“Feeling scared just means you’re making progress. Fear’s your friend. So turn it into fuel.” ~ Robin Sharma   

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Fear’s price will eventually leave our soul bankrupt.

Inside each of us there is a life that is waiting to be born, a moment in time when we begin to travel down the path of our own destiny; the direction of our soul purpose. Yet, the road there is paved with trepidation and risk, not to scare us off completely, but in fact, to see how much we want it.

We all have a choice when it comes to our lives and what we chose to do with what we are given.

Just because we have the option doesn’t mean that we will always choose to take it. Too often we let fear creep in under the guise of self-protection and mediocrity believing in its ill-fitting lies. We succumb to the fear of failure, of change, or taking a risk that, to our heart, seems too great.

We stop ourselves from doing what it is that calls to us because of fear.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a new job, a relationship, or just a different path in life—we often stop what we most want from happening because it’s the success we ultimately fear, not the failure.

Life teaches us that we will never get exactly what it is that we want. It shows us that we are crazy for thinking we actually are able to receive what is we know deep down we deserve, and so it seems that there are only so many times we can find ourselves disappointed, yet still hopeful.

And so it happens, within the blink of an eye, or perhaps during an evening when the moon was the only constant—we give up on it—we give up on what it is we most want. We give up on our dream, on our passion, our thought process, maybe even on the one we love, because we are scared.

We shake to our core from the fear of having. It is like all the times before. Life has taught us that heartbreak and disappointment are inevitable. We’ve learned what it feels like to land on our knees in tears and the melancholy moments where we realize that what it is—will never actually be.

Once we fall we know what it feels like, we know how hard it is to come back from, and so we self-protect by sabotaging everything that we want, just because we are afraid of, once again, having to put ourselves back together again.

Yet the reality is, we can’t learn how to fly if we stay safely on the ground.

We will never expand our mind into the limitless possibility of life if we only ever remind ourselves of the times that we have fallen. If we live in the what was, then we will taint the what will be. There is no way that we will ever overcome our fear if we are still inviting it into bed with us each evening.

The only way around fear is the choice of radical trust.

It’s the belief and faith in ourselves, our abilities, and in being guided by what it is we feel most deeply about. It’s abandoning the self-talk that allows for us to entertain the thought of not only falling, but of failure. For when we talk about it, we invite it in. Instead of starting over or beginning anew, what we’re doing is pressing continue on a storyline that had already begun.

Fear is the most expensive commodity because all that it succeeds in doing is robbing us of our potential.

Instead of giving in to playing small and living life with a safety net, the only way to get what we want is to live like we will.

We have to live as if having our dreams come true is no longer an option, as if we will succeed with each breath we take, each moment that we are here, and every time that we decide to follow the call of our hearts—regardless of where it may lead.

We have to make the choice to say goodbye to fear, not just for a day—but permanently. We have to decide to not let it control what we do, or where we end up. We have to accept that just because we fell once, doesn’t mean that we aren’t meant to fly now.

Each occurrence happens in our life for a specific reason, for a lesson that we need to learn and absorb. The reality is that we all need to fall at least once, we need to be broken, tested and thrown into the chaos that our souls create when nothing is known for certain. We need those moments, because it is within them and the darkness that they create, we are given the solitude to center ourselves.

Only once we have fallen do we learn how to fly. 

There is never a moment where trying, or taking a chance becomes easy. There is no such thing as a guarantee, yet that isn’t reason to not try. The reality is that we don’t know until we do. We can’t say for certain until we’ve experienced it, we can’t learn until we’ve tried, and we can’t love until we’ve been heartbroken.

To everything there is a turn, and a moment of knowledge that overrides the fear and instead transforms it into faith.

Faith chases out fear.

It grows and blooms within our hearts until we have forgotten that fear even existed at one point, or what it felt like to be stuck or held back by it. We simply forget to fear anything, because we have not only made the choice for radical trust but also to simply and beautifully embrace the unknown.

And once that happens, suddenly it seems as if anything is possible because once we have faith—we simply have everything.

“It’s hard to grow your faith inside of your comfort zone.” ~ Unknown

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Author: Kate Rose

Image: Charles Harry MacKenzie/Flickr

Editor: Lieselle Davidson