“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” – John Lennon
How did John Lennon get it all in one paragraph? By it all I mean, the parameters and purpose of our lives summed up: we gotta learn to love ourselves and then and only then can we truly embrace life. I’d go as far as saying that once you learn to love yourself, your world can be your heaven on earth.
Learning to love oneself is to learn to live from the heart. Conversely, when we don’t love ourselves, we are living in our heads. The occupants, fear and his buddies, can take over and make life a living hell. In everything we do, we are either motivated or turning towards fear or love.
Fear and love are opposites.
I don’t agree with ‘feel the fear and do it anyhow’. That’s like pushing a boulder up a hill and not sustainable over the long run. Why not break up the boulder into smaller chunks? Or a stick of dynamite to blast it into oblivion! Similarly, a much better way is to get to the crux of any feelings we don’t want, and deal with them.
It might not be fear in it’s raw sense. If we are not living in love (which can also be translated as: peace, joy, excitement and acceptance) then we are holding some aspect that is driven by or towards fear. At some level we are in our mind, fear orientated and hearing or doing some of the following:
- criticizing yourself and constantly putting yourself down?
- holding back because of fear of failure?
- angry with someone in your life?
- running around keeping yourself soooo busy and unable to be alone?
- worry about money?
- someone in your life driving you nuts (i.e. irritation)?
- your relationship a disappointment or are you unhappily single?
- feel frustrated by some aspect of your life ? career? Finances?
- doubt your ability to succeed in something that means a lot to you?
- worry about things that you have absolutely no control over?
It’s not about stopping the thoughts. It would be easier to stop a tsunami. There are better options. One is to examine the feeling or thought more consciously. Go into the story, get to the source and interrupt it. Tap inside your inner knowing that holds the crux of the feeling and also has your solution. Write a new outcome for you.
The other option is to make a concerted effort to turn to you heart and tune into what it is telling you. It’s kind of like changing the channel to a different station. Change from fear to love. Every choice you make, every reaction you have to a situation, every outcome of a conversation – ask yourself – is this bringing me to more love?
If you fancy, drop me a message info@noellegoggin.com or put a comment with what you’d like to hear more about and I may choose your favourite negative mind chatter to discuss in more detail next week.
