How to Conquer your Fear?

Fear is a very interesting subject to talk about. I see clients with all kinds of fears. Sometimes we have the fear of death. Sometimes we have the fear of uncertainty, of not knowing what to expect or prepare for. There are so many different forms that fear takes. So let’s demystify fear a little bit.

If we could categorize fears, then there are really two types of fears to consider. We have the kind of fear that has a source or trigger point at which the fear started. For example, if I had a bad experience with a dog – maybe as a child, a dog bit me - I would probably grow up being afraid of dogs. So that kind of fear can be traced back to a particular incident that connects to it, and we can understand that the fear developed as a result of some kind of trauma or as a negative impact of that experience.

The other type of fear is what we call a phobia. Usually that kind of a fear has no known source, at least not in this lifetime. The client probably cannot recall any experience where they might have interacted with that fearful situation or circumstance. So the individual is petrified of a situation that they have never actually encountered before. This kind of fear is usually rooted in a past life or it can be something that we’re carrying down from our ancestors. For example, if you have a fear of water because you feel like you will drown and die, and you have never actually been in a body of water and/or even drowned before, then this could fall under the category of a phobia. There is no trigger incident.

So as you can see, there’s really a lot to understand about the fears that we can develop; it may be coming from a past life, from our ancestors or from an incident in our childhood. It could even be something we fear because everybody else fears it like cancer. We call that a group consciousness fear which also covers the fear that we pick up from movies and books like horror stories of being possessed by spirits.

Now, let me share a little bit about my experience with conquering my own fears.

A few years ago, during a routine ultrasound at my OB-GYN appointment, my doctor found a polyp. A polyp is basically a fleshy growth of tissue in the body—it’s harmless and doesn’t really do anything but it should be watched over time because it could develop into something a little bit more serious.

My doctor informed me that she thinks there’s a polyp and we’d have to do further testing to confirm. And should there be one, I would have the option of going through surgery to remove it if I wanted to or because it’s considered pretty harmless, we could just let it be.

I decided to go in for further testing to confirm the diagnosis. The test that I took confirmed that while there was a polyp, it wasn’t very big. It also wasn’t really disturbing any function in the body but it definitely was there.

Now as a healer, I know that something like that can be healed very quickly. Very easily. Through the research I did, I found out that polyps could be related to high estrogen levels in the body, and it is pretty well-accepted that with proper diet and nutrition, polyps can simply disappear. All I would have to do would be to avoid estrogen-rich foods.

I felt confident that I could take control of the situation through healing and through proper diet; I could heal that polyp without any doubt, completely getting rid of it. But despite my confidence, I started to question my motivations. Did I actually wanted to heal it through my diet and belief work because I was confident that I could take care of it, especially since I am a healer? Or was that just an excuse to get away from something that I really fear which is surgery? I had never really had any major surgery in my life before and to be honest, the thought of surgery had always made me queasy. Of course, hospitals are not my favorite place to be either.

Now that I had introduced this thought in my mind, I went on to examine my reasons to get down to the truth of it. Was I afraid of surgery and that’s why I wanted to heal it? Was healing it the easy way out allowing me to avoid my fear of surgery? Was that really what was going on?

Through a bit of introspection where I asked myself a couple of tough questions, I came to the conclusion that my reasons for wanting to heal the polyp and go through dietary modifications was really to avoid the surgery. And since I had identified and admitted this fear to myself, and I really didn’t need to prove that I could heal it, I decided that I was going to face my fear head on. Instead of healing the polyp, I would heal my fear instead and to make sure I had really conquered this fear, I would go through the surgery to remove my polyp. Because that was the courageous thing to do. I was ready to face up to my fear and face off to it too.

Now, a surgery for removing a polyp is an outpatient procedure – you go in for a couple of hours and you’re done. You get it done in the morning and then you can go home by afternoon. There really isn’t a recovery time. It seemed like the easiest kind of surgery I could have, so if there was a surgery that I wanted to face, this would be the one to do. This made it an easy decision to go in for this procedure. I also trusted my doctor, and I knew that it would be a very quick and simple procedure as she said

So I went in. It was very interesting because the procedure happened in the labor floor—in the actual delivery room with my OBGYN. Turns out it is the exact same room that they do a C-section in as well as a D&C, if you know what that is. The operating theatre is located in the maternity section of the hospital. And so it’s the same rooms, spaces and the same operating theater that a pregnant women would go into. It’s also the same pre-surgery protocol of a C-section, and I had to go through all of it. The actual procedure was about 30-minutes long with a minimal time spent in the recovery room for about an hour or an hour-and-a-half. And I came out feeling great. Like I had not even been through anything at all.

When I reflected back on the incident, first of all, I was very proud of myself because I faced my fear of hospitals, doctors and surgery. I don’t even like blood and tend to avoid such situations at all costs. Secondly, I actually had like a dry run of giving birth to a child. It turns out as I came to understand, that I had a lot of fears related to child-birth, to having to go through a C-section. Whenever I considered having a child, I would inwardly groan thinking of giving birth, as do many people.

After the polyp surgery, I got pregnant for the first time just a month later, and all my fears of going through labor, delivery and all those related fears were pretty much eliminated because through the polyp surgery, I had already gone through the sequence of events that I would have to go through if I were to give birth. There was no uncertainty anymore. My procedure was similar to a C-section which to me was worst-case scenario, so I didn’t fear giving birth anymore. In essence, I had hit two birds with one stone just by conquering my fear of surgery because it eliminated my fear of child-birth as well. I had never been ready to get pregnant until a few months prior to the discovery of my polyp, though my husband couldn’t wait to have a child for the longest time.

"Facing your fears can get you the most amazing consequences. Not only will you be proud of yourself, you will actually develop the confidence of being able to face any challenge that you deal with in your life."

Facing my fear of surgery, of going to the hospital and having to go through that experience helped me with giving birth to my child in my future. And what was amazing is that I ended up having the easiest pregnancy, labor and delivery because I had no fears around it anymore.

So what I want to impart to you is that facing your fears can get you the most amazing consequences. Not only will you be proud of yourself, you will actually develop the confidence of being able to face any challenge that you deal with in your life. We call that your adversity quotient, or your ability to deal with adversity, which increases as you go through and successfully handle conflict and adversity in your life.

And the universe also rewards you in many ways. Sometimes you can just heal things instead of having to fear it, and other times, facing your fear is the win. So go out there, face one of your fears. If you are aware of something that you fear, go into it. Go through it. Experience it. It’s okay and you’ll come out stronger.

That doesn’t mean that you should go running into any situation which might not be completely safe just because you fear it. Always make sure that it is safe. You need to have the right support system so that you go into what you fear with the proper mindset. You have to go in knowing that you can easily conquer it. You must believe that you will get something out of it, and you will be very proud of yourself for what you went through. And the upside is that you will recognize that you are stronger than you thought, and that the Universe always has your back.