The idea that we need courage to live free and truthful lives feels romanticized at face value.
It sounds good and important, something we all know we have to do, but too few actually do it.
And that's mainly because most of us have no goddamn clue what it really means.
When you bring this romanticized idea of needing courage to live authentically down to earth, you understand its never been just an abstract concept.
I will illustrate everything with my own example. But first I want to make my own definition of courage clear to everyone.
You only need courage or bravery where fear is also present. When you are not afraid of something, whatever that thing is, you cannot say you are courageous for doing that thing.
Courage does not act as an cure to fear. It is the deep understanding there is something more important, more valuable, more enriching on the other side of one's fear. The role of courage/bravery is not to defeat or antagonize fear, but its role is to give you the leeway to choose a more empowered & conscious manner of living than you have before, when you only knew fear.
Courage arises when one decides that it is time to step into a higher, more potent and greater version of themselves. This disrupts the usual pattern they would normally succumb to.
So because you cannot feel brave or courageous unless you are first afraid, we need to look at the relationship between courage and authentic living.
This is where I give you my example.
I used to live a life riddled with fear. I was feeling fear in relation to almost everything, starting with the most basic of things and activities. I was feeling an impending doom coming over me at the thought of interacting with people, I was feeling a impending doom at the thought of walking down the street, I was feeling impending doom at the thought of eating and choking by accident and die, I was feeling impending doom at the thought of being alone and collapsing in the street. I was feeling impending doom at the thought of trying anything new, however small, like for example taking a public transportation I never took before. I was feeling impending doom, I was sweating and shaking whenever I had to use the phone and call someone. Any conversation, any look that someone gave me stir up some deeply jarring shame.
This wasn't just anxiety. This was way more than that. I could not live an authentic life, I could not even come close to knowing what that meant. It's a contradiction to live in fear and authentically at the same time. You cannot do both simultaneously.
Fear dilutes and impairs one's awareness of one's truth and authenticity. It makes sense because the main role fear has is to guarantee survival. And survival is diametrically opposed to intentional, authentic and purposeful living.
So while my waking life was basically pendulating between either crippling terror and sparse episodes of less terror, when I was lucky, there was absolutely no room for my true self expression meanwhile. How could there be?
I had no room to breathe. Living in my skin was a nightmare. Seemingly simple tasks were so overwhelming and daunting, that I frequently locked myself in my room and hid under blankets. I wanted to vanish, I wanted to become invisible. I wanted people to just leave me the fuck alone.
Everyone always seemed to want something from me, specifically things that would ask of me to betray myself in order to do them. Looking back to my childhood, it makes sense for my adaptive mechanisms to have developed into what they did in my adult life: any expression of what was true to me personally that opposed what my parents wanted from me to express was severely punished with silent treatment, physical abuse and deprivation of closeness.
This was prior to understanding how life actually works. Prior to what I now call spiritual awakening, when all chaos ensued and I was forced to face all of these agonizing fears that I was denying and suppressing (because I felt too much shame to admit to being paralyzed by fear).
This was no life to be lived, as you can probably guess. Being terrified of every little thing at every little step of the way was not worth living and I entertained the idea of ending my life multiple times, especially when conventional mental health care failed me. I felt beyond repair, beyond broken and beyond help. But what was especially excruciating was that I felt alone in this. People looked at me with dead eyes and an unimpressed face anytime I attempted to share my personal hell that was lurking subcutaneously. So when I discovered shadow work, literally saved my life down the line and I knew I stumbled upon a pot of gold.
Soon meditating, sitting with my shadows and repressed emotions and allowing them to express themselves didn't seem to be enough anymore. The fear was still there in moments when it didn't feel like it should be there, simple things were still daunting, now I just had more awareness of the fear and on top of that, I was doing everything I could to avoid doing the things that stirred that usual terror. I sat in meditation all the time, which turned into an escapism tool at that point unbeknownst to me. I started feeling like there was more to this practice, to this healing method. I felt there was a missing piece. It made sense why I felt like something was missing - when shadow integration that brought along the understanding that your shadows need to be transmuted and exalted, not just simply being with them and releasing the emotions involved - this deeper and broader perspective on healing and life itself made me realize that changes in your outer reality must be a follow up to the inner work.
Unless you make actual real changes to how you practically live your day to day life in accordance to and as result of your healing work, then healing is simply reduced to nothing more than just theory.
This is where courage steps in. Because after you discover what is true and in your highest good, all you need now is the courage to act on that in the external.
So in my case, the difference now was that instead of running off to meditate to feel my fear and soothe it, shadow integration provided me with the ability to have a deep conversation with the part in me that was terrified of everything, offering it actual resolution and solutions for its fears. Therefore, how that looked like for me on the outside was that slowly I began encroaching doing the things that brought harrowing fear to me to the best of my nervous system's capacity. I did not override anything my body couldn't handle. I did not come in with my logical mind trying to do the logical and 'right' thing to move faster. I respected my own inner rhythm, my self pace.
Anytime I did anything that I knew would trigger that fear response, I planned for how I would respond and I took care of my fearful self with unconditional love and presence. Nothing about me and within me had to change for me to decide and consciously choose to take the actions I was afraid to take. I was still afraid AND I chose to buy the bus ticket. I was still afraid AND I stepped outside of my house. I was still afraid when I picked up the phone and called people. I did not wait for things to be better for me to be and choose better.
