Fear: The Crippling Force that is Destroying Humanity

Fear is exhausting. Fear is destructive. Fear stops most humans from living a joyful, healthy, and prosperous life. So what is fear, why is it so prevalent, and what can we do about it?

Fear is an emotion. It is a subtle, or arguably, not so subtle, energy impulse that resides with the entity of our human system. Fear is a very unique experience for every individual. What triggers it, how intense is it, how long does it last, and how do you overcome it? All of these things cannot be experienced or quantified by anyone other than the person experiencing the fear. Most people are not equipped with the training, tools, or know-how to escape perpetuating states of fear.

Fear is not something we could ever dismiss even if we tried. It is a vital emotion; it creates an energetic reactive impulse hardwired into us as an animal species that keeps us alive. Fear isn’t going to go away; however, there are different types of fear, and learning to recognise and alleviate our mind-based fears is profoundly important.

From a very high perspective, there are two types of fear: objective and subjective. Objective fear is the fear of survival in the present moment, this is arguably the only “real” fear that there is, and it doesn’t require much explanation. Our intuition kicks in if our life or health is in immediate danger. It triggers various energetic impulses around our body that make our physical structure move in such a way as to act to save us wherever possible.

The second high-level type of fear is mind-based subjective thoughts. This is where the memory of an event in the past, or the interpretation of information external to a person’s mind, creates a projection of what might happen in the future that causes the emotion of fear to appear. In one sense, these fears are not “real” because they are conceptual; however, we all have unique perceptions, interpretations, beliefs, and values, which are very real to how we feel about ourselves and our lives. Dismissing this second category of fears as not real would be to invalidate a very real experience of a challenging emotion.

Freud documented five primary archetypal fears of the ego mind. There is the fear of death, the fear of sickness or mutilation, the fear of rejection, the fear of humiliation or shame, and the fear of loss of freedom. The first, fear of death, is reasonably straightforward to understand. Because most of humanity does not know what is on the other side of our bodies cease to exist, we believe our very essence will terminate. 

I come from a background of atheism, where science and academic explanations are a prerequisite for acceptance of concepts; however, someone once confided in me about their near-death experience. They were certified as clinically dead for 30 minutes and yet experienced remarkable events during that time that they remember vividly. There is no questioning that this person had that experience. They are congruent and truthful in their narrative, and many years after the event, it was as vivid to them now as it was at the time. I felt very privileged to have been given the gift of hearing their story. Many years after the event, only a handful of people knew what had happened because the fear of being invalidated, ridiculed, and rejected had kept them silent.

I was fascinated by this person’s story and have since read about and watched many interviews with people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs for short). The description of near-death experience in my mind belies the reality that these people who are brave enough to share their stories all died clinically for short periods of time, and their consciousness continued to exist during those gaps. Perhaps near death is the wrong word.

One of the stand-out NDE stories I heard was about a brain surgeon who had viral meningitis. By the then expectations of science, given the seriousness of his illness, he should not now be alive, let alone functioning normally or retaining any memory; however, he went someplace that isn’t as we know it and has a vivid recollection of what was there. Because of his background, this brain specialist and his colleagues have studied in detail what happened to him and have strong evidence to suggest that our memory actually exists outside of our bodies, much like the data on our computers and phones is stored somewhere that is not local to where we are. Below is a link to the YouTube video I watched about his story for those curious enough to look.

https://youtu.be/cyrav3tU3_k?si=2sQarA6EGeApLrrW

Since the conversation I had with my former colleague about what happened when he died, I have, through following my curiosity, taking courses, and practising, had my eyes firmly wedged wide open to the fact, and I mean fact, or I would not state this with such certainty, that there is intelligence which can communicate with humans, not in physical form as we define it. I will also state, partly because of my own experience, research, and training of other people, that any human prepared to open their minds and train their physical receptors to receive it can receive information from intelligence, not in physical form.

I will provide the details and evidence of this in future blogs, plus my interpretation of science I have researched and conceptualised for my own requirement to understand how it can be possible as I continue to share my story of how I have become a highly tuned psychic energy reader. If you would like to read or listen to the story's first chapter, here is a QR code to link you to the blog. For those of you listening to the podcast, I will include the details of the link in the transcript.

