He was a handsome 28 year old guy who’d heard that he could learn how to improve self confidence with me. I explained to him the concept of my work and checked that he was ok with a bodywork session.
“I’m afraid that I’ll be rejected”, he said. The sentence came out of his mouth before I even asked him about it. It looked to me as if he practiced at home to tell this to me.
“OK, afraid how?” I asked and we started a whole conversation about what he believed women he wanted to date with would tell him, if he dared to communicate with them. It didn’t take long to realize the emotional trauma that was linked to these feelings. It came from when he was 16, suffered from being overweight and was bullied in school as a result. He still clenched his stomach each time he thought of approaching a woman, ready to be rejected, ready to be told off. The fact that he was surrounded by friends didn’t change that experience for him.
In the session I taught him how to allow his shyness to just be, to accept his insecurity about reaching out to another person and still act as he wanted to. He allowed his cheeks to blush, his legs to tremble and he was able to say clearly enough what he actually wanted. The fear turned into excitement of actually doing something, even if it was clear that he could not predict how things would turn out.
In the bodywork technique I learned, worked in and later taught, fear used to be a pillar term. In recent years I find myself moving away from relating to fear, as I notice that it is the practitioner and their clients that choose where to put the emphasis – whether they want to focus on the fear, on the bravery, on courage, or on the individual’s desires and dreams.
In the way I see it, blocking fear out doesn’t help us to live the life we want or create the life change we want to have. Fear by itself is not a positive force in life. Bravery on the other hand is fascinating and has many faces. One of them is to not block our emotions – whether it is happiness, love, compassion, joy, anger or fear. A great deal of the suffering I see with my clients comes from learning to push away how they felt – they didn’t give themselves freedom to feel, or they were taught to not just let their emotions be.
When I asked my client in the next session what he had learned, he talked about the joy of doing what he wanted and he talked about the few adventures he had recently. His eyes looked aside shyly when he told me how he had used what I taught him when he approached a girl he liked. There was no fear in the room, no insecurity, only a bit of embarrassment, excitement and a kind of unspoken understanding that if he could win this game, he might be able to win others in the same way.
My work is not about fear – I wouldn’t want it to be. It is about the bravery people have within themselves to face what they need, to go where their heart is, to succeed in their own challenges. I am astonished again and again to see how much beauty people have in themselves if they feel safe enough to move on toward their dreams.
Fear is described in the Oxford Dictionary as an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm. We probably cannot live a life without it, but the moments when we are afraid are quite specific. There is a challenge linked to it, as with any other unpleasant emotion – to let it be, to trust the moment, to trust that it will be over in time. To realize that if we allow it, the moment would continue and become an opportunity, a story to tell and an experience that eventually would make us stronger, or more emphatic and humane.
When people do scary things and seem to enjoy them – seeing a horror movie, cliff diving or bungee jumping for example, they clearly get a kick out of the adrenaline rush. I can imagine that they feel safe enough, yet they know (or believe) that they are not in danger, so in those situations the fear itself becomes a positive experience.
Being brave enough to feel, to be exposed, to act, or to tell the truth is a source of great energy and endless possibilities. Letting our heart lead the way and knowing that even if we are afraid, it’s often only a memory from our past that links that certain moment in our life to fear. If we can learn to feel safe enough in our own body and life, we will find ourselves acting in many great and surprising ways.
