Finding the space around the fear

I missed my weekly writing last week because I was on the train to Seattle from Vancouver. It felt nice to feel as if I was missing something from my routine. As if this Friday writing in a café, just for the sake of writing, is now a firm part of my week. That makes me happy.

So lets recap. I took the train to Seattle to spend the weekend with my sister who was over from Ireland. For some reason this trip triggered a deep anxiety in me in the weeks leading up to departure. I can’t fully explain any rational reasoning for this because it was just a whole lot of over exaggerated thoughts mixed with this travel anxiety that I have acquired over recent years (which I guess makes some sense after the past few years we’ve had). There is something about living in a country that is not your home country, that has created a (mainly) mild sense of vigilance in me. That feeling that although it is home - it doesn’t quite feel like the level of connection or safety I feel from my homeland of Ireland. So it has created a travel anxiety - although even when I go back to Ireland, that also doesn’t feel like my current home so the underlying anxiety to get back to Canada is there. It’s complex, and irrational and takes up way more energy than it needs to. Proven by my most recent trip to Seattle.

This fear I speak of kept me up at night, it sent me down a rabbit hole of researching safety and travel stories (which we all know is not a good idea to deeply Google about anywhere - I’m sure if I did the same about Vancouver I would not step outside the door) and resulted in an overall sense of unease about the unknown. It was a nice reminder of the power of anxiety, fear, irrational thoughts and how convincing they can be. So convincing that they woke me up in the middle of the night as if the fears I was carrying were happening in that moment. It is wild. It is also wild how quickly they can leave, but also important to understand the depth and strength of these feelings and thoughts and that sometimes we just need to fully experience them and let them course through us before they can disperse.

As one might expect, the anxiety induced fears were in fact just that, and the weekend was a delight and I’d love to take the trip again, and perhaps keep going down the west coast on the slow train towards Portland. I do love a good train ride. It has left this niggling reminder in the back of my mind now when I notice hesitation or indecision rise up - and the age old question of how do I decipher between my gut instinct and fear fueled thoughts. I guess it’s just in the doing and the more you move through them - whether the end decision is more in line with the gut instinct or proves that the hesitation was just fear - you have to just move through it.

I’ve sent three emails this week that I have thought about sending for over a year - and while they weren’t anything of too much importance they certainly were me facing fears of rejection, of being vulnerable and trying to move forward with my dream to start new things and branch out. I also signed up for a course that I have debated for a long time. It felt significant that after the week of visceral anxiety, culminating in the trip that was the subject of the misplaced anxiety that I then just pushed through these other old hanging-on anxieties. I don’t want to carry them around with me. I think the more we hold them in, the more they grow inside and the more they fertilize other such thoughts to sprout and grow. It can hit you when you least expect it, and be triggered by something that theoretically should not create a reaction, but perhaps it is just the bodies way of wanting to surface and process the fear that you are ready to release using a relatively safe conduit (in my case, getting the train to Seattle).

To answer my own questions above about intuition vs fear, perhaps the body knows when we are ready to shed and release. Perhaps it finds a setting that it knows will ultimately be safe, but it is unknown enough for our minds to create space for the fears to generate and gather energy from within and ultimately release and let go- and today I feel better in my body for it, it is creating this new level of space around my deeper held fears. That instead of the fear releasing and taking over, there is room to create space around these bigger, more ingrained fears and to be able to access them and work through them. They seem small in the grand scheme of things, but again I trust that my body knows how to build me up to the bigger, more impactful ones. That my body is drip feeding them to me as in a way that allows my system to build up the resilience to them. That small steps over time still takes us the distance.

Doesn’t it feel wonderful when you worry about something for so long and then it happens and all goes well and you feel this sense of lightness and relief? Or even when you have hesitations about something and it might not result in the outcome you had hoped for, but still you get through it, the world doesn’t end and things are all okay. Lightness, relief. We all have our day-to-day experiences of this, or the ones that come with the natural progression of our lives, some have a lot more to deal with than others, and some we bring upon ourselves - whether it be intentionally (such as signing up for a 50km trail race that terrifies you), or just pushing through the things that bring up fear and holding them from an open space.

Notice the effect they have on you, physically and mentally, but stepping back and holding them from an open space. Not pushing them away, not clinging onto them and becoming consumed by them - but just being curious. For me this happens in stages, I get consumed - I Become them with a capital B. I feel it all in my bones, in my cells, in my heart rate, in every part of me. I reach out from this space, I believe and see the world from this space. Then when I start to let myself release a little bit, I can start to feel into the shift between the fear and the letting go. I can start to notice the softness that exists behind that, the space that there is between these opposing sensations. I can start to feel the return to the heart space, to the space where safety exists. To the present moment where safety can exist.

So keep doing things that bring up fear. Keep send those scary, vulnerable emails and facing rejection when it happens. Keep moving through anxiety even when it feels so real and so true and so believable. Keep trusting that you will know when the fear is real and asking you to stop or change course. Keep writing in the café on Fridays on your little corner of the internet that no-one reads just because you want to. Keep signing up for scary things, even if they don’t seem scary to others. Keep taking a step back to notice the space around the fear and how you could open up to it. Keep trying to move through and come to the other side of the the seeds we’ve tended to for too long so that we can plant new seeds, and fertilize new beliefs and thoughts and paths. Keep finding ways to move forward and see what you will find.