Fear plays a major part in our society's over-riding dismissal of events such as these NDEs, invalidating them as make-believe or that the person can’t have properly died, that they made it up. Yet the mere act of this invalidation is evidence of mass population fears at play. If we are alive and have not experienced an NDE, we have no right to invalidate anyone. Just because we can’t explain it with science based on our current measuring methods and equipment doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; we simply have to stop dismissing what we can’t measure or comprehend. This is science based on guilt until proven innocent, and that, my friends, is not science; it is belief at play.

If our ego knew for certain that its consciousness does continue to exist without our physical body, then the fear of death somehow becomes less of a problem, as let's face it, it's going to happen sometime anyway. Then the real problem we have about death actually becomes, will it hurt?

So, this takes us neatly to the second Freudian archetypal fear, the fear of sickness and mutilation. Once again, it is easy to understand why this is a fear of our mind. No one, or at least I believe that no one, wants to have a life that is lived through a body that doesn’t function properly. However, there are many people in this world who have 100% healthy bodies in the present moment but live in a perpetual state of fear of what might happen to their physical bodies in the future.

As fear builds around a topic, so does the attention it gets, and then it becomes commercialised and gains more attention, and the focus feeds the size and scale of the fear.  To give you an example, there is an uprising of fear in women around my age about going through menopause. There is an ever-increasing number of clubs and clinics, and media attention is given to this. I seek not to invalidate what is happening to any one individual, and much of the attention is incredibly supportive; menopause can be really challenging for some women.

However, I don’t subscribe to focusing and filling up my brain waves about a topic like this unless a problem actually happens to me. Why engage in what might happen if it hasn’t happened and worry about what might happen based on what happens to other people? Other people do not have my body. If we focus on the idea that our body might become ill, it will be considerably more likely to become ill because of the immense stress we are causing it based on something that hasn’t happened to it and that may never happen to it.

Now let's move on to the fears of humiliation and shame, the fear of rejection, and the fear of loss of freedom. These are the most challenging fears we deal with. These are fears completely invented by the human ego because of the constructs of society. These are the fears that stop us from being true to ourselves. These fears have given rise to judgment, criticism, jealousy, resentment, and aggression. These fears incite rivalries and conflicts between societies, cultures, and even between families and friends. 

Every single ego on this planet wants to be the best at something. Every ego wants to be seen. Every ego wants to be heard. Every ego seeks to be validated by somebody else. Every ego wants to be acknowledged, every ego wants to win, and if our ego can’t win at something positive, our ego will choose to win at being negative. That is what egos do; their job is to promote the self. This is not a good or bad thing; it is what it is, and when we acknowledge and work with this aspect of ourselves, it is much easier to discover why we have our fears.

Let’s revert for a moment to the example of health and then superimpose the ego’s need to be the best at something and how that can manifest into a destructive lifelong challenge. I have sadly lost count of the people who have turned up and announced themselves with the illnesses that they have within no more than three minutes of chatting. “Hi, my name is Jennifer, I am an artist, but I also have bipolar disorder, so I’m not very good at meeting deadlines because it’s a real struggle for me sometimes to function properly.” “Hi, my name is Louise, I run my own business as a life coach, but I have to warn you I also have ME, so I’m only available to work a certain number of hours”. “Hi, my name is Jane. I own a law firm, and I specialise in wills. I am happy to help, but I have to warn you I have a number of food intolerances and allergies, and I can be off sick for extended periods; therefore, I can’t commit to the deadline you are after.”

Once again, I seek not to detract or diminish from these very real and very challenging issues; this is really horrible, devastating stuff going on for people. However, when you try to look under the surface of what is really going on, there is this depressing sense of permanency in people announcing themselves with these labels that state, “I live with a sub-optimal body with very little hope of overcoming this, because no one has been able to help me find a solution. I feel like I am swimming alone in society, and I fear the humiliation and rejection that comes with not having the energy to meet outputs that are expected of me, so my body is now malfunctioning.”

The tragic thing is that this fear of not being good enough perpetuates and arguably has caused the body its disease. A disease is sometimes better described as a dis-ease. The body is not at ease because the ego is not in alignment with the truth of how we are and what we want to be; rather, it seeks to align itself with others' expectations of itself, and then our physical body starts to fundamentally malfunction.

