Hi, and welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about working with fear. Fear is something we've all experienced. It's a very normal and primal part of being human. And it's something that can keep us safe and protected from harm by helping us focus on things that could potentially go wrong so that we prepare and take action.

And it's also something that can get in the way of living our lives as fully as we want to. Despite the many ways, fear can be frustrating, I've really come to appreciate this emotion of fear and the loving intention behind it. It's trying to protect us. It's trying to serve us in some way. Even though it may be misguided at times, it, it wants you to be happy, which in its mind is to help you survive.

So I think simply starting by appreciating fear helps us have less of an oppositional relationship to it so that it there's an opportunity, at least for it to become more of an ally rather than an enemy. The thing about fear though, is that just because it's, there doesn't mean we can't do the thing that we're fearful of. I'm sure you've had many examples of that in your own life. So I'm going to share four simple steps that you can use when fear arises so that it doesn't have to overwhelm you and prevent you from living a full life. The first step is just to feel it.

This may feel simple, but a lot of times with difficult emotions, we try to suppress them or pretend they're not there. But this actually causes them to subconsciously influence us in a negative way. And so when we bring the emotion into our awareness, when we bring fear into our awareness, acknowledging its presence, letting ourselves feel it, this actually takes away a lot of its power because you can now work with it rather than be subconsciously manipulated by it. So the first step is just simply to feel it. The next step is to name it.

So once you feel it, just say, Oh, Hey fear, good to see you again. There's a lot of research that shows naming an emotion, reduces its control over us and it's emotional charge. So, we feel then we name it. And by doing that, it's no longer this mysterious thing in the background. We know it for what it is.

We've brought it into our awareness. The third step is to reground and you can think of this as like being a lightning rod. The fear is coming through you activating your body, but then rooting you down into the ground, moving through you. This helps you not deny the fear by letting it move through you, and then also ground yourself simultaneously through it. So we feel it, we name it.

We ground ourselves into it, ground ourselves through it. And the fourth step is just to go. This is to take the step in the direction toward whatever it is you want to do in that moment. This might feel simple again, but it's an important reminder that you can still move forward. Fear is just an emotion.

It's just an energy in your body, and it's important to retrain yourself to not move away from the fear, but to move into it and then through it. Condition action in response to fear, let it be your trigger to move forward. And the more you do this, the easier it will be. So again, the first step is just to feel it. Second step is to name it.

Third step is to ground yourself into it. And then the fourth, the fourth step is to go. Try this out the next time you're experiencing some fear, then I think you'll find it helps you take action and not have to be controlled by the fear itself. Thanks so much for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.