“1-2-3 Go!”
HOW To Feel, Differently
When you start to feel fear:
1. Stop everything and notice How it feels. Have your muscles tightened? Are you short of breath? Are your palms sweaty? Is your mind fuzzy? These are all just INDICATORS telling you that the experience of the emotion of fear is currently going on. Soon you will be able to objectively identify what’s going on and not get caught up in the experience.
2. Stop thinking about What is causing this fear, and only focus on the fear itself. ** Once an emotion is satisfied that you have acknowledged it, it will start to go away-and faster and faster with more practice. So play with it: take a few moments to really let yourself get saturated with the emotion-don’t worry, it can’t hurt you. Notice How much space in your body it consumes and where it resonates, does it have a color, a texture, a temperature; does it feel soft or prickly? Once it becomes a game and an object, you will no longer fear it as an uncontrollable experience-but more as a time-controlled, fascinating experience (it might even bring you pleasure at some point). And again understand, you’ll start to feel it coming up, you’ll acknowledge/look at/face/notice it, and it WILL GO AWAY!
3. With that emotion starting to neutralize, start thinking of things you love, things you think are beautiful, things that make you giggle-anything and everything that makes you feel good and makes you love life. You are now inserting a NEW emotion! And guess what?-you can’t feel good and bad at the same time = impossible.
4. Now with the new positive emotion activated, you can ease yourself into looking at What things activated the fear emotion in the first place, “those things”. You’ll immediately notice How the thing that scared you isn’t so fearfully “charged” anymore. Think about doing the things that scared you…does it bring up more fear? = go back to Step 1 and start again. You will have to repeat these steps until your brain is retrained on How it initially perceives emotions, and How the system is going to work differently for a different overall response.
5. Think about and imagine things that have scared you in the past, BEFORE you actually try to do them. Right now you need practice. And you need practice at being successful at trying new things. Be kind to yourself, and practice ahead of time so when the opportunity arrives for you to apply your new tools you will succeed.
“BUT,” you say, “those things will still be scary even if I’m not scared of fear any longer.”
Actually, it’s pretty awesome because NO they won’t!!! With the element of fear taken away You now get to chose What the new feelings about those things will be: exciting, interesting, fascinating, enthralling, helpful, fun….And those things will now feel good to you.