Celebrating Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations

I hope you’re enjoying these tips and teachings as much as I enjoy sharing them!

To start with today, I’d like you to consider how often you feel stuck in your everyday life . . .

Times when you know you need to take action but you’re afraid to make a wrong decision. Times when you want to head in a certain direction, pursue a new path, or jump into a new possibility, but you’re just not sure it’s the right thing.

Something holds you back. You imagine the worst outcome, you worry about how it’ll turn out, and it prevents you from moving forward and taking the risk. Even when it’s a risk that can yield wonderful possibilities!

This hesitation you’re feeling is fear. We all experience it. It’s our mind’s way of keeping us safe and our heart’s way of avoiding emotional pain.

The problem with fear is that it can often prevent you from branching out and spreading your wings, discovering your true purpose, and living a “bigger” life.

It can keep you stuck in a “small” life, coloring always inside the lines, never experiencing the depth and breadth of the world around you.

In one of the sessions of the Conversations with God 7-week Course, Neale shares a valuable tool for helping you overcome and dissolve that fear, so that you can experience life more fully each and every day.

When you’re able to dissolve your fear, you’ll feel alive and capable, and it will bring you closer to God because it will allow you to express your creativity and therefore, more of who you really are.

That’s what the Conversations with God course is about—the process by which you’ll come to experience and express the truth of who you really are, which is an aspect of the Divine.

With each tool, each exercise, each teaching, you are brought ever closer to your true essence, and ever closer to having your own conversation with God.

Okay.

Now for the exercise.

I’d like you to take a few minutes here to ponder something you’ve wanted to do or experience in your life but have been afraid to and have held back.

As soon as you have something in mind, I want you to see what arises in you when you imagine yourself doing this thing you’ve been afraid to do.

(For the purposes of example here, I’m going to use an action of resigning from a job you aren’t happy with in order to start your own business, but when you do the exercise, please insert whatever action you’ve chosen.)

As you feel your way into the action step by step, you’ll probably feel your fear rising, but just keep imagining yourself completing the action in every detail, asking yourself, “What would happen if (that) occurred?” at every turn, until you at last get down to the core of what you’re really afraid of.

The goal of this exercise is to get to that core of what is causing your fear. Because chances are, what you think you’re afraid of isn’t what you’re really afraid of.

Here’s how this might play out for the example action I just gave:

Q: What would happen if I quit my job and started my own enterprise?
A: I’d stop receiving a steady income and go into debt.
Q: And then?
A: I might not be able to afford to pay my bills.
Q: And then?
A: I might have to ask for financial help from family and friends.
Q: And then?
A: I’d feel like a failure.
Q: And then?
A: I would feel depressed for a while, ashamed of myself.
Q: And then?
A: I’d get over it eventually.
Q: And then?
A: I’d look for other opportunities. Maybe my new venture would eventually bring in some income.
Q: And then?
A: I’d have to get more creative and push past my comfort zone to make it more successful.
Q: And then?
A: My life would obviously change.
Q: And then?
A: Then . . . nothing, I suppose. I actually want my life to change!

Once you’ve asked yourself those kinds of questions until you run out of “what would happen if?” questions, and can no longer think of any more, you’ll have reached your core fear.

Now, think about that core fear for a minute.

Are you really afraid of it?

Most people aren’t actually afraid of their core fear—even it’s a fear of death, because at the moment of death all physical pain ends and you are reunited with the Divine.

Therefore, most people, even when they consider their core fear of death, aren’t actually afraid of death itself; they’re afraid of the process they might have to go through to get there. The pain, the suffering, the possible regrets, the effect on the people they leave behind . . .

In the example about quitting a job, you might be afraid of the feelings that would come up if your decision ended up making you feel like a failure, and then forced you to push past your comfort zone.

When you examine it in this way, you might well decide that you’re not actually afraid of what’s on the other side. You’re not afraid of the core of what can happen . . . you’re afraid of everything in between.

But—and here is where the “aha!” moment comes in—as soon as you realize that you can handle the process, you’ll succeed in dissolving your fear, regardless of what it is.

And you may well decide that the process you might have to go through is actually well worth the risks, because there is the reward of a more vibrant life at the end of the journey.

Now that you’ve completed this exercise, please go to our Facebook page and share your own experiences and “aha”s with the community, as well as reading and responding to what others have shared!

And then I invite you to try this exercise out on all of your fears.

What are you really afraid of?

Can you handle the process it may take to get there?

What will happen if you can dissolve your fears?

How will your life change?

But, more importantly, what will your life be like if you never face your fear?

Something to ponder!

Warmly,

Melissa Kuz
Program Director
Conversations with God