What to Do When We Are Feeling Fearful

So I’m feeling anxious today.  There is a lot of change going on in my life.  My husband has asked that we separate and after much resistance I suddenly decided to pack and move out.  Emotions are a difficult thing for most of us, and I was just teaching at this morning’s “A Course In Miracles” Zoom class that we have to feel everything.  Denying how we are feeling is resistance to the emotion and is a veil to the presence of love within.

Feeling our emotions is part of the spiritual process, and we need some training on how to do it.  We aren’t really taught how to feel emotions in our society, more often we are taught by example, and word, to repress them.  That’s okay.  No blame here.  It’s just that there is a better way.

I don’t want to feel anxious.  It’s a very uncomfortable feeling and my natural tendency is to avoid and overlook it:  find something to distract me so that I don’t have to feel it.  I bet you feel that way too.  We all do.  Again, it’s okay.  Our mind training is to watch what is occurring in our own mind.  Watch our resistance, observe our body sensations, listen to our thoughts, be present to what is going on in your moments of being uncomfortable. I often say, “take tea with your unwanted feelings.”  Sit down, invite them in, listen to what they have to say and allow them to pass through your mind.

Lesson 48 in ACIM is, “There is nothing to fear.” Just because there is nothing to fear does not mean that fear doesn’t knock on our door, that these emotions don’t come to visit us.  “A Course In Miracles,” Jesus and The Holy Spirit are here to comfort us.  To tell us in our times of fear that there is nothing to be afraid of.  That who we are is established by God and there is nothing we can do to change that even though we believe we can and believe we have made up a person to replace God’s creation of ourself as Christ.

So let’s get back to feeling our fear and how exactly to do that.  Jesus actually teaches us in a book related to ACIM exactly how to do this which is one reason why I love, “A Course In Love.”  In the Dialogues in the 40 Days and 40 Nights, in Days 14 & 16 Jesus explains this process very succinctly.

First, he explains that escape is not possible.  We cannot escape our sick and wounded self.  We must face it from the wholeness of our Christ Self.  “So okay, escape is not possible, I am going to have to feel this sometime, I can avoid it, but I can’t escape it, so I might as well CHOOSE to feel it now.”  I can ask Jesus and Holy Spirit to be with me as I go through this and even visualize a little hand holding on the part of Jesus.  I guarantee you He is there, even if you can’t feel Him.  In the text of ACIM Jesus tells us that he can’t take our fear from us, we have to do that. “The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear you are implying it is not. You should ask, instead for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about.”   (Text Chapter 2, Section VI. Paragraph 4). 

To review, escape is not possible, but it is our responsibility to correct fear.  No one can do it for us.  We can ask for help in the correction, and what is the correction, if not the miracle.  A miracle is a change in perception.  We are perceiving ourselves incorrectly, as a body stuck in space and time with an expiration date that appears to be arriving ever more rapidly. This is a false perception! We are not a body! We are Christ!  

What does that mean, we are Christ?  Again we go to the words of Jesus in ACOL.  All is consciousness.  We are our mind, not our body.  Not our thoughts, but that which is aware of our thoughts.  It’s no stretch to conceive of mind as being without form, of being infinite spirit and joined with other minds.  It makes sense.  We are not our bodies, we are Mind, Consciousness, Awareness and that is Christ.  That is what God created.  We are the Thought of God.  

The lessons of ACIM are designed to bring us to the awareness that this is so.  And it is designed to do it ever so gently as possible.  So when we have progressed far enough in our learning to believe that what Jesus is telling us is true, we are the same as Him, Christ, then we can deal much more effectively with the emotions that come to the surface to be cleared.  This is purification, which is necessary.  

We are taught that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and everything else is feelings.  So our response to our feelings comes from either of those two emotions, love or fear.  If we respond to our feelings with fear, we are responding with resistance, pain and suffering.  We are responding from the belief in ego and death.  This has been the normal human response for eons. But now at the advent of the Great Awakening we are learning to respond from Love.  We are learning to “hold space” for our feelings.  To embrace them in the Love/Christ Self that we have come to believe and even know ourselves to be. 

So dear friends, feeling anxiety (and as I write this I also realize I am feeling depression), feeling our feelings is part of our spiritual process, part of our undoing.  It is normal, and even though it is scary, there is nothing to fear.  Another one of my great teachers is Dr. David Hawkins. His work has helped me to understand the teachings of Jesus in greater depths of awareness and I feel it is invaluable work.  

Doc, as we like to call him in Sedona (he lived here and many of us knew and loved him), mapped out levels of consciousness.  He gave us a roadmap to understanding our minds and where we might find ourselves on any given moment on that map. The levels go from Death and Shame at the bottom to Enlightenment and beyond at the pinnacle.  One thing that he taught that has been extremely useful to me is that when we find ourselves on the part of the map in those lower emotions of shame, grief, guilt and fear, that feeling hopelessness is congruent with the field of consciousness.  In other words, when we are taking tea with fear, it’s going to feel hopeless, unending, like we are going to die and that we will never escape the feeling.  That is part of the feeling.  It’s helpful to know this as we feel, so that we can remind ourselves that even though we feel this way, IT WILL PASS! This of course helps with the courage to feel through to the end.  Courage is actually the turning point on the map.  When we rise to courage, we are rising above the fear levels.  Amazingly what takes us even higher is willingness!  “Father, I am willing to see this differently,” is a statement that immediately heals because of it’s innate transcendence of the lower levels.

To summarize: fear happens.  When it does, don’t ask for it to be taken from you.  Face it, and as for the miracle, ask for the correction of your mind from ego to Christ.  Then feel it.  Take tea with it.  Allow what ever is arising to arise.  It may feel awful and hopeless for a while, but this will pass.  You are Christ.  We are infinite Mind and we can be aware of that in any moment (“I will be still and instant and go home”). 

Just because we feel fear, does not mean we have lost our connection to God.  It means we are feeling fear, allowing that veil to be lifted from our mind so that more awareness of Love’s presence can enter our mind, and more fear can exit, permanently.  We cannot fail in this because it’s Truth (“No one can fail who seeks to reach the Truth”).  That is because truth is what is true, not this illusion of yourself you have made up to replace God’s version of you.  You can dream that you have a life apart from God, but it’s just a dream and you will awaken.  That part of you that is skeptical is the ego, and the way it proves to you that it is real is by your fear of death.  But what God created can never die.  Your mission is to realize, awaken to the fact that you are not a body! You are Christ.  And it is forever so. Amen.

Postscript: After writing this article and feeling the fear and depression for a couple of hours it all lifted and has not returned.

This article was first written in June 2021.

About the Author

Sudie is a master teacher of “A Course In Miracles.”  She began her journey with “The Course” in the late 1980's at the same time she was completing her studies for the Science of Mind Ministry.  After more than 30 years of spiritual study, Sudie has become an open channel for Spirit to speak through her.  She does not prepare for talks or classes, but instead allows her inner guidance from the Holy Spirit to speak through her.  Her greatest joy is assisting individuals and groups in awakening to their own inner guidance and Higher Self.  She resides in Sedona, Arizona and attends daily “ACIM” and related classes devoting her life to continually awakening to the Light within.  She has also done many interviews, podcasts and international groups.  

Her website is www.Sudie.love. Sudie guides many of the 17+ weekly groups the Sedona community offers.  Everyone is free to join any group, any time.  Go to their website to see the information for each group--they change regularly!