After every activity that in the past would have sent me into downwards spirals of shame, I now acknowledged myself for the courage to choose differently and for loving myself enough to not allow fear to choose for me, while at the same time loving the fearful self.
I acknowledged myself for having survived the impeding doom I believed would be unleashed onto me for taking that action I was so terrified of taking.
Soon enough, after all these compounded necessary steps were taken, the Universe put me in an very interesting position. I would not have been put in this position if the Universe, God, my subconscious and my higher self would not have believed I was ready to take on this powerful challenge, which was the challenge of having to face the man that abused me and physically beat me several years ago. I was recently put in a situation were I was faced with 2 choices: either give into his demands and conniving methods once again (something that my people pleasing self would have done to placate him) or stand up to him, own my truth and not give in to his threats. I was shaking to the core when this happened. It was probably one of the hardest things I had to do. But I knew my truth. I stood in my integrity. I did not bend. I did not move. His character assassination tentative was pretty impressive, but not enough to break me. After I realized what I just stood up against, I felt so proud of myself, that I bawled my eyes out for half an hour. From the scared and frail woman whose porous identity allowed for anyone and anything to decide her worth to the empowered, courageous, worthy and unapologetic woman that knows herself deeply, the path was winding, stretching, demanding.
Not for one second did I expect myself to have it easy making a bold move. Not for a second did I conditioned my self love and compassion on the degree of lack of fear that I felt. Don't wait to stop feeling fear first. It's not going to happen. Fear only dissipates in the light of courage. You need courage first before fear clears away.
Courage is about knowing you are stretching beyond your most deeply rooted emotion.
Courage happens when you choose to do what is true and right over what is immediately gratifying and comforting. Courage is about choosing from and acting from the place of holding space for what you are experiencing AND what you want to experience at the same time.
If you let the adaptation to your trauma choose for you, you will never be free. You will never live outside the deterministic pattern that was embedded into your mind and into your body by your earliest antagonistic environment.
One may say we are the sum of our environment. But we can choose the environment to unfold our truest self within.
There is no recipe for living authentically. There is no one size fits all. There are however certain pillars or guidelines that can lead you to a wholehearted and untamed life. Courage is one of these pillars.
Here are 4 tips on how to implement more courage into your life:
•Encroaching new actions by honoring your capacity for them. When you decide to be bolder, don't bulldoze your fearful parts. First converse with them and see what they need, why and what they are afraid of. There is always some kind of unwanted social consequence we are terrified of. See how you can mitigate and plan for them if they do happen and you are potentially ostracized for doing that thing. These parts need to feel safe and need to be seen, acknowledged and held as they are. Choose one small action that feels doable for you at this point in your journey. Don't expect yourself to not be afraid. Your nervous system believes you are at risk and will send you into fight, flight and freeze response. Witness the physical sensations that come up in the foreground. Allow them to be without judging them. Reassure yourself that you will be by your side and you will not abandon yourself while and after you take that action. After you take it, congratulate yourself. Even hold yourself. Be proud. This is huge for your growth.
•Take extremely small steps. Small is big and less is more when it comes to courage. Fall in love with your fearful parts and only do what feels right to the entirety of you. Love does not rush.
•There is no failure or moving backwards. Even when or if you cannot take the action you want to take, it's totally ok. Acknowledge yourself for even having enough self awareness to understand what is going on with you. Most people don't even know they are afraid, let alone know what they're supposed to do. Choosing not to do something scary at the last minute is still bravery because you listened to your body that told you it is not ready for this move. So at the end of the day, you ARE brave. The key here is building back trust with yourself and reattuning to understanding what is in your highest good at the moment. Listen to what comes up for you when you decide to practice taking action that is in alignment with your truth.
•Surround yourself with encouraging supportive people. For many if us unfortunately this is not a reality. For many of us the opposite is true- we are surrounded by people who don't make the effort to understand us and take us for what we are. And so we are in desperate need to find like minded people who support us and want what's best for us. I'm opening a Facebook group for women who don't have people they can be vulnerable and honest with on their healing journey. You can ask questions and be fully raw, something we all need to do in a safe space. The Facebook group is called Women's True Self Liberation Community and you can join here if you're a woman.
Living in your truth, meaning in integrity is easier said than done. At the cognitive level, we know what is true for us (some of us have disowned even the awareness of that, but that's for another time). When trauma separates us from feeling able to actually speak and act in accordance to what we know is true for us, it takes time, patience, self compassion and a lot of practice. You didn't learn how to walk in a day as a toddler. You first had to crawl. Then when you got up, you fell on your bum more times than you imagine. Then you took the first step and the second step after that became challenging. Before you knew it, you were walking. We take for granted what once was hard as we increasingly became unconsciously competent at it. Its the same for practicing re-learning how to live in our truth. It takes the courage of the first step that will change everything from there on.
Courage is not a romantic concept reserved to the heroes or knights and other such characters. Eliciting courage is available to the rest of us too and I can attest, as someone who lived tight in a bud all her life, that the courage to choose differently is the missing ingredient in the healing journey. Its a matter of choosing to tap into it and put it into practice that separates the ones who embody their true and best self from the ones who are ok living a mediocre and deadened existence.
Wow, Thank you Thank you Thank you - love it 🙏🏻