How to discover your purpose now (and start living it)

You don’t need to overcome your fear. You don’t need to ignore it and pretend to be fearless. You need to lean into it. Feel it. And listen to what it has to say. There is wisdom in your fear. It’s not always instructing you not to do something. Sometimes, it’s giving you the blueprint for how to get exactly what you want.

Hey there! Welcome to the Larissa Nicole On Purpose Podcast where we explore shadow work through the lens of astrology, NLP and somatics and as a pathway for living life in alignment, on purpose and on your own terms. I’m your host Larissa Nicole and this week, I’m excited to hang out with you today and talk about one of my favorite topics – Fear. To be clear, I’m talking about situational fear, which is extremely useful in keeping us alive and healthy, like the fear that might arise if you were in actual physical danger.

Now, I’m not talking about situational fear, which is extremely useful in keeping us alive and healthy, like the fear that might arise if you were in actual physical danger. I’m talking about the kind of fear that keeps you from living your best life. The fear of failure, inadequacy, rejection, judgment – the really sneaky stuff. Fear can be an ally or a bully, it all depends on how you cultivate your relationship with it. And yes, I said cultivate your relationship with it because I feel this is one of the most important and valuable relationships you can have. In this video, we’re going to talk about what fear is, the difference between fear and intuition, what a healthy relationship with fear looks like and how to make fear the homie so you can stop letting it control you.

First, let’s talk about what fear is. Fear is sensory data. It is a physical sensation that is brought on by your thoughts. Super short and simple definition for a concept that has such big implications. There is a very real neurological connection between the mind and body. Feelings, whether emotional or physical, are often stimulated by what is happening in the mind. And, unaddressed trauma from severe experiences gets trapped and stored in the body and causes an autonomous response or reaction to present or future situations that the mind determines to be similar to what was experienced in the past.

Because one of the mind’s main jobs is to protect you and keep you safe, it will create a story that elicits an emotional response in your body to get you to evade what it perceives to be danger, distress or harm. It activates the nervous system and puts us in one of four states: fight, freeze, fawn, flee.

• In a fight response, we are reactionary, defensive and overly protective.
• In a flee response, we contract, shut down, remove ourselves, run away or simply do not show up.
• In a freeze response, we vacillate, fantasize, daydream or escape into other distractions
• In a fawn response, we people please, self abandon, playing small.

This is where we get the labels insecure, anxious, avoidant or codependent.

But you are none of these things (unless you have convinced yourself that you are).

What is happening is you are caught in a neurological or psychosomatic response loop. It’s like a record that has a scratch and every time the needle hits that part of the song it gets hung up or skips and the same part of the song gets replayed over and over again. You have to consciously walk over, lift the needle and move it forward to another part of the record to temporarily resolve the issue.

Fear is a lot like that – a scratch or a scar that keeps reminding us of where we have been so that we stay in a space that is familiar and we can (with relatively strong certainty) predict the outcome. It’s all about control and predictability.

Fear also triggers a physiological response. Whether it’s a racing heartbeat, dry mouth, lump in your throat, warmth or sweating, nervous stomach, shaking, or fidgeting, etc., when these sensations arise, we label them as fear because our mind associates them with scary situations or experiences from our past when we were either rejected, abandoned, misjudged or we “failed.”

But wouldn’t it be cool if we could use these sensations to our advantage, rather than viewing them as these big barriers that we have to overcome?

The good news is we actually can! We can stop seeing fear as an inconvenience and start seeing it as an invitation. Fear just wants to be your friend. And the way you make friends with your fear is to stop trying to be separate from it. You don’t need to be fearless. You need to invite fear in, sit with it and have a conversation.

I have been asked and I have often thought, if fear is a sensation and intuition is a sensation, how can I tell them apart? What’s the difference? There’s a reason it’s hard to differentiate between fear and intuition. And that’s because fear and intuition are one in the same.

That’s right. I said it. Fear and intuition are one in the same.

I have heard people say that intuition feels expansive, exciting and open; while fear feels restricting, dreadful or closed. Fear is loud and intuition is quiet. And I’ve had to sit with this for a while because my experience of intuition and fear has never been this black or white. Where I netted out is fear is an unconscious expression of our subconscious beliefs. Intuition is what fear becomes in the light of consciousness. Fear is what the body experiences when there is nowhere for our wounds to go. When we have not acknowledged our pain and created a container for it to be held, healed and loved.

It is very rare that doing something scary for the first time will feel expansive even if we intuitively feel led to do it. The end result may feel expansive; but the act of doing it probably will not.

