A Year Without Fear: What Would Your Life Be Like?

I invite you to step beyond the hypnotism of what you think you can and cannot do. Here’s what’s true:  You are loved. You have everything you need. You are more powerful than you know.

But fear or unquestioned negative beliefs or old stories may keep you from your boldest possibilities. Well, that’s about to change. I doubt you want a “mediocre” life. I doubt you want to just pay your bills or settle for a sort of loving relationship and call it good. I think you want to cry with gratitude when it’s all said and done. I’d like you to cry before then.

This is your life. This is your chance. This is your time on earth.

I want you to write the screenplay that moans in your bloodstream. Or love your child like no child has ever been loved before. Or run for office or run from your office or whatever nudges you in the sanctum of your heart. I want you to know the peace of the Dalai Lama, more freeing than a nice big bucket of Xanax.

I want you to hit the note you came to sing—because life is set up for you to do that. I want you to know the Presence of a strength not of this world. I want you to drop your predictable goals and drop your jaw in awe—as you discover what you can really have this year. The inspired power within you can accomplish anything at any time. Let this be your time.

Welcome to a year without fear.

Years ago as an overworked and soul-starved attorney, I walked along a beach and felt as though I wanted to end my life. Instead, I decided to begin my life. I made the unorthodox decision to leave my career. I realized it was fear that had compelled me to play it “safe,” attend Harvard Law School, graduate with honors, and work a bazillion  hours for a law firm—even though I had always dreamed of being a writer.

But I hadn’t called my motivation fear. I called it “being realistic.” I was just “being practical,” living life the way I’d been told you should live it.

It was only when I stopped making choices out of fear that I discovered a whole new way to live. I had to learn to trust in a power beyond my intellect and a love that was more powerful than any resource I’d ever known. I had to learn how to love myself through bouts of anxiety and frustration into creativity, conviction, and inspired action. I began teaching and coaching, and finally published my first book, This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love, and then my second bestseller Inspired & Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in Your Life’s Work!

Now, as a career/success coach, I’ve worked with thousands of individuals who, like me, knew they were here for something more. Yet they just lived the life they assumed they could have.

I’ve seen how our own self-talk and beliefs about reality can corrode our potential. I know that real happiness or freedom comes from cultivating our own inspired mind-set, the intimate, interior world we live in every single day.

Your original instincts and genius are a love song between you and God. (Or Spirit, or whatever you call an extraordinary consciousness.) You are a life that has never been here before.

True freedom is a conscious, everyday spiritual adventure. It’s a reinvention. It’s a wholly new relationship with yourself.

You can achieve any inspired goal in your own inspired way. It all depends on you generating a miraculous mind-set through daily choices. Are you choosing from fear or love? Insecurity or strength? Habit or intentionality?

You’re making decisions every single day and, really, many times during the day. I want to see you make the ones that inspire your greatest love.

How Do You Get over Fear?

How do you get past that immediate impulse to fight, flee, or eat massive amounts of pasta? Let’s face it—these stellar options are brought to you by the amygdala, the primitive reptilian brain that didn’t know a thing about finding yourself, raising enlightened children, or getting a book deal. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a lizard being in charge of my evolution and life. I want to choose from the golden throne of being centered, alive, and attuned to what I really want. That’s what I want for you, too.

When I was in therapy, I just wanted to cut the fear out—do a lobotomy. But it turns out (no matter how much you offer to pay these people) that you do not remove fear by attacking it.

You let go of fear by focusing on love. Love is the answer to fear.

I’d like to offer you 3 quick focuses to practice and develop over time:

1. Everything is either love or fear. The best way to get out of fear is to get into love. If you focus on something you love or do something you love or hold love for another, your fear will not be there. You cannot feel fear in the moment when you are feeling love.
2. Stay in the present moment. All fear comes from thinking about the future or thinking about the past. In the present moment, all is well. You connect with your own innate wholeness.
3. There is another way to see everything. If you are in fear, you are seeing something from a painful point of view. You are telling a painful story. There is another way to experience this. There is an expansive perspective that will free you. When you are connected to your Spirit, there are no painful stories.

For most of us, moving beyond fear isn’t an overnight shift. It’s not a pill. It’s a practice. It’s a pilgrimage. It’s a commitment to fill our minds with new conditioning and perspectives.

This year, choose who you will be in this lifetime rather than having circumstances choose for you. I invite you to wake up to your own fearless potential and that of every human being. And please know I’m here, believing in you, practicing in my own life, and championing the power of all our fearless love.

© 2014 Tama Kieves. An excerpt from A Year Without Fear: 365 Days of Magnificence. (January 2015) Reprinted with permission. www.TamaKieves.com