Let’s focus on Frued’s fifth archetypal fear, which is the fear of the loss of freedom. To my mind, this fear is one of the biggest reasons for humans' out-of-alignment behaviours. This is the fear that has people going to war over land and natural resources. The fear drives us to work long hours for money, often doing jobs that might not align with our passions. The fear allows us to let other people have a say in who we are and what we can do.

Humanity’s lack of understanding of what money is, has become a huge determinant of how much this fear of losing freedom impacts our lives. The topic of money will be subject to an article of its own. However, I will mention here that money is just an “I owe you note”. Money is a tool that was invented to facilitate the swap of items of trade between individuals who didn’t know each other and where timing differences were involved. The challenge we all have with money is not money in itself; it is that we do not know how to value ourselves, and we fear letting loose into the world the greatness of our own capability. 

The fear of the loss of freedom has two aspects to it. The biggest driver for getting ourselves into such a huge fear-based societal mess is that we all crave, seek, and need to feel internal emotional freedom. This is the feeling inside us that comes from being able to be true to ourselves, to be able to express ourselves, to be able to relish our creativity and our unique individual identity. 

However, we intellectualise that the path to freedom is to have material freedom, assets, money, titles, and societal status outside of us. This is not freedom. I can cite an example of an extremely wealthy person who owns an estate in Scotland along with several other houses around the world and yet lives in fear of being kidnapped. This person's wife is reputed to be aggressively rude to their staff. Despite the appearance of freedom that comes with wealth, many people with money are not emotionally free.

Our human thoughts, feelings, and values represent our inherent desire to evolve and, for some, venture into previously unimagined emotional, physical, and mental realms. Each of us lives a life of self-discovery, which we then restrict by stress and angst and create a noticeable absence of joy in our lives. At the core of this struggle lies the tension between our intrinsic, unique, intelligent energy and the overwhelming urge to fit in. You can call this energy our subconscious, inner being, instinct, soul, spirit, chi, life force or other names; regardless, it is intelligent, far more so than our ego mind. This battle is waged between our ego mind's dread of non-conformity and our soul’s longing for self-expression.

In its pursuit to avoid differentiation, the ego seeks to assert its dominance over our longing for self-expression, often at the expense of our physical well-being. It is obsessed with fitting in. The ego is entangled in society's desire for recognition, fearing humiliation, rejection, and illness, all while demanding authority over others based on perceived status. Yet, in the middle of these ego-driven fears, the heart and soul of every individual yearns for authenticity, for the courage to live true to ourselves. That is the true fear of loss of freedom.

How do we fix this? The good news is that there is a way out. We can rediscover our joy, zest for life, and dedication to being true to ourselves. By doing this, we unlock a kind of strength that pushes past most ego-based fears. It is not an easy process because our ego will keep trying to bring back its fears. But if we realise we are constantly just attempting to fit into a world where fitting in doesn't matter since everyone's trying to find their place, we can choose to stop worrying so much about what our ego wants.

When we let go of our ego’s fears and surrender to our soul's desires, we start to tap into a deeper power, living for something greater than just trying to please people and be seen by others, all of whom are outside of us. Inside is the real freedom and power. It's the basis of unconditional love for ourselves and of unconditional love and sympathy towards others, all of whom are fighting the same tough battle. Instead of criticising or judging, we start offering sympathy and support.

Our bodies do way more than we often realise. They're not just about physical or chemical processes; they are complex mental, physical, emotional, and energetic systems capable of amazing things that go beyond our mental grasp. Without knowing, our bodies make countless decisions critical for survival. It's not just our brains that are intellectual; our entire body has incredible intelligence. When we shift our mindset from fear, judgment, and stress to one of kindness and self-compassion, we connect with a different kind of internal energy. This affects how our body and mind interact, leading to a more balanced, healthy and fulfilling life.

Living in fear activates a part of our body's wiring called the sympathetic nervous system. This system is all about quick responses, sending signals throughout our body to keep us on high alert. However, despite its name, the sympathetic nervous system isn't very sympathetic; it keeps us in a state of constant stress. When we're stuck in fear-driven energy, we're only tapping into a tiny fraction of our body's full intellectual and creative capability.

When we start treating ourselves with kindness and compassion, we lift ourselves out of this stressed state and engage our parasympathetic nervous system. This change allows us to access even more of our body's systems, including the system responsible for our deepest feelings and creativity. This system, often called our "second brain" or our enteric nervous system, is the centre of our intuition. It's where most of our serotonin or feeling hormones are generated; it's part of our inner equipment that senses the world around us. By focusing on self-compassion, we unlock a more profound connection to our body's intelligence and capabilities and find joy and passion in our creativity.

