Fear vs Love
I am not good at playing head games. Honestly, sometimes I wish I were. I wish I had the capacity to not always speak my truth and be more coy or mysterious. As a single person, friends are always saying “don’t call or text him, let him come to you” or “don’t respond right away, he needs to think you’re busy” and all of these mind games. I have never been this person. If I like you, you know it. If I don’t, you know it. If I want to call, I call. If I want to dance, I dance. This isn’t a soapbox I’m standing on, I’m just setting the stage for the struggles I am feeling at the moment. I tend to live by my emotions and, trust me, it is often leads to a lot of negative aspects of my life. I am learning to accept their fluidity and impermance and not react, but observe. This will most likely be a life long lesson.
Fear and love are two emotions that are the foundation of all our experiences. If you break down all decisions, all thoughts, all emotions, all actions- they can fit into one of the two categories. They are either fear-based or love-based. There are entire theories on this, but I happen to believe that you are either choosing love or you are choosing fear. So what are you choosing?
Currently, a lot of us are living a fear-based life. And I get it. We are all scared of this new world. It is scary to think that anything or anyone we touch can infect us and our loved ones. It is scary to think that we could be carrying a virus around and accidentally spreading it to our community. Realizing that this life is short and you could die sooner than you thought is scary. It is scary to live in the unknown. Everything about this new life is fucking scary!
Now I don’t need to go into a whole diatribe about why fear-based living is not good for you. It’s just not. Mentally, it keeps you small. It feeds into a scarcity mindset. It feeds the ego. It puts up walls. It causes stress and anxiety. It’s entire evolutionary goal is to keep you safe and make you feel protected. And that is all well and good, but living in constant defense mode is actually harmful to your physical well-being. It is not only energetically draining, but it causes your body and muscles to constrict. It releases cortisol aka the stress hormone into your body. When you’re in fight or flight mode, cortisol and other hormones being released has a negative affect on your immune system. Your body is ramping up to respond to that COVID lion that is trying to kill you and it is neglecting to perform its natural functions. Living in fear is not keeping you mentally and physically healthy, so let’s work on moving into love-based living.
Why do we need to choose love in everything? Because choosing to live with love is the kinder, more compassionate, more empathetic, more reasonable, more heart-opening, more peaceful, more happy-making, and not to be self-righteous, but much better way to live. Love allows for growth and fear keeps you in a box. Love fosters and nurtures and hate creates anxiety, stress and guilt. There are one million and one reasons that I could give you on why you should choose to live in love and choose to not live in fear. But the question right now is, how do you move out of this fear-based life and into a more loving space? The answer is that it is different for all of us. For me, I am trying to be really cognizant of where my mind goes and what language I am choosing. Am I feeding my inner critic or am I being kind to the parts of me that need more love? I am reality checking myself and my thoughts. When fear starts to creep in, I stop it and ask myself what is true and reality and what is not? I stopped watching and reading all news and I am avoiding social media, except for what is serving me. I am journaling and meditating each day. I am exercising and moving my body every day. I am waking up and speaking my gratitudes out loud each morning. I am texting friends and people I care about saying nothing except, “I love you and miss you and I am thinking about you”. I am blasting music and dancing solo. I am facetiming long distant friends and catching up. I am sitting outside in the sunshine and counting my lucky stars that I still get to work and have a roof over my head. I am doing my best to keep myself physically and mentally healthy. I am purely showing up for myself in the best way I can with the cards I have been dealt.
I am choosing love. What are you choosing today?
Be love, share love,
Jamiesonxo