Surrendering to fear

Our emotions are what drive our life, they are the one thing we are always being bombarded with as we are sentient beings moving through the world in different ways depending on how we feel.

Think about when a situation happens that makes us feel sad or unhappy, we tend to be less motivated about the future and are likely to not care about anything outside of us as we focus on trying to make ourselves feel better. However, when we feel joy, love and happiness, we want to scream it from the rooftops and share it with others leading us to make decisions that are better.

While our emotions guide our every decision (whether we are aware of it or not), we are not taught how to deal with or even process our negative emotions which are the underlying cause of unhappiness in this world. When we are unhappy, anxious, worried, scared...we are being dominated by fear and as a result treat others negatively. This can be seen in the way we talk to people, in the way we carry ourselves, in the tone of our voice, in the stories we tell ourselves that make us feel superior to others to help us cope with the situation.

We may not be consciously aware of it, but the majority of us allow fear to be the deciding factor in our lives. There is great difficulty however in determining if this is true for us as it requires us to get brutally honest, crack ourselves open and ask if we are somehow responsible for not getting what it is we desire most? We are forced to look deeply inside ourselves to determine which insecurities are getting the better of us and where we are getting in our own way.

Fear in this context is not about being fearful of the situation itself but rather fearful of how it makes us feel which generally stems from our childhood fears of not being good enough and the fear of the unknown.

Two years ago I began journaling daily as a tool to help me better understand myself and to identify the bad habits that were holding me back. As much as I don’t like to admit this, the two main things I identified was that I had a strong need to be right and to be in control.

I would tell myself that I was a super chill person open to many things but in reality I needed to have strong control over my life which came in the form of excessive overthinking and planning. I would tell myself that it was good to be organised and have a backup plan for my backup plan in case something went wrong. It didn’t help that I’m a perfectionist which meant I would spend too much time and energy worrying about both the situation and all the solutions I could come up with not being good enough. As you can probably imagine, this was not helpful for me or anyone I was working with as nothing was ever good enough and often then not, things didn’t move forward.

When I went further into trying to understand these habits, I realised it came from the fear of the unknown, more specifically from worrying about all the things that could go wrong in the situation I was faced with.

We are pros at playing the “what if” game, but because the world we live in has taught us to always look out for the negative, we always think of the worst case scenario. What if I fail? What will people think of me? What if I make a fool of myself? But what if with every decision we were faced with, we focused on all the amazing outcomes that could happen instead?

Remember, the world we live in is so much bigger than ourselves and the only thing we truly have control over is ourselves - how we choose to perceive a situation and how we choose to act upon it. The world we live in is but a reflection of our beliefs and emotions and therefore the easiest way to change your life is to change your perspective and the way you feel about it.

We try to control things and people because we are so attached to a specific outcome, blinding ourselves off from all the potentially better outcomes that are available to us; it is at this point that we must learn to surrender to fear.

Surrendering doesn’t mean sitting back, feeling sorry for ourselves and doing nothing but rather learning to understand that life is so much bigger than us and there are infinite possibilities available to us, not just the one we have made up in our mind. Surrendering means to stop fighting the universe and the natural flow of life, to stop resisting what is taking place in lieu of enforcing our own will.

It takes wisdom to know when to do something vs when to do nothing at all.

We tell ourselves that things can’t get done without us but this is a story we make up so that we feel like we are in control. We must learn to trust that whatever is taking place is happening for our highest good, even if it may not appear so in that moment. Everything happens for a reason and the less we fight it and try to enforce our will, the better the outcome will be in the long term.

Think about all the times in the past where you fought so hard for something to happen but it seemed that despite everything you tried, nothing seemed to work. The moment you said “I give up, I no longer care what happens, I am done trying anymore”, the universe somehow brought you an answer to your problem without you even trying. As soon as you surrendered and stopped fighting, something amazing happened that you could never have imagined.

Learning to surrender to the unknown is not easy and takes work, but once you realise that the universe wants nothing but joy and happiness for you, and once you have taken the time to question whether your fears are in fact what are stopping this from happening, you will see your life begin to transform in ways you never would have imagined.