There have been times when my intuition felt very constricting because it was giving me queues that I should stop doing something that I didn’t want to stop doing or to start doing things that I didn’t think I was ready for – all for my greater good, no doubt. And there have been times when fear felt extremely freeing and expansive because it gave me a familiar narrative to cling to or permission to play small and tell myself that I was all in or going full out.

You can contract into your intuition, just as you can expand into fear.

There is this obsession with expansion inherently being good and contraction inherently being bad. But we can’t keep forever expanding. There has to be a contraction to balance things out. The exhale is just as important as the inhale. So I think we do fear and intuition a disservice when we try to separate them and put them in boxes.

Fear is disembodied intuition. And intuition is fear that has been transmuted. As I have experienced them, they are polarities of our instincts – the same energy being expressed in two different ways – either consciously or unconsciously.

One of my mentors would tell me you’re afraid because you’ve got too much past, too much future and not enough presence. That’s because fear can’t live in the present. It’s based on the expectation that what happened before is what will probably happen down the line. And when you sit in expectation of that, guess what happens, that’s what you manifest. The principle of Mentalism and the principle of Rhythm teach us that. The mind will look to prove what it believes and disprove what it does not.

Back to our friend Fear.

A lot of times, our intuition will guide us in a particular direction; but our fear will override it. So as much as I (and many others) like to say “trust your intuition,” it’s not always that simple. Sure you can trust your intuition; but what happens when it shows up as fear?

Cultivating your relationship with fear starts with one thing – curiosity.

When I am in a state of fear, I ask myself three questions:

1. What are you defending?
2. What are you avoiding?
3. What are you holding on to?

What are you defending?
When we are in fear, there is often a story that we are protecting because we need to be right about what we believe we are capable or incapable of. This story creates a fatalistic view of what would happen if we dared to prove ourselves wrong. The easiest way to tell if you are defending a story is in your response to the question “why.” For example, if someone asks you why you haven’t done the thing you’ve been saying you want to do or why you’re still doing something that is counterproductive to what you say you want, and your response is “because I can’t…”insert whatever reason you’d like, you are likely defending a story.

What are you avoiding?
When we are in fear, there could be a story that we are suppressing because we haven’t or don’t want to acknowledge the pain that created it. Our deepest fears were birthed from our most traumatic experiences, so it makes sense that we would want to push that down and not deal with it. A simple way to tell if you are avoiding or suppressing a story is if your response to the question “why” is “I don’t know.”

What are you holding on to?
When we are in fear, there is a story that we have become reliant upon because we don’t know who we are or who we might become without it. There is an identity that we are clinging to. One way to tell if you are holding onto a story is if your response to the question “why” is “because I am…”

All three of these questions help to get to the root of the story that is feeding the fear. But we have to remember that fear didn’t create any of these stories. It simply shines a light on them. That’s why I truly believe that fear is one of our greatest allies IF and when we are ready to go beneath the surface of the uncomfortable feelings it generates.

Another great inquiry is what is fear trying to communicate to me or teach me? What is the embodied response for this moment? We talked earlier about the four fear responses: fight, flee, freeze and fawn and their negative expressions; but none of these responses are inherently bad.

• In an embodied fight response, we assert and stand up for ourselves when necessary, this includes fighting for a goal or vision that you want to achieve.
• In an embodied flee response, we walk away from what truly does not nourish and serve us.
• In an embodied freeze response, we are in both a spiritually receptive and creative state, settled into the quiet, swimming in the stillness and manifesting within the mansions of our mind through visualization
• In an embodied fawn response, we are situationally aware, thoughtful and accommodating of others, while not losing sight of our own values, needs and desires.

So, when you are afraid or fearful, what response do you unconsciously default to? How can you consciously learn into it so that is expressed from a place of embodiment?

Dr. Carl Jung said – and this probably one of my favorite quotes

“Until the unconscious becomes conscious, it will continue to direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Our lives are the reflection of the sum of our choices; but we have to ask ourselves, what’s powering those choices? Are we truly living from the polarity of our intuition or our fear?

When you trust yourself, fear can’t control you. If you want to know how to strengthen your relationship with trust, check out episode #13 for tips and inspiration.

Thanks for tuning into the show this week. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so new episodes will be automatically delivered to your feed. And please, share the love. Share this show with someone you think may get value from it. I’m also growing a community on YouTube and I’d love to connect and engage with you there. You can find me on YouTube @larissaonpurpose. I’m sending you tons of love and I will chat with you again soon. Have an amazing week.