Summary
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler explore fear as one of the most direct paths to freedom and authenticity. They distinguish between fear as a bodily experience (shaking, screaming, jitteriness), fear in the head (binary thinking, false ends, feeling like you must make a decision), and related but distinct experiences like anxiety and power struggles. Joe explains that when we resist fear, it doesn’t disappear — it leaks out sideways, creating the very outcomes we’re trying to avoid.
The episode makes a compelling case that fear reveals where our identity feels threatened, and that by embracing fear rather than resisting it, we access flow states and greater freedom. Joe shares that every time he embraces one level of fear, a deeper, more subtle level reveals itself — suggesting fear is an ongoing path rather than something to overcome. They discuss how the things we fear are often the things we invite into our lives through avoidance.
The conversation also covers helplessness as perhaps the deepest form of fear, the somatic practices for processing fear (shaking, sound, community support), and the critical distinction between truly feeling fear versus getting stuck in a story about it. If you’re feeling the fear authentically, your stories will dissolve and change; if you’re indulging or defining yourself by the story, nothing moves.
Key Concepts
- Fear reveals where identity is threatened
- Resisting fear leaks it sideways
- Fear in the head creates binary thinking and false ends
- Embracing fear produces flow state
- Sustained fear requires delayed processing
- Sacrificing authenticity now for future safety is a trap
- The fear path has no end — deeper levels always reveal themselves
Key Quotes
“If you want to find out who you are, offer yourself up to annihilation, and the part of you that can’t be annihilated is who you actually are.”
“The things that we fear are the things that we invite into our world.”
“You’re sacrificing being yourself now for the fear of not being able to be yourself in the future.”
“Courage is feeling the fear and then doing what’s authentic.”
“When we think we have to make a decision, it means that we’re scared of a consequence.”
“If you’re feeling the fear to get rid of it, then it’s not gonna work.”
Transcript
most of the things that we don’t understand we fear approaching your fear allows us to go places and understand things that we wouldn’t otherwise welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson all right Joe how are you doing today I’m good I am I just got off of a houseboat for Thanksgiving with my family for a week and uh we go to a place where there’s there’s nobody at all there’s no cell reception no anything and it was just so nice to be reconnected as a family and it was really interesting to watch my girls you know at the beginning of that holiday they were like I don’t you know they have fear they were like I don’t want to get away from being out of connection as far as Cellular Connection or Wi-Fi it was there’s definitely some resistance and then by the end of it they were ready to have another week where they weren’t connected to anything and we could just be together as a family unfortunately we couldn’t do it but it was really nice to see that transition for them tell me about the fear that they were the fear of losing connection to Wi-Fi it seems like such a little thing um but I don’t think it is you know when kids are growing up they’re like learning this whole social thing and to be out of connection of their friends the Wi-Fi it’s like anything can happen right somebody could start saying bad things about them online they could there could be these dramas that they don’t know about they’re not informed and then all these consequences can happen and I think my guess is that’s a real driving fear with for my girls anyways about not being in connection Cellular Connection not the connection of the family but that Cellular Connection was really important to them because it’s like it keeps them up to date on the social you know the Mercurial social nature of teenage girls I had some some sort of experience with fear myself this past weekend I was in Moab Utah in the canyons and I was trying highlighting for my first time in a couple of years since the first time I tried it but anyway High lining is like where you go between two massive Cliffs kind of thing with like a like a slack line is that what that is yeah I wrote yeah it’s like a one-inch slackline uh anchored between two Cliffs about like 500 feet over the the ground and you you clip into it with a harness and then slide out and then stand up and walk the line and I’ve been doing a lot of slacklining over the past couple of years particularly over the pandemic when I’ve just been in one place and this is my first time trying to Highline again and there’s definitely a strong fear that comes up when you’re hanging out on a line and you’re putting your feet on it and trying to stand and I definitely immediately fell and took a little whipper and uh the line caught me and it was perfectly safe but definitely wait wait wait wait what’s a whipper a whipper is when uh when you come off the line in a rather uncontrolled and extravagant way and take a nice big swing around the line oh wow yeah it feels like you’re getting whipped around yeah I’m just imagining it okay yeah yeah the experience of getting kind of whipped around and disoriented and in that moment you’re like how good is this uh you know how good are these anchors how good is my equipment did I double back my harness right right right right right yeah right so that’s another thing of fear right so we that’s interesting which is cool because it because that’s what we’re meant to talk about today which is like fear and it’s cool to think about like those two different kinds of fear yeah you’ve got the subtle fears that are guiding so many small decisions in our life and making us feel resistance to go out into nature and have a connective time with family because we’re away from Wi-Fi and then we have the more extreme and present fears of physical Annihilation even if it’s not really present even if you’re actually protected but the visceral feeling of it and I think that’s a really good analogy or just some something to bring into the ways that we feel fear all the time in our in our business and in our life and the way that we show up in the world yeah yeah it’s fascinating when you think about it that way I think what it brings is that question of like what is fear essentially and I think that’s an incredibly difficult question to answer you know the typical answer to that question is you know if you feel in threat if you feel your person what you love care about is in threat some version of that is like the typical idea of fear but if you think of fear that way then you know you could Define anger that way you could Define sadness that way as far as the body goes if you define it as the body it’s a very different experience right so the experience of anger and the experience of fear are very different like like after fear you’re gonna shake during fear you’re gonna scream your facial expression is gonna have like big eyes and an open mouth anger is gonna have a closed mouth and tight eyes and so if you define it you know intellectually it kind of makes it sound like fear is at the bottom of all the anger and all the sadness and I think there’s an interesting truth to that perspective but it’s not a body truth of anger I’m a fear excuse me there’s a definite ex felt experience of fear in the body that is unique to all the other you know big emotions that we feel yeah it sounds like any of the fight flight freeze or feed or any other F’s that people have come up with to describe various responses that are linked to fear and the perspective of like that there’s only love or fear which yeah is useful and not necessarily entirely true it sounds like fear can have a lot of different flavors and be identified as other emotions and it can also be its own distinct thing you know just they can be the thing that’s underneath anger and it can also be the thing that anger is underneath that’s right yes that’s exactly it and so I don’t know the feed one so I’ve heard of fight flight or freeze I use that a lot what’s the feed what does that represent uh feed is just you know there’s a uh let’s say if I’m procrastinating and I just go to the fridge frequently and oh I might as well just put some more calories in my body because maybe that’ll help with whatever this like undetermined risk is that’s another thing that I think that it gets confused a lot is like there’s fear and then there’s anxiety and they to me those are very separate things right so um and I don’t think we could talk about all of them in one podcast but I think there’s like fear as anxiety there’s fear as in power struggles and then there’s like the actual um fears and like an emotional experience that’s happening I think that we should do a different podcast on the like fear and how that creates power struggles and what I what some people call the drama triangle I would call the fear triangle and another discussion on anxiety and what that is and and how it’s related but not related to fear for me though fear the experience of fear when we’re um in the body is uh like a a shaking uh screaming a um like a jittery sensation that’s kind of how we know fear to be there and when we’re in fear in the head what we know is that we um start thinking about binary or sharp binary thinking it’s either going to buy the red car or the blue car but I don’t see that there’s like a black car or a green car he’s like I either marry her I don’t marry her like that really tells them that’s the mental you know that shows the mental that you’re in or you think don’t take the job exactly yeah yeah or that there’s like a false that often fear creates this false end in the system where it’s like oh my God I’m gonna lose my job but you’re not thinking and then what and then you lose your job and then you find a new job and then you are you know get a two-month vacation while you look for a job and then you you know go into credit card debt and then you repay your credit card debt like there’s this false end nature to having fear in the system um it also it’s all it also presents when you think you have to make a decision that’s another thing that like how fear shows up in the head so I think fear in the the body is that shaking screaming whereas fear in the head is binary thinking false end and thinking that you have to make a decision yeah making maybe a list of pros and cons to try to intellectually analyze it to to the Max and come up with a confirmed answer right if that’s true if you’re doing that it means there’s unfair fear it means that like like we all make a thousand decisions a day right easily a thousand decisions a day and and we don’t even think that we’re making them we don’t even consider them they just happen all the time so it when we think we have to make a decision it means that we’re scared of a consequence we’re scared that we’re going to do something wrong and so the first thing to do in those moments is to address the fear not try to figure it out because the brain doesn’t figure out fear it can’t it’s it doesn’t do it very well at all but the next most obvious thing can be found so easily you know it’s I can’t make the total decision but I can definitely know what the next most obvious thing is to do if all I do is just feel the fear and let it move through me so what makes fear take hold and not just move through so cleanly as you just described like all emotions that there’s like um you know different societies have different ways of handling it like there’s definitely societies that I’ve been in or subcultures of our society where like showing fear is not okay if I show Fear then I’m gonna get harassed by the cops or if I show Fear then I’m gonna be on the bottom of the totem pole like to show fear is not an acceptable experience if I show Fear dad will attack me or Mom will attack me so like all of the emotions actually letting that fear move through your system is going to is going to create you know the potential of harm for you and or some history of harm for you um and again like all emotions um the mind then forgets that oh we can actually Express the fear just not with anybody around or when it’s safe when we know we won’t be attacked for it so um so that’s one of the reasons that fear doesn’t move like incredibly uh quick through us when it doesn’t that’s one of the reasons the other is just sustained like when you have a situation where you’re scared for a sustained period of time the body just can’t handle it you you have to you can deal with a certain amount of it and act through that and feel that for a certain amount of time but if you’re doing something like I remember when um my girls were young um both of them had life-threatening diseases at different times and it was like 10 days of sustained fear in a hospital and it was like that took months for me to move through because I actually had to compartmentalize some of that fear to make decisions I had to operate it’s the same with like war that you know there’s if you’re in the sustained trauma for an extended period of time you have to go back and let your body move it after the fact so that’s another reason that it’s it’s important and because fear was meant like historically like for most mammals fear is meant for a very short period of time it’s like um run from the lion it’s not for like a sustained thing and also for most animals that the only thing that they’re really trying to protect is there and the physical welfare of you know their family so to speak the that maybe the tribe or the or the whatever the different words for different animals but the group of animals or the herd of animals that’s really the only time when that they’re feeling the fear whereas humans their sense of self is far beyond just my physical form it’s what I stand for my political nature my sexual orientation my like how good of a person I am my reputation how good I look blah blah blah blah and so now that we have extended ourselves into all of these I would say illusionary things then our fear can be more sustained over longer periods of time and so it takes more to just have it move all the time or you have to see through the idea of self you have to see through what you’re protecting and then there’s just a lot more less fear in the system generally yeah so it sounds like what you just said there’s that our fear we we can have a gradient of fear all the way from the visceral level of walking a high line and being afraid for our personal well-being all the way to something so abstract as if I’m away from Cellular Connection somebody might invite me to a party that I miss and then I won’t get the social connection that I want and I’ll have fomo and or there’s going to be a whole bunch of people who say shitty things about me and I won’t be there to defend myself and when I come home my social rank will have lowered and I’m going to be the person who’s bullied right which feels a little more real than like I’m gonna miss a party but yes all of that all of that is now part of fear so anything that we anything that we project our identity into now has to be protected and so what’s interesting here is that it all still links right back down to the body no matter how abstract the thing you’re afraid of it connects straight to the body and whether if you’re if you’re not aware of it and you’re not letting it move then you’ll find yourself in this binary thinking being afraid of a false end some consequence that it just seems like it’s the end of the world and that you have this big weighty decision to make and this these different streams of information that if you if you could only understand it fully you would know what to do to keep yourself safe and if not it’s all lost the consequence piece is really important too I love that thought process so from the way I see that is like when I’m coaching clients what I see a lot of is they want to be their authentic self but they’re scared of the consequences of it and then that’s like that’s when the fear really takes hold when it’s like when that when that ratio gets out of balance right and what I also see is when people consistently show up and be themselves despite the consequences then what happens is the part of the world that doesn’t like who they are Falls away maybe dramatically maybe maybe violently but it falls away and the part of the world that supports who they are actually and their authenticity shows up and it’s not magical thinking this isn’t like new age like I wish it and therefore it’s so it’s just literally the same way that if if there’s something that’s feeding on insects Creek is a good place to be to eat the insects because there’s more insects near water than there is in dry spaces so you’re going to get more insect eating animals near creeks and it’s just as simple as that it’s just like we go to the places and the and and the things are attracted to us depending on what we’re what we’re delivering if we’re a creek delivering insects then we’re gonna get insect eaters around us so to speak yeah or if we’re someone who’s who is patterned into experiencing a lot of interpersonal drama will tend to find where there is drama and try to fix it because we’re afraid of it and draw ourselves into it even more and create yeah exactly exactly trying to fix it creates it yeah exactly perfect example so when it’s so clear in your system that the consequence is so much less important than being yourself then there’s no fear that shows up when you start worried about you know that the consequence could stop you from being or being yourself then the fear really hits and and what the the ridiculous thing about it is then you’re like okay I’m so scared that if I do that I can’t be myself then I won’t be myself right now right like back to my daughters I’m so scared that if I tell my friend that the the way that she’s treating me really doesn’t work because then I might lose my Social Network and then I can’t be myself at school it’s like really so you’re sacrificing being yourself now for the fear of not being able to be yourself in the future which is almost always like I’m scared it’s the same thing like I’m scared of losing all my money I’m like okay so you’re gonna not be yourself now because you might lose all your money so that it and so that that way in the future I I can be myself because I have the money yeah I don’t think so it’s a funny bargain that we make often if everyone around us loves a certain identity of us and we’re afraid of losing that identity well if if we can accept losing that identity which will happen if we step into our authenticity rather than that image then we do that self does die that’s right and if we’re willing to go through the experience of finding what we are underneath it and finding our place and in our environment and in our world then then the fear Falls away because then you can look forward to it what is this journey I’m about to be on yeah that’s why I have this poem about this where I talk about which is like fear is like one of the most direct paths to Freedom and it’s because of exactly what you’re saying is that like it the fear tells you where you’re scared that your identity is gonna be taken away attacked your idea your idea of self whether that’s the physical self or the friends or the wealth or whatever and there’s this great quote that says if you want to find out who you are offer yourself up to Annihilation and the part of you that can’t be annihilated is is who you actually are and so fear is this incredible path it’s like this incredibly quick way to get to freedom because you’re just annihilating all the parts of yourself it’s it’s directly like oh I’m scared of that means I’m scared of that level of annihilation and then you can find what is truly true about you which is the part that can’t be annihilated yeah and on a visceral level that reminds me of the by Journey in base jumping and just how going into jumping off of a cliff and parachuting is something where it brings up all these fears of visceral Annihilation and those being in constriction around those fears just makes your performance far more rigid and clunky and far more likely to lead to your Annihilation than if you if you simmer in it and sit in it and let yourself feel all of that fear and let yourself feel the the subsequent fears of if if I die you know my partner will have a bad day and my family will have a bad day but if you if you let yourself continue to constrict in those fears then that’s going to be the thing that pops on your mind if if something goes a little bit off of the plan right also the flow state that I think so many people who do these kinds of sports look for let’s call that the freedom for a minute is directly linked to allowing the fear it’s directly leads to the the Embrace of the fear so if you’re not embracing it you’re