The Fear and Anxiety Solution (24 page)

Because it’s important that you remain associated with the observer position, the following questions are formulated to inquire about your younger self, the person you were at that time. The questions are phrased in the third person (referring to your younger self as
he
or
she
), which allows you to stay dissociated from the event and thus prevents you from being drawn back into the memory and reliving the painful experience.

Ask yourself the following questions and wait for the answers to arise from deep within.

What is your younger self afraid of or confused by?
For example, being bullied by kids in school, being yelled at by a parent, or feeling alone.

Was whatever happened your younger self’s fault? does he or she deserve to be treated this way?
Usually the answer is no, especially if you’re starting with an event from your childhood. The place of learning allows you to recognize and remember your innocence at that time.

If it was his or her fault, what were the intentions of the younger self?
Maybe in the past you blamed yourself for what happened during that time. You told yourself it was your fault that you were bullied because you were a “pathetic” kid; it was your fault your mom yelled at you because you broke something or received a bad grade; it was your fault you were abandoned because you were sent to your room as a form of punishment for being bad. Even if you saw your younger self as being at fault, you’ll now find, from the place of learning, that his or her intentions were innocent. Maybe instead of pathetic, you were awkward because you were trying so hard to make friends or because your parents didn’t have the money to buy you cool clothes. Maybe you broke something because you got too excited and didn’t pay enough attention. Maybe you received poor grades because you believed that you weren’t smart enough and therefore didn’t apply yourself in school.

No matter what the situations were, observe your younger self with compassion, and assume that you can gain a deeper understanding of the goodness and innocence of who you were.

Did your younger self pick up on other people’s negative emotions or limiting beliefs? if so, whose emotions and beliefs were they?
This question provides you with greater insights about the feelings and motives of others involved in the event and how you might have taken on those feelings, without even noticing. The bullies probably didn’t feel only angry or cocky. When you look beneath their emotions, you may detect that these bullies had their own fears and insecurities. The parent who punished you may have felt overwhelmed, frightened, pained, or consumed with self-loathing. Did these people project their feelings on to you? Did you subconsciously soak them up as though you were a sponge? It can be quite illuminating when you realize that potentially a large portion of the emotions and limiting beliefs you have held on to weren’t even yours in the first place.

How would a person who dearly loves and cares about this younger self interpret this situation differently than you may have in the past?
No matter how alone and misunderstood you felt, there was probably one person—a grandmother, sibling, friend, teacher, or neighbor—who loved and appreciated you for who you were. If not, can you look at your younger self with love and compassion? Through the eyes of kindness, you may see that the bullied kid was actually stronger than the bullies because he or she didn’t choose to put others down to feel better about him- or herself. You might recognize that the younger self should not have been punished for a bad grade but instead
should have been supported and reassured by Mom and Dad, who might have regarded themselves as underachievers. And maybe you can assess that the kid who felt abandoned and alone was, in fact, loved—or at least had many reasons to love him- or herself.

What other empowering and liberating lessons can i learn from this memory before i find resolution and completion with it?
This question invites your subconscious and your higher consciousness to provide any additional clarifying insights about this event. You may recognize more aspects of your younger self that you’re able to appreciate now. You may be able to look at those who hurt you with greater understanding and compassion because you can understand the pain or fears they struggled with. And you may be even grateful for those who did make mistakes because they taught you how not to be or act. It’s also perfectly fine if you don’t receive earth-shattering realizations and all that’s bubbling up from the subconscious are words, images, or sensations.

If you don’t seem to get any answers at all, don’t be concerned. Some teachings and insights will take time to reach your conscious awareness, and you may be unable to verbalize them for a while. By conveying to your subconscious that you’re ready and open to learn from the past, you’ve already set the most important part of the process into motion. Even after you’ve completed this process, you may receive additional information about this event and its patterns. These pieces of the puzzle can appear during your dream time or in the form of a spontaneous revelation, where suddenly the event makes total sense. And sometimes you may just feel more neutral and at ease about your past and more comfortable and confident with yourself without really knowing why, which demonstrates that the healing work of your subconscious doesn’t require input from your conscious mind.

Step 4 provided a new perspective about what happened, enabled you to set the record straight, and helped you rewrite your story. Now that your subconscious has provided you with all the information it wanted you to retrieve, you can peel away the layers of emotional baggage and confusion and remember the truth of who you are.

From the place of learning, kindly gaze at your younger self and share with him or her all the teachings and insights you’ve gained so far. What does this self need to hear from you to resolve the event? What advice would you like to offer?

Then imagine that you’re sending a brilliant light beam of compassion and love directly from your heart to this young person, enveloping him or her with the soft blanket of your love and appreciation. The light from your heart infuses the little self with healing energy, which gently penetrates into each and every cell, circulating throughout his or her body. While this healing energy is gradually filling his or her entire being, it easily pushes out all fear, anxiety, and emotional imprints that your younger self experienced or took on from others. Imagine the emotional charge releasing; for example, you might see it as dark smoke, dust, or clouds rising out of your younger self, out of the event, out of your life line, completely dissolving.

As the compassionate light from your heart continues to release and replace the emotional baggage, it soon overflows and expands beyond the physical form, creating a sphere-shaped field of energy all around your younger self. This sphere functions as a protective shield, within which your younger self can safely be, grow, and expand while all negative outside influences simply bounce off it.

