“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” ~ Mary Oliver
Fear is something inbuilt to us; it’s evident throughout nature in the way animals instinctively respond to danger, and it operates just the same in us. And yet, whilst it’s such a primal and natural piece of our cycle of wisdom, it’s something we have been conditioned to want to fix, change and shut down. We forget, as we are caught in our heads, that fear is something that is inbuilt to keep us safe - and that it actually means very little about what we ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do...
And so, it’s completely understandable why I see, and honour, this fear in many of my clients. As people step into their journeys of self-rediscovery with me, fearful thinking is often something that stops us diving in deeper, and manifests itself in many ways that really prevent people from simply honouring their truth. My guess as to why this might be is that throughout life - myself included - we have been taught that we should avoid fear to keep ourselves safe. So, whenever ‘discomfort’ arises, we often quickly retreat to respond to the thinking that we live in the illusion of safety under. But that’s all this is; an ‘illusion.’
You see, we are never really living in a world of ‘certainty;’ I’ve come to see that certainty is simply something our mind creates to keep us feeling better. Recent world events have really shown us that quite beautifully, actually. But what they equally showed us was how resilient and capable we are at adapting, how much wisdom there is guiding us with what to do in each moment, and how much nicer it was to live in a beautiful presence – fully in the moment - rather than in our ‘ideas’ about what life ‘should’ look like, or who we think we should be. What I have seen so deeply is that ‘who we think we are’ is made up by us, and us only – and that’s quite liberating!
So why is it, that time and time again, we worry about being ‘who we are’? Why does it feel scary to show up, simply, as ourselves? In so many clients I work with, this journey is often shrouded by the fear of allowing permission for ourselves to live as our wildest truth. Questions I ask often in response to this is, ‘what even is permission?’ Do we really need to seek permission, or can we just show up exactly as we desire to be? Why are things like ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ such ‘dirty’ words?
We have been conditioned that we have to be who we have created ourselves to be in order to feel safe. Once we identify with the labels we have attached ourselves to (and it is always us that creates these), we then conform to them as if they have been given to us by God, to honour for life – and yet, the truth is, we are whoever we desire to be. But ‘desire’ is something made dirty; many of us don’t live in a world of ‘coulds’, but a world of ‘shoulds’. And in daring to stepping out of the ‘shoulds’ into the ‘coulds,’ often this creates some fear that we will change and the world will judge us, or somehow make this mean something about us.
But where does judgement even come from? We can only really ever experience judgement through our own thinking, and I’ve come to see that whenever someone is apparently ‘judging’ me, it really is only being experienced via my own thinking. I used to really design my life around who others saw me as – until I realised that I couldn’t even ever truly see who they saw me as! Someone asked me once ‘who is Nicole?’ and I realised I identified with all the labels of who Nicole was, until I realised that these were just labels created by myself! When we begin to see this, there’s a certain freedom that appears in the place of fear, as we realise, it is only ever us that is creating the experience of judgement. We are the ones writing the narrative – and in my experience, most of the time what we think that others thing is never accurate! Mostly, people just want us to be happy.
Perhaps a little deeper than that, even, one of the things that often helps my clients to truly step into who they really are, is the rediscovery about ‘who we really are’ beyond all of these ideas and stories that we tell ourselves. The deeper, bigger ‘who are we’ question is always one that offers us a sense of total freedom to be our wildest, authentic selves. For what I have come to see is that we are wisdom. There are plenty of labels for this – perhaps divinity, magic, universal intelligence, nature, unconditional love, or something else might tick your box to understand this for yourself – but ultimately, we are connection. Any sense of separation from others comes entirely from our thinking, because it can’t not – who we really are is deeply connected to life; it is magic. Wisdom in action. And in seeing this, and really feeling it for ourselves – rediscovering our ‘true nature’, if you like – we suddenly realise that the fear of being ourselves is really quite unnecessary. Not simply for the fact that we can’t really ever be anything else but ourselves, but because there’s nothing to be frightened of when we show up as our truth. When we appear as love, with that intention, not only do we light ourselves up, feeling into that magical connection that is always there under the thinking that it isn’t, but the people around us feel it, and the whole world changes and responds to our newly rediscovered beauty.
And this is not because we are aiming to evade the ‘ego’ and rise above our humanness, either. Many spiritual teachings offer us the idea of our ‘oneness’ with the condition that we should be rising above our human experience; but again this isn’t what I see. I see that understanding our connectedness actually offers us the freedom to express our beautiful human truth – to dance as whoever we desire to be – in its wildest, most beautiful glory! When we see our deeper connection we find ourselves in a settled foundation of knowing there is a wisdom living us, but that we can also choose to express as whoever we desire to be! Every thought – all our human form – is an absolute gift to be embraced, and we get to choose what that expresses as!
Of course, sometimes, it’s inevitable that people won’t understand our journeys, because we are all human and we all have different thinking. I know that I experienced this – and for some of my family me rediscovering my truth was scary for them (more fear!) – which did result in my eventual divorce, which actually was navigated fully from wisdom. But the one thing that helps to know when people feel a sense of separation, is that we people don’t really need to understand us; we can still love them regardless, as we know that we more deeply understand ourselves. And not only that, but we too can understand, from this space of love, that they may be having some messy thinking about life, if they feel a resistance to who we are newly showing up as.
But the best bit, as we show up as our truth, regardless of fear? Is that we no longer worry about feeling the fear. Because as we truly step into our magic and see the wisdom of life – as we sense deeper into who we really are beyond all ideas, it frees us up to simply play with life as who we desire to be. We begin to creatively show up, dancing with joy, seeing the magic of life, and allowing ourselves to embrace it all. We begin to fully embrace and express the beauty of being truly ourselves! And we know, that there’s a wisdom there to guide us through all of it; all the fear along the way, and all the resistance, and all of the messiness. There’s a richness to it all. There’s an expansion. And in its place, we truly become fearlessly ourselves, and the whole of life feels much more magical – as well as more trusting of our full capacity to cope with anything…
Had I not allowed myself to rediscover who I was, or step into my truth, I would still be living in the feeling of stuckness, lost and brokenness. There wasn’t even much ‘change’ of the external as I dived deeper, it was an internal shift, that led me deeper into a life that I truly desired. I now see that following desire, in a heart-led way, allows us to unravel a life we love, that feels effortless. As I began to see who I was, I settled into peace, and then began to see how I could dance in my human desire. It eventually led me to living in a new county, with the love of my life, having a baby and creating a beautiful business that I adore as I get to support beautiful souls like you on their journeys into expressing their own truth - and I couldn’t be happier. On the whole, the fear didn’t impact me, and when it got messy I knew the depths of my own wisdom and resilience. Instead, diving deeper into my truth has been a gentle, beautiful and magical unfolding - and life is so much richer now. I see the magic of life; and I honour myself for allowing it.
So, what would happen for you, if you just allowed yourself to be? What would happen if we knew it was safe to express? What if we just allowed ourselves to love what we love, and to show up as who we really are? How liberating would that be, to move from heart-led desire, take inspired action and create from a space within that is wise, wild and beautiful? What would it look like to simply allow ourselves to rediscover ourselves as the magical, creative, loving, inspired, soulful beings we already are, underneath all of the thinking about who we are? Does such a gentle animal feel scary, anymore? As Mary Oliver says - “whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.”
Interested in sensing into this a little more? Check out our Self-Rediscovery School which offers a Self-Rediscovery Foundations Program, grounding you in the Three Principles I share, as well as an Unravel Program to deepen the dance of love with life:
