“How would we ever learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world?” … Helen Keller questions us.
FEAR STOMS that show up and cloud our sunny, emotional wellbeing are a necessary part of our heart’s seasoning and strengthening process.
If we do not learn how to weather our FEAR STORMS we automatically stunt our emotional growth and miss opportunities to build heart strength, which is vital for our emotional survival. It is impossible to learn how to master fear if we never face it, stay with it and feel it.
Our “Weapons of Mass Distraction” can operate like an internal boom box to prevent us ever hearing our heart’s genuine FEAR STORMS. Turning up the volume with drugs, alcohol, money, busyness, drama, sex or food is a very effective muting mechanism. Avoiding our FEAR STORMS restricts our ability to weather the internal challenges we need to endure and know we can survive in order to build our self-confidence, maintain our health, wellbeing and self-respect.
Many of us have ended relationships and retreated from constructive opportunities in order to avoid facing a FEAR STORM we have been running from all our lives. Some of us never stop running. It is exhausting. Mainly because we never feel that beautiful sense of inner triumph or know that gentle smile that blossoms unexpectedly when we are alone, because we have genuinely impressed ourselves.
When we are in the midst of a FEAR STORM it is a challenge to not lose hope. Sometimes it can feel like we have lost our life map and along with it the belief that we are tenacious, lovable and capable human beings. FEAR STORMS in my past had overwhelmed me. Especially the ones that accompanied a hangover. Shit, shit, shit … what had I said, what had I done? I felt flawed and fell into the trap of believing I always was and always will be.
My “weapons of mass distraction” just added to the severity of my emotional FEAR STORMS, they became FEAR CYCLONES. Lots of emotional debris from my past, crap I had not cleaned up, would go flying. Once we clean up our act, you know, all that emotional rubbish we have left accumulating in our own back yard. FEAR cyclones diminish, the wreckage they leave in their wake, and FEAR STORMS become more endurable .. less scary.
FEAR STORMS for me nowadays, having been clean and sober since 1995, are actually a gift. They are cleansing and nourishing. Emotional STORMS often signal that we are ready for more growth in our lives, which will always mean work, and reward. To make room for more love in our lives we will need to get rid of the years of emotional clutter impeding our path forward.
It is easy to be mistaken in our thinking concluding we are going backwards while enduring fierce FEAR STORMS, or that we are being unspiritual, ungrateful and unworthy. Anything that forces us to surrender, like a little bird in a storm, and bow our head reminds us that there are forces at play on this earth bigger than our ego. It is humbling and survivable.
When the opportunity presents itself for us to kick a goal in life, often we need to take a few steps backward, and even to the left, in order to gain momentum. A cleansing FEAR STORM helps us refocus on the goal posts and then gather our energy and move forward and have another go.
It is helpful to understand that FEAR STORMS approaching indicate that more useless emotional clutter is ready to be blown away so we can progress and move forward. FEAR STORMS clear the path for further growth and maturity.
If we ask the Universe for an abundant and love-filled life, it is going to need room to house that in our hearts. If our heart is cluttered with old crapola left over from past pain we have neglected to clean up, we will need to make more emotional room for love.
FEAR STORMS often arrive before our next big love can arrive. Sometimes it is a relationship, a new opportunity or experience, even a geographical change. Love is demandingly big and beautiful and needs room to dance around and move into our perhaps preoccupied and cluttered heart.
Without FEAR STORMS there is no opportunity to learn how to be brave, go deep into our truth, hold on and become resilient. As the timeless Dolly Parton reminds us …
“Storms make trees grow deeper roots.”
Lotsa love Cynthia xxx
© Copyright 2017 Cynthia J. Morton Emotional Fitness™
This Word Vitamin is an excerpt from my latest bookset “The Four Seasons of the Heart”. If you would like to order your own full set of Daily Word Vitamins one for each day of the year, in book form for yourself or as a gift for another just email me cynthia@emotionalfitness.com xxx
