Fears Are Almost Never Very True

Q: I chose to take a gap year and pursue music and travel and it was a super tough decision and I released all sorts of tension from my heart and was living in a terrible state for a week. But, ultimately it felt right when I made it.

Recently, as I’ve been learning to produce music in my house, I’ve been overrun with fears and panicked that I made the wrong decision and I should see if I can still go back to college. I’m worried I’ll be isolated, won’t enjoy my music as much as I have, I’ll feel left behind as people I know go to school, and I’ll lose social skills, and feel purposelessness and will wake up with dread and depression every morning yearning for the year to be over — even though I have plans to backpack and work on farms in foreign countries.

Can intuition really change like this? Is this the ego just throwing fear programming at me. I have no idea what the heart is or isn’t saying anymore. Should I just be courageous — I felt called to take this year off, and now to be honest, I’m not really sure why. I guess I’m not gonna die, but this is insane fear and irrational fear.

A: The truth opens our heart, expands our sense of awareness and being, and quiets our mind. Something that is less true has the opposite effect: it closes and contracts our awareness and sense of self, and makes the mind very busy. It is a rhetorical question, but do any of your fears open your heart, or do they cause you to contract into tunnel vision? Does your mind get quieter or busier when you focus on your fears? My guess is that very few or even none of your fears open your heart, and that is because they simply are not very true or at least not important and relevant in the here and now.

Ultimately, all there is is truth, so even the most unlikely fear has some truth to it.....just very, very little. And only when it is important that you change course to avoid some less than ideal outcome will a fear or idea of something bad happening turn out to actually open your heart and therefore be true and relevant in that particular moment. It will still not be a very big truth, since the biggest truth is that you, your essential being, cannot be harmed. But a particular fear still might be important and relevant in the moment.

The truth is what matters, what is relevant, what is helpful and meaningful in life. So almost all of your fears do not really matter, are not relevant, and are not helpful or meaningful. And unless they do open your heart and awareness, they are not coming from your intuition.

In contrast, what happens in the moments when at least temporarily you can touch a bigger truth, maybe something like, "In the long run, a year is not that much time." or maybe, "No matter what, I am sure to learn a lot about myself and life and music if I stay with my plan." And then in the moments when you touch again into the original inspiration that led you to make this choice, what happens in your heart? Be sure to check in the moment before one of your fears kicks in. Once you have focused on a fear, then your heart will move instead to showing you how true your fear really is.

Fears are normal and natural, and everyone experiences them. They just are not important, meaningful or relevant almost all of the time. You do not need to get rid of your fears, just see them for their actual size and importance.

And when something is not very true, a useful question is, "What else is true?"

I hope this helps :-)  

More articles about fear are listed here.