trauma and fear and how they are coupled together and how old traumas do get lodged in the body, in the nervous system. And that, unless we do the healing work to uncouple that, they will be dominating and driving our responses to life. And so I do encourage you. If you know, there are places where there is old fear operating within you, that is rooted in trauma, that you get support for that, that you get support in addressing it because it is essential to freeing yourself because here’s the thing, the big challenge about fear is so often, it engages with our mind, and yes, it does hijack the body and the nervous system, but it’s when the fear and our mind get together that we are just in over our heads, the mind in and of itself, when caught in the grips of fear, is not equipped to find the truth.
We need our body’s wisdom. We need the wisdom of our heart and our soul in order to discover and root and find the truth. And the thing is, is that nine times out of 10, probably more than that, 99 times out of a hundred fear is not telling you the truth, unless there is a bear standing in your kitchen or someone chasing you, you are not typically in the kind of danger that your fear is telling you is warranted. And the mind is not equipped to fully assess that. And it gets caught up in the fear and it’s like a runaway train and we just cannot see the truth clearly and the sensual body in particular. So what I mean by that is engaging the power of the breath, engaging the power of the senses. So literally with your eyes, scanning your environment, is there an imminent threat in this moment, letting yourself experience gravity in your body.
So feeling the support of the earth beneath you, feeling the boundary of your skin, literally making contact with your body, with your skin, whether it’s with gentle patting the body or firm caresses, it can help saddle the nervous system and help you begin to assess the truth more clearly. So I have become a bit of an expert at this because I would say for the last two to three years, as I really have been going through my intense, uh, awakening and expansion more Saturdays than not, I wake up hijacked by fear. I’m not sure why it comes to visit me on Saturdays as it does today happens to be a Saturday as well. And today was no different. I think perhaps it shows up on those days when I don’t have structure or a schedule or a place I have to be. And so I am free and available to work with, but so here’s the deal.
As we endeavor to live more authentically as we endeavor to be more empowered and to stand in our sovereignty, to take up more space, to dream bigger dreams seems to create more powerfully, to take leadership in our own lives and be a leader among our communities and families, guess what? Fear is going to surface, fear is surfacing anyway, survival level fears are surfacing in the collective, as I said, but as we step into our power and our authority and live our true purpose, we are going to face fear, and we need to have some tools to address it. So, as I said, coming back to the body tuning in to the wisdom of the heart, listening to the yearnings of your soul, all those sources hold pieces of the truth for you. But there are a few other things that I want to recommend if you feel yourself, hijacked by fear.
One is to recognize just as if you were driving through the mist or fog or dust storm in your car, that you would know that somewhere on the other side, you would be able to see clearly. So just remembering that, that is one of the gifts that your mind can provide. It can be a tool that you can harness to help bring you back. It can be the voice of the reminder, but it’s a habit that we have to cultivate. So really, recognizing first that you are in the fog of fear, and then again, affirming that there is truth. There is clarity on the other side because I’m here to tell you when you are in the fear and it is not grounded in a real current, in the moment threat to your alive-nes, it is not telling you the truth. It’s never telling you the truth.
The story that is running about other people’s intentions about what’s possible for you about what resources are available to you. When it’s coming out of that fear, it is not the truth. It is never the truth. There is a deeper truth and you can access it once the fog passes. Once there is a sense of clarity. So it’s that do not make choices, do not take actions when you are in that state. Secondly, it can be very helpful to reach out for help personally, I’m a huge proponent of prayer and that can take whatever form is meaningful for you. I’m not prescribing any particular spiritual or religious path or orientation, but for me to open up to something greater than myself and to ask for help, does naturally begin to expand me and show me other possibilities.
Also reaching out to other people, trusted, supportive people in your life that can hold the space for you and just letting them, letting them know you are in a contracted and fearful place. And that the voice of fear and limits are running the show and even better would be if you could be with someone that can physically connect with you. And what I mean by that is put a hand on your back, give you a hug because energetically, what happens when we contract is we, when we’re caught in fear, we do contract and it’s like pulling away from the periphery of our skin of our body and, and getting really tight and compact within ourselves. And so when we can have physical contact, whether it’s with a person or even with an animal, it just helps bring us back again. It starts to loosen and expand us in a way that is very healing and grounding and brings us into the safety and wellbeing of the present moment and of the support that’s available.
And then lastly, just affirming again, using that a good mind of yours to affirm that the truth exists, affirming it exists, and that you are committed to discovering it and finding out what it is and just being patient and supportive with yourself until you do. And again, holding off on taking any action until you’re clear of what is aligned action that’s coming out of the deepest truth. And that’s the, the wisdom of your heart, the truth of what is right and aligned for you in any given situation, ideally more and more, and with greater ease, you can and will be able to embody the clarity and the truth of standing in your sovereignty, that sovereignty, which is the connection to your true nature, to the part of you that can see through the illusion of fear and beloved. That is the vision I am holding for you.
And I believe we are being called to as the wise women of this modern day world, we are being called to hold the vibration of the truth and the vision of the truth for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our humanity. And it begins with doing our own healing and addressing the places of fear that surface in us, or that continue to cross our path on a regular basis. Sometimes we do need outside support. Sometimes it does get bigger than we can manage on our own or with a friend. And as I said, if there is latent trauma in the body, it’s very important to get support to address that. And it can be a very gentle and supportive process over time, but super important to get that addressed. And even if there’s not big T traumas, as I said, sometimes we do need support with the little T traumas, which we all experience in life that are underlying the way fear can get ahold of us.
The stories that it tells us, the particular kinds of fears that we, or our more vulnerable and susceptible to. So there are times when we need to reach out and get support and assistance to address those, to dissolve them and to turn that contracted energy of fear into its true essence, which is free flowing essence of love. That’s what we’re here for darling. That’s what we’re here in this third dimension to do, to bring more of that essence of love into this denser reality of the earth plane as a spiritual midwife and transformational guide that is precisely what I support the women I work with in addressing. If you’d like my support or more information about my work, you can go to my website, revolutionaryheart.com. So beloved until we meet again. I want to remind you to always trust what your heart knows.