An invitation to cultivate courage and resilience.

There is so much uncertainty and chaos in the public arena today. That brings up a lot of fear.

• Frantic scrolling on social media, every post bringing up fear of missing out or comparisons to 2D model people
• Climate change conversation and the change in seasonal weather
• Catastrophic climate events experienced already — fires, the dying coral, the slow unfolding of the 6th mass extinction on the planet.
• Political systems becoming more rigid and controlling. Endless summits without meeting actionable steps.
• Social systems are becoming strained — the rise in extremism on all sides, challenging democracy.
• The pandemic — that’s not a small one! Loss of personal freedom and grieving the world pre-pandemic.

All of this is very uncertain. Bringing our minds first and foremost to the threats in our environments.

In this time of uncertainty, will we have to expand our capacity to hold threat and still trust that it will be O.K.?

I think that has happened in everyone’s life in the last two years. Consistently, people have expressed that these times have made them re-evaluate what is meaningful to them in their lives.

There are two robust body systems; trust and threat.

When we are in trust, we see the world through an open lens; joy, pleasure, beauty, generative ideas and open to learning and making steps.

When we are in threat, we are narrow; we see the world through a need to secure, control, gain acceptance and validation, and maintain our sense of personal self.

There is no judgement on either of these. In the coaching model I work with, we honour the threat system as a part of the intelligent, protective system that keeps us alive, especially in childhood when we are dependent on our caregivers for our needs.

In adulthood, these highly developed threat systems are still activating in the ways that we needed them in childhood.

They only evolve and change when we see them clearly, and we know that they are not needed anymore. Other responses will provide us with those things in the trust state, within a connection.

Trusting the process of fear allows you to embrace it.

Fear is another marker of your sensory experience. It lets you know if threats to security, acceptance, validation, or control are present.

The challenge is that the system cannot differentiate between a threat to immediate and physical safety and a perceived threat or a remembered threat from the past.

If you are legitimately facing a threat, please listen to your signs and remove yourself from the situation the best you can. If it is a perceived threat only, then you can begin to embrace it.

We can meet our fear and say:

Thank you for the illumination. This is how I will respond.

Or more simply:

I hear you, I understand. What are you trying to protect?

Let me ask you this challenging question, though:

How much security, control, acceptance, and validation do we actually have?

In each moment, how much of our environment can we truly say is a certainty?

Not much.

Try to journal out exactly what certainties there are in life and how many come with expectations and control measures. Again, this is not a bad thing. It’s just an observation to expand awareness.

We don’t know what our next thought will be, let alone if we’re going to make it through life in a beautiful way.

This might sound scary to you, and that’s the point of this article, embrace that fear!

The way to a beautiful life is to live it in each moment. Embracing each uncertainty and newness as a blessing, surprise, curiosity and gift.

Beauty is not a thing to be obtained, it is already within you.

When we can live life in relationship to fear and uncertainty, it becomes a much more enjoyable experience. We develop courage, resilience, rejection resilience and deep connection to people in our support network.

The threat system is very egocentric, nothing wrong with that. However, if you consistently live in threat, you will not be able to connect with your loved ones and create a genuinely nourishing support system.

When we sit with fear, we usually find that other perspectives, intuition, and wisdom come online. We can see the world through another’s lens, a community’s lens, or nature’s lens.

Connection starts with trust. Trust starts from within, not without.

Embrace fear, see what it has to say to you, and allow it to dissipate with the dawning of new possibilities.