“I work hard with my Inner Bonding process to get into a centered and connected place. I’ll be doing great and then out of nowhere Seth blames me for something and it all goes out the window. I get so upset at him for blaming me and then I feel off center and down for days. Maybe I shouldn’t be with him? Maybe my guidance is telling me that I’d be better off without him so I can stay in a good space?”

“No Jenna, that’s not what your guidance is telling you. While it’s hard for you to see this right now, Seth is providing you with a wonderful opportunity to learn to stay centered and connected, even in the face of his wounded self. Can you imagine being able to do this? Can you imagine how good you would feel to not disconnect from yourself just because he is disconnected?”

I have selected a few quotes related to The Power of Despair from my One Light, Many Reflections collection. Savor each idea by having three or four breaths between reading each quote to contemplate and expand the meaning to yourself.

“If you are curious how to find pure love, I recommend going to a place within yourself that is so despairing all you want to do is die and then find something you are willing to live for.” Will Hale 12-8-14

“It is easy to die for what you believe in but it takes real courage to live for what you love.” Will Hale 5-24-14

“The emotions of grief come in two tones, the agony of loss and the joy of gratitude, both come from love.” Will Hale 12-15-12

“You can’t really kill yourself, because the part you can kill is not yourself.” Will Hale 12-28-14

Strong anxiety frequently triggers fight-flight-freeze, our survival brain’s strategy for dealing with threats. This can become a trance that dominates our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and deepest experience of who we are.

This talk explores how we get caught in this reactive trance, and ways of calming anxiety and radically shifting our way of relating to the experience of threat. The gift is discovering an inner freedom in the midst of life, and the capacity to respond to what arises with love-in-action.

Trauma is the emotional wound that certain experiences can leave behind. As many of you know the effects of trauma can linger for years after the initial experience that caused it has been over.

It leaves behind Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, along with the tendency to project the pain of the experience on to our current situations. It essentially keeps us stuck in our past in a way that is negative and unproductive.

It thwarts our personal growth and can come in the way of the healthiness in our relationships. This includes both personal or business relationships.

It creates addiction and insurmountable substance abuse. The lives that trauma has claimed are countless.

There are different levels of trauma. Some of it is so violent and devastating that there’s really no human way possible to avoid accumulating it. i.e. creating it and storing it in your body on an emotional level. It is my experience that these traumas are able to be healed. It can take years of cellular, energetic clearing, depending on the person.

There’s so much going on around us these days. Does it feel like we’re almost in this surreal experience? An out-of-body experience? I can only imagine what it’s like for those who are feeling all of this anger and sadness about what’s going on. As with most of us, it’s been a challenge for me to know the best way to navigate this time but there’s something I’m super clear on…

Anger Comes from Sadness

I learned from one of my teachers that anger is a deeper version of sadness, and that rage is a deeper version of anger… which is also sadness. I experienced a lot of anger and even rage as I was going through the last parts of my marriage, which  actually seems really small compared to what's going on today, but I think it can help us understand a little. 

I really learned that this anger and rage I was feeling was telling me something. It was revealing how sad I was. So if you’re feeling a deep sadness or you’re in a place of rage and anger and you’re super triggered… ask yourself, “Why am I sad?” Don’t simply live with anger and rage. Question yourself, “Why am I sad?”

Scarcity is a low frequency code hidden deep in your unconscious. It’s fed by your fears and it blocks abundance from entering your life. 

This mindset is founded on the belief that if someone else wins, you have to lose. There is no room for the possibility that everyone can win.

The fear and judgement that comes with the perception of not having enough sets in motion a reaction that reaches every aspect of your life. It keeps you in constant fight or flight mode and effects you both at an unconscious and cellular level.

Scarcity affects you mentally, spiritually and physically and once it becomes your default code, it will literally cause you to write your own scarcity story.

Right now, life around is nowhere near what we imagined it would be. The amount of change we’ve all been asked (forced?!) to navigate is staggering. 

When we’ve been hit with as much as we have on a collective level, it’s easy for our minds to go to negative places, focusing on all that’s been taken from us. And the list is long! There’s not one area of our lives that has been unaffected by the events of 2020. I talk to many friends who are dealing with heavy feelings of grief, and some days I feel it too. It’s tempting to fall into the gap between what I desire and what exists. 

I want to be on vacation… I am stuck at home. 

I want to send the kids back to school… I am homeschooling 6 hours a day in addition to handling my full-time job. 

I want my friends and family to be happy and healthy… I am dealing with health issues and strained relationships. 

I want a world of equality and justice… I am seeing the places where that’s not the truth. 

Whew! It’s exhausting to try to hold the disparities in our minds and hearts, and it can make you question your role as a co-creator of your experience. (I don’t know about you, but a pandemic, racial strife, and a worldwide economic meltdown weren’t on my 2020 requested playlist, or vision board).

Fear is the single biggest thing that holds people back from achieving their goals and dreams. It’s one of most common reasons why people procrastinate on taking action toward their goals.

We fear failure, loss or rejection. We feel fear of being embarrassed, of being disappointed of getting hurt, or fear angering other people. So we play it safe and avoid taking risks or trying new things.

That’s why today, I want to discuss how you can overcome those fears that are holding you back from greatness.

Where Does Fear Come From?

Fear is natural. It comes from us – from our own minds and imagination.

It’s important to remember that, as humans, we’ve evolved to the stage where almost all of our fears holding us back are now self-created.

We scare ourselves by imagining negative things are going to happen in the future. But just because we imagine these things happening, that doesn’t mean they WILL happen, or that they will be as painful as we think.

F.E.A.R.

That’s why psychologists like to say that fear stands for ‘Fantasized Experiences Appearing Real.’ Because fear is all about what we think or imagine MIGHT happen – not what WILL happen.

You’ve heard that before. Love is the only answer. It is the answer.

So today what we’re really going to talk about is love. Fear is the focus so many people have had lately … it is the fear of _____  … and then just fill in the blank of whatever the fear has been.

But what I want to talk about is Love.

Yes, the energy of the world is swirling in the fear, and the anger, and the overwhelm, and the lack of knowing what to choose, and what to do, and what not to do, and the judgment, and the criticism.

Have you seen any of that at all, by chance?

The reality of it is that, yes, there are a lot of people that are in that place … and that is a really unhealthy place to be because it just perpetuates the negativity. It just perpetuates the fear. It just perpetuates the anger, the judgment, the criticism. And what we know about judgment and criticism and anger and pain and hate, and all those things, is that if you are projecting it outward, there’s something inward. There’s something that you are avoiding, don’t like, are angry with, are judgmental, or critical of within yourself. And we look to other people and we put the blame on them. It isn’t always the same thing, but there’s a lot of projecting that’s happening.

And now more than ever we need to re-visit what we are DOING to shift that.

Most of us have at one time or another been ‘triggered.’ A trigger is an event, situation or interaction with a person or group of people that activates the fight, flight or freeze stress response. A trigger is usually related to a past event, interaction or situation that was very painful or traumatic

One of the eventual results of practicing Inner Bonding is that, over time, we develop a strong loving adult self – capable of being aware of when we are triggered, rather than acting unconsciously in response to a trigger. Our consciousness of when we are triggered gives us the choice to act in rather than act out.

Acting Out

When we act out in response to a trigger, we do what we naturally do when the stress response is activated: we get angry, blaming, agitated, impatient, annoyed or irritated, or we shut down, withdraw, numb out, go away or disassociate. These are the natural actions of the wounded self during a threat to survival.