When we dive into activities that spark our creativity and make us feel alive, we begin to cultivate joy and compassion. This shift helps us overcome deep-seated fears, our fear of not being good enough, fear of sickness and death, and fears of humiliation and rejection. By spending more time doing things that motivate us, we can start to dismantle our fears.

To overcome our fears, we must shift from relying on thinking to listening to our feelings. Then we have to recognise our overthinking patterns and replace them with feeling through using our intuition and being prepared to be vulnerable with ourselves. We then have to train our minds to validate our emotions and allow the truth of our inner being and what we love about ourselves to emerge.  Our minds can be given a new role: to protect us and be the action takers to instigate our right to express and grow our creativity. This means no more fighting to be heard or seen by others but instead instilling a firm belief in ourselves and taking every necessary action to give ourselves permission to promote our unique capability.

Our ego minds need to be taught how to recognise what feels right for us, not to let others diminish our value, and to avoid conforming just to agree with others. Our ego minds need to learn to step away from what doesn't benefit us to discover the beauty of life in pursuing our passions rather than chasing after others' expectations for fleeting moments of approval. The more we can focus on living in the present moment and not letting past fears overshadow future possibilities, the sweeter life becomes and the more magnetic we become to the energies that are meant to support us.

We need to practice speaking to ourselves with gentleness, compassion, and kindness to overcome our fears. Overcoming fear also means releasing judgment of others, letting go of jealousy, and directing our energy towards our own achievements instead of envying others. To truly move past our fears, we must embrace collaboration over competition, introduce compassion where there is criticism, and choose growth over limitation.

Retraining the mind is straightforward in principle because it involves activating and then deliberately training yourself to rewire your thoughts. This is energy healing in action, where you reactivate underused synapses and keep working at using them until it's second nature, no different from forming a new habit. Speaking daily affirmations and using positive self-compassion and self-worth meditations are ideal places to start.  This process includes adopting new ways of speaking to ourselves and making a daily choice to move towards self-love rather than self-hatred.

Ultimately, our feelings and behaviours are a choice; we can either react out of fear and perpetuate the energies of lack, sacrifice and control or embrace the balanced mature energy of someone who chooses to be free and true to be their authentic selves and who values and supports the choices of all others to be whoever they are able to be at that moment in their lives.

Choosing self-love does come with fears. Deciding to prioritise your needs does sadly sometimes lead to rejection from those who should be expected to be relied upon to support you. Others will feel threatened by your empowerment and attempt to diminish you. Nevertheless, the choice is yours. You can either continue living in fear, catering to the energies of those stuck in a fearful mindset, or you can choose a less-trodden path.

By opting for the road less travelled, you will embark on a journey towards emotional freedom. It's a path that may lead you towards fewer friends, but it also promises joy, prosperity, and health. When you align your entire physical, energetic system with your truth, you embrace the beauty and talent that often lie dormant in every unique individual.

My own need to start telling my story because of the importance it has for the advancement of science and human and planetary health has involved overcoming fears I did not even realise were there, let alone as deep-rooted as they were. For example, I really fear expressing my thoughts after a lifetime of listening more than I have ever talked. I never experienced imposter syndrome throughout my career as a very successful business executive, and yet choosing to speak out about subtle energy has made me continually question my experience until, one day, the evidence and knowledge I hold has become too much. 

Likewise, the fear of speaking out about psychic energy reading has made me hold back for months longer than I perhaps could have done; however, that has led to even more evidenced examples, plus a deepening foundation for some of my scientific conceptual explanations and again, I now have too much fact-based information to NOT do something with it. 

With the loss of fear comes a great sense of peace and empowerment. I really hope some of you are inspired to set to work on reducing how much fear impacts your ability to live your authentic life because when we are at peace, we consume less, we are more forgiving towards each other and other creatures that we share our planet with can expect to be treated more kindly.

I will finish by saying that there is a pressing need to integrate the understanding and management of fears into our educational system. By doing so, we can spare future generations some of the burdens of navigating this very challenging, negative aspect of our human mind that we have, in so many ways, managed to construct for ourselves.