Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear

I was watching a SuperSoul Session with Oprah and Gary Zukov and a statement he made jumped out at me “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”
 
But when I respond to an interaction with a friend or colleague, or my child having a meltdown, or a member of staff at a checkout counter, or a situation that has arisen, how do I know when I’m acting out of love and not fear?

This might sound simple at first, but it is far from easy. For example, Brené Brown says “Shame is the most powerful, master (negative) emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.” This is an inner belief that gets created in childhood in many of us, something I talk about often.
 
We are born into this world as love itself and then, as our caregivers actually have to deal with our needs and desires, we get shaped and molded out of authenticity and into well behaved members of our community (or so the aim is) that don’t make any fuss. As a result this creates trauma within us and we develop fears.
 
Interestingly shame isn’t an emotion I’d have particularly associated with, yet not feeling good enough is. This made me want to dig a little deeper after hearing Gary Zukov’s impactful insight. I listened to Brené’s first TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability. In her research she found the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they are worthy of it.
 
As I wrote about recently, I’ve been tracking my dreams and feelings like fear, not being good enough and not belonging feature frequently. Since the unconscious doesn’t lie, this helps me to really get a grip on some of those less obvious chronic thought patterns that are clearly still playing out in my head.
 
While I’ve deliberately tackled many of the more acutely felt thought patterns, these are like a baseline that has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember. I now recognise this baseline is not one of love, it’s more like a suitcase full of feelings I’ve carried since I was a child that add up to anxiety, anger, rejection and constraint. You might now begin to see why I often tussle with the question "am I doing this out of love or fear?"
 
Recording my dreams was something I started to do a few years ago, then I remembered the other day the reason I’d stopped is that they were often depressing and (I felt at the time) better not remembered. Pushing them away hasn’t helped, of course, they are a wakeup call to what is actually going on inside me whether I choose to face it or not.
 
Learning to wholeheartedly love myself is an essential part of the journey to authenticity. The question I found myself asking was “how do I go about feeling love rather than fear as a predominant emotion? How do I take this suitcase of anxiety, anger, rejection and constraint and turn it into something loving?

As well as the work I described in Awaken to the Gift Your Dreams Offer in Waking Life - focusing consciously on the positive aspects of each day and how those feel - I decided to get even more targeted. Following the advice of Katie Byron, I looked at the opposite of what I was experiencing. I came up with these statements by completely flipping the emotional baggage in my suitcase around:

​I feel calm/at ease
I feel wanted/cherished/loved
I feel like I belong
I feel I have all the time in the world
 
As well as taking the time to look at what has gone well in my day, and how that felt, I’m also looking for evidence to support these statements in particular. I personally write them in a journal so they stick more. 
 
What I’m flushing out each time are my sticking points. For example, deep down I know that I will always have time for the things that are important to me. Yet the end of a school term looms for me like a giant stressful ticking clock; school holidays mean the absence of my little blocks of solitude, which is what I crave in order to feel into myself.
 
However, past experience tells me that I will get enough moments – often unplanned and ad hoc - to nurture that part of me that wants to explore new threads of thought and insight. So that is the evidence I need to draw upon, in enough detail and enough times that I start to tell myself a different story, beat a different drum.
 
It also helps to organize a few things that help me to see the times in the calendar that make that possible. I have to take charge of the self talk, call out anything that wants to sneak back in with the old baggage.
 
The other thing I notice is how my examples can start to lean towards external validation, for example, how others might make me feel loved or feel like I belong. These might be good indicators that I’m making some progress but, if I rely on them alone without feeling and demonstrating evidence of self love and self acceptance, the old thought patterns will soon kick back in the minute I believe someone rejects me.
 
That said, everything that happens, I think, happens in love. Even the things we would all agree are atrocities bring out aspects of people they never knew were in them. Everything lends itself to our growth, prompts us towards our path and – even the choices we make in fear – create opportunities for future choices to be made in love.
 
I know there it’s unlikely I’ll suddenly start making every choice out of love than fear, it will take time and perseverance. In his book The Pilgrimage Paulo Coelho describes a process called The Cruelty Exercise. This involves digging the nail of your index finger into the cuticle of your thumb of the same hand every time a thought comes in your mind that makes you feel bad about yourself. Being cruel to be kind may be a quicker route if you’d like quicker results.
 
It takes focus for me just to figure out if my thoughts are born of love or fear; sometimes it feels like a bit of both. Just the other day I was examining my reaction to a hissy fit one daughter was having because her sister had just got some new sparkly shoes. She was jealous and everything about getting dressed and out the house that morning became difficult.
 
I stayed calm and supportive and I got the kids out the house and on time, win, but did I follow a path of fear or love?
 
I know where these hissy fits can go if I try to work with my daughter to rationalise them rather than just to allow the feelings, they head straight to explosion city; suddenly smoldering embers become thriving wildfires and there is no stopping the meltdown that ensues – often for both her and me. None of that feels good, we all suffer and, inevitably, we are all late. So it is fair to say there is likely some fear around the tact I took.
 
On the other hand, from a loving standpoint, I want my daughter to know it’s okay to feel jealous, it’s okay to want something someone else has got and it’s actually okay that she doesn’t have it right now, she will survive. This is an important lesson in self regulation.
 
Overall, I feel that my decision was based more in love, but it can take thrashing it out in detail like this for me to start to recognise what is happening and to build that confidence. I’m also aware that I’ll just as likely make some decisions in fear for some time, but I’m okay with that as long as I’m becoming more conscious of what is happening and the overall trajectory is going in the right direction.
 
Better than mashing my thumb into a raw state (I shudder at the thought).
 
When you make decisions out of fear, this gets played back to you in frustrations and failures, but when you make decisions based in love, you absolutely know that even if something that might look like a failure initially is just another step along the way to living your best life.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Cherish Yourself?. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog