RC101 – Lesson Three
Fear, Doubt, and Releasing Limitation: What is holding you back from living your vision?
Homework Review: Were you able to find your joy in playing yesterday? Did you find yourself being frustrated, or were you able to just be spontaneous and not worry about the results?
What is Fear and Doubt?
Fear, in it’s simplest form, is a warning mechanism for the body to pay attention to a possible physical danger. This is fear’s natural role and ideally the only role it would play in your life. What fear has become for many people is the place where power is projected outside of us, so far outside that we envison it as separated from our inner being. Whether it’s earthquakes, the government, or Y2K, fear plays the same role in an infinite variety of guises. If your beliefs about something tell you that you have no power over it, you become afraid that it can harm you.
Sometimes we allow our fears, and the beliefs in powerlessness beneath them, to dictate a “safe” lives for ourselves. Instead of consciously facing these fears, or looking at the beliefs which lie beneath them, we avoid them by just not challenging those areas of our lives. In some cases a person can create a seemingly “normal” life for themselves, even being somewhat happy, although usually there are large areas of their lives unfulfilled. We might experience boredom, frustration or depression, asking ourselves questions like “is this all there is?” We know that it’s not, that there are huge parts of ourselves being unfulfilled, however we might be so used to the safe structure that we have created that it takes some conscious effort to notice the walls around us.
Doubt is Fear’s cousin. Doubt comes from those same beliefs that are based around powerlessness. Doubt, instead of coming when we sense any sort of danger from an area of powerlessness, as fear does, comes from us not believing in our power to create a desired outcome for a situation. Fear and doubt often become intertwined in our lives, since we will often hold beliefs in some area that we feel both threatened in some way by it, and powerless to stop it.
A current example of this is the Y2K bug, many people are afraid of what it will cause, and don’t believe that it can be corrected before the end of the year. Some people are even reacting to the belief by stocking up on dry goods, preparing for what they believe as “the inevitable.” By taking this action, this is reinforcing the original belief in powerlessness in the first place, making it more likely that they will experience such an event. The key to this type of undesirable situation is to recognize what your underlying belief is, recognize it as just a belief, not a “fact,” and remind yourself that it can be changed. The switch in perspective from assuming something is a fact to seeing it as a belief can be the most challenging part of all of this, as well as the most rewarding.
From a reality creation perspective, fear and doubt can become two of your best friends. When you’re feeling afraid or powerless, or feeling doubt about the outcome of a situation, it’s a chance to step back and say: “Aha, here is another area for me to reclaim my power.” Fear and doubt are transformed from something which blocked you from achieving your goals, to friendly advisors who wave bright orange flags at any place in your life where you don’t believe in your own power.
Confronting Fear and Doubt
We realize that in the above paragraphs we make dealing with fear and doubt seems rather easy, and sometimes it is; however, many times fear and doubt seem very “REAL”, and facing them and dealing with what they have to show us is among the most difficult lessons we can learn and sometimes takes the most personal courage.
Sometimes, when we can’t let go of our belief in fear (ironically because we are afraid to) we will tell ourselves that it’s just fear and not to worry, then go about creating the event anyway. You might quit your job and find yourself without money for the rent, then begin judging yourself harshly for having ever challenged the fear in the first place. The truth is that if we can’t allow ourselves to let go of that original belief in powerlessness, we will create the (un)desired event in order to show ourselves that while it may be unpleasant, it’s never as bad as our fears made it seem.
The trick here is to step back, especially from that harsh inner critic that might be telling you how crazy you are for challenging these areas in your life. Once again this is self-judgment raising it’s ugly head. If there’s a nemisis in conscious creation, self-judgement would be it; however, the only way to deal with self-judgment is to love yourself, to allow love to flow in and fill up those hard, cold areas inside your heart.
Because when we turn away from our focus on fear, doubt, and separation, we naturally flow back more in alignment with our true selves and in alignment with the Love that we are.
Your Personal Vision
Do you have a vision for yourself? For the life you would ideally be living? If so, how far away from experiencing that ideal life are you? Do you see yourself as stepping into that life right now, or does it seem impossibly far away?
If you are not living that life now, take a pen and paper and write down why you are not living that life, ask yourself, “What is preventing me from living my ideal life right this moment?” After you are finished, look at each sentence you wrote and try to identify the beliefs behind them. The beliefs might appear to be facts of life to you and incredibly obvious to anyone, but write them down anyway. One belief that I held for years as a “truth” was that a man must work hard for a living. Blech! Talk about limitations! Yet at the time I would have sworn that it was a fact of life.
One area in which you might be limiting yourself is by believing you have to DO something in order to have that ideal life right now. You might believe you have to lose 20lbs before you can meet that perfect woman, or that you have to win the lottery before you can quit your job. Once again, there is nothing wrong with having such beliefs, but if holding onto them is keeping you from your goal, then why bother? 🙂
One of the most empowering parts of being a conscious creator is stepping back from yourself and saying “Oh, wow, I was believing THAT!?!” It’s this wonderful sense of recognition when you can associate your creative power with the events you have been creating, and particularly in the case of unwanted events, releasing them from your life. There is a certain rush of energy that comes with the process, a sense of acceleration, particularly when you have done this a few times and really feel your own sense of creative power expanding.
Listed below are some guidelines for conscious creation that we have come up with. We have found these to be a helpful tool in explaining and revealing the creative process. Feel free to examine them and play with them, and for homework write down anything that pops into your head while you are reading them. This will reveal even more about yourself and what you believe, that you may not have even consciously known about!
Guidelines for Conscious Creation
- Beliefs are what we hold to be true in our lives.
- Intention is a focused desire to create something.
- Action is a movement in physical reality.
- Action is a flow of energy.
- Action allows the flow of intention in physical reality.
- Intention and Action with opposing Beliefs creates repeating patterns.
- “Nothing” is a repeated pattern of no results. (This is different from the idea of conscious creation “not working.”)
- Acceptance is taking action in harmony with Intentions.
- Acceptance is the only necessary Action.
- Resistance is taking action in opposition to Intention.
- Intuition is the compass of Intention.
- Trusting Intuition guides us to Acceptance.
End of Lesson Three