constricted if you are embracing it if you’re like oh yeah there it is that’s the fear I’m going to fully allow this thing to be felt and move through me then you’re in Flow State and it’s the same thing in the fear any of the other fears so that’s how fear is such a direct path this is something that I experienced a lot and saw a lot that if you if you let your attachment to a certain identity cause you to suppress a certain range of fear then the the thing that that fear would keep you safe from becomes more likely to happen to you yes the things that we fear are the things that we invite into our world often the other thing that’s interesting is that like I remember hearing like some Monk at some point tell me I can’t remember who it was he was like I don’t really feel fear anymore and that idea is so foreign to me because and I I don’t know exactly what they meant by fear so I can see a way in which that may be true but but what’s what’s foreign to me is that like every time I embrace fear I find that there’s a new level of fear that exists that there’s a more subtle form of fear that exists there’s like a it’s almost like if fear is the direct path then to say that fear goes away would kind of say that the path goes away right and what I notice is that in my own system there’s just like a deeper Embrace of the the fragility or the um the limitations of life yeah I think that points to a common misconception around fear is that it’s something to be overcome yeah that courage is overcoming the fear and you know one definition of courage is feeling the fear and doing the thing anyway I think even then Matt there’s still a little bit of a little bit of like pushing through I think more like courage is feeling the fear and then doing what’s authentic yeah it might just be feeling that feeling the fear and the rest happens yeah yeah um yeah there’s like yeah fear is such a great signal and and it tells us so much about our situation like what part of life we’re not embracing what things that we’re not asking for that we need there’s so many aspects of fear that it and there’s so many levels of it and it’s beautiful and there’s a way of also defining fear which creates like the power struggles like fears power struggles or fears anxiety that are it’s kind of a unique situation because most of the time when those things are happening people don’t know they’re in fear right so there’s this level of fear that’s happening in the world that people don’t actually they can’t they can’t see it they can’t see that they’re in the fear when they’re acting in those ways like any time I the way I see it any time anybody’s in a power struggle they’re scared right yeah they’re scared that their identity is going to be destroyed how do we practice coming to a practice of feeling and welcoming our fear and letting it move through us in a way that allows us to accept all the consequences to our Identity or to our physical self or to those that we love in order to to engage with the world more fully and more authentically yeah well the first thing is to see that when you resist fear it doesn’t go anywhere it doesn’t stop it just kind of leaks out sideways it like just doesn’t come out of the front of the toothpaste tube it comes out of the side so that’s one thing is that like resistance doesn’t work you know that that which we resist persists is a kind of common thing so that’s one way to to you know keep on trying to resist it see what happens see how that works for you um see how big of a shield you have to put up between you and life to be able to resist fear I noticed that what you just said there was not don’t resist it because that’s another form of resistance but correct feel it let’s feel what it’s like to resist it see feel where it gets you and then let your let your system update and just determine experiment with new ways to relate to it yeah that’s right also loving fear finding out the wisdom of fear learning how to listen to it and then seeing how much wisdom and Brilliance it has and then allowing yourself to feel to feel it is a natural thing once you once you see how cool it is and how much it informs you and how much Freedom it oh my God I’m scared that means my decision making sucks right now so I can feel my fear and then my decision making can be great holy crap right like that what what Freedom oh my gosh I’m in fear right now that tells me that I I have some needs that aren’t being met great like wow why would you not want to have that signal that’d be like saying no you know like [expletive] this speedometer on my dashboard [expletive] that I don’t want that speedometer there like it becomes completely nonsensical when you see it as that and then finally when you embrace the fear deeply and you get that flow state or you get that freedom not just in the long term but in the short term well then you’re just like I can’t wait to find it I mean then you then you then you do things like and they put a one inch rope across 500 foot cliff and go and go walk in there and you’re like yeah great I can’t you know I can’t wait so if you have that felt experience of that of that full Embrace of the fear then you you feel the freedom of it and you’re like this is wonderful and just to be and there’s somebody somewhere right now who’s saying like wait if I if I embrace the fear that I’m inviting danger you know like I’m not saying go create fear I’m just saying and I’m not saying that like don’t listen to Fear I’m saying listen to it and if the more you feel it the better you can react to it the better the natural reaction will be to the fear yeah like that moment that moment when you’re with a colleague and you have a piece of difficult feedback and you feel that fear you feel that constriction looking for that looking for where In My Life am I feeling fear right now because those are the those are the doorways to get out of whatever pattern I’m in and into some beyond that I have no idea where it’s going to take me and if I feel like I want to expand in my life then wherever I feel some subtle or or deeper fear those are exactly where I need to go yeah that’s right yeah the places we don’t go are the places we’re scared or we don’t know exists most of the things that we don’t understand we fear wouldn’t otherwise yeah so how do you relate this to to helplessness which we’ve we’ve talked about helplessness before and it could even be sort of its own feeling but it also seems like it might just be describable as a as the the state of allowing fear to move through one thing I want to say before that is that like in the connection course we do the view thing which is vulnerability impartiality empathy and wonder um to some degree that also is like a really neat response to fear meaning that like it’s really hard I have an experiment up on the website I think where um we talk about how being in Wonder is impossible if you’re in fear right so in in a kind of deep sense of fear and so it’s really interesting to feel like in one way that you could you could say what’s what is fear and I would say it’s when you’re not in view it’s another way to describe fear and so how to approach it I would say approach fear in view oh what how does this really making me feel what am I really scared of that would be the vulnerability what what what is the impartiality is not trying to get out of it it’s like okay well how long does it want to be here what does it want to tell me empathy is like being with it not trying to avoid it and wonder is like oh what is this all about like so to me like you can approach the internal states that you resist the same way that you can just like difficult conversations in the world you can approach with you it’s the same way so that’s another one as far as the question that you had before on helplessness I would say helplessness is I would say maybe the deepest form of fear that’s what I would say like it is when you feel like there is absolutely nothing that can be done that you are without you know it’s the thing that when we’re doing trauma work with people they go into during rapes or during car accidents or um with a parent who just couldn’t wouldn’t love them no matter what they did like it is a feeling of helplessness and it is incredibly freeing emotion to feel it’s incredibly frame because just like all the emotions when we feel sad we actually come out with more joy if we feel helplessness we we come out feeling so much more um potent so much more viable so much more empowered right and so so feeling that helplessness is is like an amazing thing and it is it’s usually the deepest of Journeys right and it’s weird it’s like there’s this weird little Nuance that happens when people feel fear or helplessness is that they’re scared and therefore they conflate being scared to feel the feeling with the feeling itself like oh my God I’m I’m scared and I’m feeling the feeling so therefore I must be scared of feeling the feeling and so it’s like one of the more challenging um feelings for people to experience is my is what I’ve seen but it’s it’s one of the most useful experiences to really allow yourself to go into so a lot of what we’ve just talked about has been like ways to intellectually recognize if you’re feeling fear and then to kind of go into feeling it and recognize emotionally if you’re if you’re sensing the fear and letting it move through and I’m curious also if there’s a purely somatic or a visceral way to let fear process and a pointer to this is that you know some sometimes it like there are there are practices that they use with the veterans with PTSD where you just lay down on a bed and you just start letting your limbs shake a little bit and like that’s a way to burn off here what’s the visceral process of of feeling and burning off fear and what are some tools that can help somebody get into that or that they could further explore what’s really good is to have a place with a whole bunch of people who love you and can support you in the process so part of fear often is that I’m alone in it and so to see that you’re not alone and is incredibly useful yes shaking your body like just allowing your body to shake is an amazing thing or even putting your body into a position where it shakes is also can be very useful you can go into memories that created a lot of fear and relive the physical experience of it there’s certain breath work that opens up fear that can be done that’s another one too hard to explain right now there’s also there’s some benefit to this as well which is just literally allowing the fear in your body without reacting to it just like observing the fear I think there’s some as long as you don’t do that to create separation you do it to create intimacy with the fear is another incredibly useful tool so all of those can be really useful I like I will lay down and shake and and during helplessness I will make the sounds of helplessness which is screaming and or really tight feelings like that tight emotion you know or not being able to say anything sometimes is helplessness it’s like you feel stuck in it and so yeah all of that is really really useful yeah in case this sounds crazy to anybody listening yeah it does it’s a natural reaction when when you see an animal who goes into freeze because there’s a predator around before they get up and move again they will get up and shake and that literally releases and burns off some of the chemicals and the the energy that was stored in those muscles to keep them Frozen or whichever form of fight flight you might have been in it’s so obvious even in dogs like if you just look at dogs like they Shake all the time and we think like oh there’s this thing called fear and this is where now we have to shake and like we’re gonna shake two times a week and like and you watch a dog they shake like 20 times a day 30 times a day easily not for a long period of time but they shake and and dogs that are more anxious Shake more they they and they you know they put out their legs and then they like start with their head and then their whole body shakes it releases their muscles it’s amazing to watch all all animals do this and the fear does compile like that every day yeah it’ll just stack up until it moves and it’ll either show up in a deep subconscious way that makes you recreate the thing and then you feel it all at once when the thing you’re afraid of happens yeah or you can just let it through a little bit a day or in real time it’s close to real time as you can get to that’s right yeah and so something I want to touch on before we close uh for anybody who’s just listening to this and wants to experiment with feeling Their Fear what’s a good way to to notice the difference between feeling fear and letting it move through and then getting into a story about it that just deepens it because I’m imagining somebody who might be alone feel alone in it and then go off alone and start shaking and then reify the story that they are alone and that nobody loves them and find more truth in it than than letting the fear just process what advice do you have for that so that that would be a good episode on anxiety like I’d like to do an episode on the power I’d like to do an episode on the anxiety because what you’re describing is someone who’s not feeling the fear um so maybe they Shake but they’re not actually allowing it and so that story this is the part that we’ve talked about the one thing is you process your fear the other thing is your sense of self becomes um so expansive or so the veil is seen through that there’s nothing like you’re the part of you that can be annihilated is like we I know I can’t be annihilated the part of me that’s actually me and all the other parts they’re not me so what what is there to protect you know I asked this question to people all the time where they’re like defending themselves and I’m like what are you actually defending and nobody can really answer that question it’s this this idea of self and so so to me I think it’s really spending time there and the way you spend time there is to see what stories you’re telling yourself nobody loves me is a story that and that’s your definition your definition is I am the kind of person that nobody loves I am the kind of person who needs to be like I’m the kind of person who has money these are these stories of ourselves are the things that we’re defending and so to some degree that might be necessary to start the fear process but if you’re in the story through the fear process then it’s not moving well I think one of the ways to tell if you’re moving through the fear is that your stories will be dissolved by it and you’ll you might be in a news story a larger story a different story but the any any in this this works for pretty much any emotion if there’s a story and an emotion moves through it it will change the story if you’re moving it that’s right that’s right the story will change there will be relief and there eventually will be long-term relief if you if you’re moving it if you’re not moving it if you’re indulging it if you’re defining yourself I don’t even like to use the word indulge if you’re defining Yourself by that story then the story and the emotion and therefore it’s not moving the story will remain the same there won’t be a sense of short-term and definitely no long-term relief and you’ll still feel that stuck relationship with the feeling meaning you won’t be like I can’t wait to feel fear again you’re like I’m gonna feel this fear to get rid of it if you’re feeling the fear to get rid of it then it’s not gonna work so that’s those are the ways yeah yeah cool this has been an awesome episode I really enjoyed it yeah me too me too thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment who enjoyed what you heard 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