Turning fear into flow

A while back, I asked Gay Hendricks, what is the number one piece of advice he would give me? His answer: Find those pockets of fear, and turn them into flow by breathing into them. That phrase took on a new meaning for me last night.

I was lying in bed, having trouble sleeping. A couple of things transpired. An old painful sadness came up, which caused a bump in my relationship with my wife. Plus I had to get up at 4.30 to catch an early morning flight to Chicago.

So I laid there, allowing myself to feel that sadness like I normally would. But this time, I felt inspired to ask myself the question "what if this is really fear? can I breathe into it and turn it into flow?"

I tried it, and boy was it powerful. It felt like there was a whole layer of fear-based structure around that feeling. Layers upon layers, in fact. I breathed into it, allowing it to dissolve into flow, and it gave me such a rush of energy in my whole body. I kept breathing into it, and the rush kept going.

It feels like yes, there's sadness, there's pain. But the structure that really holds that old emotion in place is the fear. The fear that it's going to stay. The fear that what it's claiming is true. The fear that I won't be okay, ever. The fear that I'm on the completely wrong track. The fear that I'm fundamentally broken in some way that I'm not even entirely aware of. Once that fear is dissolved, the emotion can move.

I'm not sure how long this went on for. It wasn't like I then fell right asleep - it was quite a rush.

Eventually, I did fall asleep, though. Then at 3.30, my puppy started barking at some sound, and I couldn't sleep after that. So I got about an hour of sleep.

But screw all that. I learned a lesson for life. This is such a cool new tool, I'm going to keep playing with it.