While this field of shielding energy grows wider and brighter, the people or circumstances in this memory, which may have scared this little self, become much smaller, two-dimensional, translucent, and eventually insignificant.

Now that all the layers of emotional baggage have lifted and disappeared, and your love and compassion have safely enveloped your younger self, softly gaze into his or her heart and become aware of the brilliant light at its core—the essence of its being. How does this core light appear to you? What are its qualities, and what are its powers?

At this point, you may not be able to put into words what you experience. The essence of who we are goes far beyond our vocabulary and our conscious understanding. People I’ve worked with described feeling a strong sense of purity, joy, compassion, and love radiating from this inner light. But more frequently, they were simply in awe of the indefinable brilliance and power of their true essence, which most of them were completely unaware of until they gazed into the heart of their younger self.

Once you feel complete, at peace, or simply neutral about the remembered event, gauge whether or not the feelings of your younger self have also transformed. If you find that the anxiety charge hasn’t completely resolved (a rare occurrence), repeat steps 4 and 5 of the Pattern Resolution Process. Make sure that your inner protector understands that it is in your best interest to let go of this draining, emotional burden.

Now that you’ve taught your subconscious how to learn from and let go of past fear and anxiety (and, by doing so, created the space for the light of your true essence to emerge and expand), it can extrapolate this process to all previous and subsequent events of the same emotional pattern, creating a domino-like effect. Your subconscious mind is a very quick learner and can easily implement this process after the resolution of just one memory. However, your more skeptical conscious mind may want to work through this process with one or two more events before you place the process in the capable hands of your subconscious. If this is the case, repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 with events that happened either before or after the one you just resolved. When you’re satisfied and convinced that your subconscious is sufficiently trained to take over, continue the process with the following step.

From the place of learning, high above your life line, it’s evident that the same anxiety-driven emotional and behavioral patterns repeated themselves. Some of these events may have happened before the event you started with, but most of them occurred after. Instruct your subconscious to retrieve more knowledge from the remaining unresolved events and store them in a special place where you can easily retrieve them at the appropriate time.
At this point, you don’t need to be consciously aware of the specifics of these insights.

While your subconscious provides you with the innate wisdom and growth potential of your past, send beams of light, compassion, and love from your heart to the younger selves in each event. Fill them with this healing energy, and allow the clouds of fear and anxiety to lift out of your life line and disseminate.

As your younger selves are liberated from the emotional baggage, you can see how the bright lights of each of their core essences emerge and expand—all across the past section of your life line. From your comfortable higher perspective, watch how your subconscious releases—within just minutes—decades of old fears and anxieties, making room for the brilliant light of your core energy to come forth.

In the final step of this process, you can concentrate on your present self and release any remaining fear and anxiety from its subconscious (and cellular) storage places.

Still viewing your life line from the place of learning, slowly move back until you end up floating above the present moment and your current physical form, which is comfortably propped in a chair or lying flat on a bed. With a tender smile of compassion and appreciation, take a moment to contemplate and appreciate the positive choices you’ve made throughout your life and ask yourself these three questions:

     •
With all the fear and anxiety i’ve experienced in the past, did i give up on believing in kindness, compassion, goodness, and love?
The answer is no, because you’ve just proven to yourself that you can utilize the love from your heart to heal your past.

     •
Is my inner light, my core essence, still strong and intact?
From all you’ve experienced so far, the answer is, of course, yes.

      •
Looking across my past, what have i learned about who i truly am?
This is a big question, one that has been pondered by the greatest minds throughout history. So once again, resist the temptation to let your analytical (and maybe philosophical) mind take over. Instead, allow the response to this question to come to you in whatever form it needs to—as words, images, sensations, or simply the comforting realization that the potential of your true essence is and always has been far more powerful than your fears.

Radiate the light of compassion and love from above into the body of your present self, where it expands and fills up the head, torso, arms, abdomen, pelvis, and legs. As this healing force ripples throughout your entire body, it forces out and clears away any residual fear and anxiety that was trapped in your subconscious and your cellular memory. Pay special attention to the parts of your body that became tense or felt heavy when you recalled anxiety-charged memories. Imagine that you are releasing any remaining vestiges of stored fear and anxiety as dark smoke or clouds, which rise out of your body and completely dissolve.

Once your entire physical body appears filled with light and in a complete state of peace and harmony, gaze down from above into your heart and recognize the familiar light of your core essence emanating from there. Take a moment to bask in its radiance and appreciate that it still comprises the same qualities of beauty, purity, and power that you’ve witnessed within your younger self.

Take one more glance at your now “enlightened” past, then gently float down toward the light of your essence, where you can reenter your physical body. Anchor yourself in your heart, your spine, your legs, your feet, and then all the way up to the top of your head.

Take three slow breaths in and out. Welcome back!

• • •

I know you may feel a bit overwhelmed by all these details and information, but I told you this was an easy process—and it is. And it’s much easier to follow when someone else guides you through it, which is why, as I mentioned before, I have made available a summary of this process as an mp3 download. To help you feel even more comfortable taking this journey on your own, here is an example of a client I worked with.

Gerry was in her late fifties when she contacted me after listening to one of my radio shows. Although Gerry had been a very successful, award-winning saleswoman for many years, when her company was sold to a new owner, her insecurities and anxieties reached a new high. “I’ve been with this company for eight years, and I now have to prove myself all over again,” she told me. “The new management wants me to take on more and more tasks, and I’m already overwhelmed. I think they don’t like me and are trying to get rid of me.”