Fear and love – two of our primary emotions that are a little like primary colours in that to varying degrees, they are the base of all other emotions.
When we can engage with the so-called negative emotions of fear, we can really start to release and clear some rubbish out of our body and our system. This creates space for some deep healing and expansion.
I've introduced dualities in a previous article, and that's exactly what fear and love really are in their base forms. We have this plethora of emotions that we articulate or describe, but at the core of all of those emotions is fear or love. It’s when we can come into a state of oneness, of balance, where we can really allow ourselves to not be in the intensity of either of those emotions, but to feel and flow through them.
Dr David Hawkin developed the map of consciousness. This illustrates many different emotions and the frequencies that are attached to them. The map of consciousness puts these emotions on a frequency scale, starting at a low number all the way up to 1000. But when placing these on a horizontal spectrum and looking at them as a duality, we can see that one cannot exist without the other. Therefore, if we can experience the emotional state of humiliation, the very opposite, which in this case would be bliss, is also possible.
Experiencing the scale as a duality really opens us up to the possibility that we can move through those emotions that are rooted in fear.
Let me take you through some examples to explain further.
Let’s look at some emotions that are fear based at their very core - emotions such as worry, anger and sadness
Worry is a future-based emotion. We worry about things that haven't yet happened and may not even happen. So we're running through scenarios in our heads of what if this, what if that, what if they don’t, what if I don’t? And so on and so forth.
But is worry fear based? Let's put it into the context of worrying about your health: worrying whether you're ever going to be healthy, you’re ever going to be the weight that you desire to be, worrying whether you're ever going to be as muscly or as toned or as fit as you would like to be.
When we put this into the context of fear, what is it that you're really afraid of? You're afraid of being unhealthy and dying. You're afraid of potentially being alone because you won't attract the right partner. You're afraid of being humiliated at a fitness competition.
Now let's try the same thing with anger – or perhaps frustration.
Maybe you're frustrated with your partner for always filling up the dishwasher and never actually turning it on. Perhaps you're frustrated with them because they don't message you as often as you want them to.
When we look at the dishwasher example, that's something that might be important to you. If you feel your partner is not doing something that's important to you, maybe that reflects that they don’t view you as important. This is possibly a fear of not being loved, or not being valued.
If we look at frustration around your partner not messaging you as often as you want them to, this too can come back to a fear of not being loved. We are not receiving from them what it is that we need to demonstrate to us they love us.
So, in both of these examples, it's the fear of not being loved.
As with worry and anger, you can feel sadness around many different things, so let’s pick something specific. Let’s say you feel sad about not getting a job promotion. When we apply the lens of fear to this, we start to see that this again comes back to the fear of not being valued, fear of not being appreciated, fear of not being worthy.
I guess the question now is really well, so what? So what, that we've got this anger, we've got this sadness, we've got this worry and it's being created and stemming from fear? What do we do about it?
Two of the biggest fears that feed these emotional states are the fear of death and the fear of loneliness. For most of us, these are huge, HUGE fears. When we start to work on these things, we can begin to release the emotional attachments to things like worry, sadness, anger, frustration and so on.
Let's use the fear of death as a working example.
A lot of people have a fear of death. This can stem from the understanding that once we die, we will no longer exist and there's a loss of self. So it's not so much the death itself that scares us, it’s that we will no longer be alive.
I’ve discovered from conversations with friends and clients that when we start to explore what it means to be afraid of not being alive, it often comes from this feeling or sense that we haven't done everything we wanted to do in life, so we can't die now. This is something very ingrained in western culture. We work for 40, 50, 60 years, and WHEN we retire, THEN we're allowed to start living. It's retirement that we're striving for so that we can do all of the things that we want to do. As a result, we're not doing those things now.
This reinforces the sense of fear I haven't accomplished everything that I want to accomplish. I can't possibly die yet. I need more time.
I've been very fortunate to have grown up in a culture where death is a very natural and accepted part of the cycle of life. We either ascend or we reincarnate, and certainly through my own spiritual practise, I'm very connected to my soul, my spirit, the energy that is my essence, that is connected to everything and continues to exist beyond my physical body.
As a result, I've been able to be very much in harmony with death, and really be able to embed that in my being as an adult and let go of the fear around death. I can appreciate that if it is my time to go, it is my time to go.
That's not to say that I have no control over what is happening in my life. Rather that that is my soul's choosing. That is my heart’s choosing that this was the time I was meant to pass.
With this comes a huge amount of liberation of energy which can be then expended on living life. That helps us overcome the fear of the end of it because we are truly living, truly experiencing life.
Being in alignment with the process of and the cycle of life, has allowed me to experience my life in lots of wonderful ways. I've experienced many different adrenaline sports. I've travelled around the world and continue to do things that allow me to play in life and be incredibly present because I'm not worrying about when it's going to end.
If fear is at the core of so-called negative emotions, how can we use love – its duality – to bring balance to our experience of those emotions?
First, by identifying what the ‘instead’ looks like. Instead of worry, how do I wish to feel? What's the emotion I want to experience? Instead of anger, what is the emotion I wish to experience? Instead of sadness, what is the emotion that I wish to experience?
Here we create for ourselves, for our internal being, our own little duality but a place for us to move our energy bodies and our whole being towards.
This step is so important. We're so well versed and learned in how to say what we DO NOT want. I'm often asking my clients “What do you want instead of X, Y and Z?”, and often they will reply “I don't want X, Y and Z.”
That’s not framing what it is that you desire.
That's not framing where you want your energy to move to.
It's only telling your body what it's currently experiencing. ‘I don't want this’, but your subconscious mind doesn't register what it doesn't want. It simply recognises and registers the thing that it is, the X, Y and Z, and gives you more of that.
So this step is super important. Use positively framed words and language to define what state you desire instead of the one that you're experiencing at the moment.
Instead of worry, a love-based emotion might be calm or peaceful or confident or even present.
Instead of anger or frustration, it may also be calm and peaceful. It may also be neutral. It may even be loving or happy.
Instead of sad, the emotion might be happiness, perhaps joy, or perhaps vibrant and full of life.
To really play out this particular exercise, first, start by asking yourself with some of those negative emotions, “What is the fear that is underlying this particular emotional state that I'm experiencing?” Then ask yourself, “What do I desire instead?”
When you play those two together, it really starts to open up the possibilities of being able to experience another emotional state instead of the one that you're in right now.
As always, awareness is so paramount to creating change and growth. So if nothing else, we've raised our awareness as to where these emotions are coming from and what's creating them so we can begin to let them go.
Love, hugs and magic!
Bhavna xx
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