When fear rises, you do not have to push it away. You feel it all the way through, you let the earth take it, and you turn back toward love.

You want to live a love-filled life, a love-first life, and then fear arrives anyway — it comes as sadness, it comes as anger, it comes as despair, it comes as a hopelessness you cannot quite name — and there is a gap between where you are pointing your heart and what you are actually feeling. That gap is not a failure. It is the work. It is what it means to be an eternal being living inside a body, and there is a way through it.

The message I want to share with you comes from what I now call the Monad — the single source, the unified life, the love-light that moves through all of us and beneath every guide and angel and ancestor I have ever channeled. The Monad is plain about this. Fear is not something to conquer. Fear is something to move through. And moving through it begins, always, in the body.

Let the word fear hold whatever is closest to you right now. If it is grief, lay grief over it. If it is rage, lay rage over it. If it is a heavy numbness with no name yet, lay that over it. The practice does not change. You feel it, you let the earth receive it, and you turn your attention back toward love.

One

Before anything can move, the fear has to be found, and it is found in the body, not in the mind. So turn off the phone, close the screens, sit down in the quiet, and let the quiet be uncomfortable if it needs to be. Then feel your way inward, slowly, until you find the place where the fear is living — the chest, the throat, the belly, the jaw, wherever it has made its home in you. This can take a little time. If there is a backlog, if the fear has been snowballing in you for years, it may take more than one sitting, and that is alright.

Two

When you have found where the fear sits, speak to it. This is not a strange thing to do; it is how the body answers you. The fear almost always has a message, and the message is almost always love wearing the face of protection — it has been holding something for you, carrying it, keeping it safe until you were ready to feel it. You can do this on paper, letting your hand write on its own until the words begin to surprise you, or you can do it in the quiet of your own mind, back and forth, question and answer. Ask it plainly. What are you protecting me from? What have you been carrying all this time? And then let it answer, and believe what it tells you.

Three

You were never meant to do this alone, and you do not have to. Whatever loving presence wants to come forward is welcome here — your guides, your angels, your ancestors, a wise soul from anywhere in the long human line, a healer, a teacher, anyone who steps into your awareness and offers a hand. Call them in. Let them stand with you while the feeling moves. They will not do the work for you, because the feeling is yours to feel, but they will hold you steady while you feel it, so that even the largest wave has something to break against.

Four

Now let it move. The earth will take it. She can hold all of it — there is no amount of fear too heavy for her, and she asks nothing from you in return. If you can, put your bare feet on the ground and let the fear pour down and out of you, out of the body and into the soil that holds every one of us. Do not try to force it. Do not try to figure out how to transform it; that was never your work. Your work is smaller and kinder than that. You feel it, and you let it go. You feel it, and you let it go. As many times as it takes. And when the feeling is very big, and sometimes it will be very big, it helps to have a witness in the room with you.

Five

When the feeling has moved through you, turn. Turn your attention toward everything that matches your deepest nature — toward love, toward what nurtures you, toward the true being you can see in another person when you really look, in your animals, in the trees and the water and the living earth itself. This is where you fan the flame. Every time the fear comes back, and it will come back, you meet it the same way; and every time you turn back toward love, the love grows a little stronger and the turning gets a little easier, until one day it is not a practice you do but simply the way you are living.

And let yourself be helped along the way. A therapist. A friend who can sit with you and not flinch. A room of your own and some silence, if that is what steadies you. There is no prize for carrying this alone, and no reward for doing it perfectly. There is only the practice, done again and again — feel it, release it, turn back toward love.

If any of this moved something in you, I would love to know where you felt it, and what shifted. Leave a note below. And if someone you love is carrying more than their share right now, send it to them.

— Juli Martin, The Love Lady