Scared From Within: Finding Peace with Your Own Feelings

Photo: Majestic Beings: The mighty Sequoia also known as the Giant Redwood - Poulsbo, Washington (2018). Copyright SJPhotography.

Scared From Within: Finding Peace with Your Own Feelings

When fear takes hold and gathers within our skin; finds its way to the murky corners where light does not reach summoning darkness to the growing surge of sensations that begin to storm through us, we can become lost. Lost in a roiling sea of feelings and emotional turbulence. No matter if the threat is real or perceived – an activated response to a triggering event or personal encounter – it makes no difference for we no longer feel safe in the space where we stand. Something is out to get us and we must fight or flee. But no matter where we move to or what we do the feelings are still raging within and follow us wherever we go.

Sensations are the way we feel the body, such as hunger or pain.

Perception is how we experience the world, such as hearing and tasting.

Emotions and thoughts are sensations plus a story.

Feelings are an amalgam of sensations and thoughts.

_Rupert Spira, “You Are the Happiness You Seek: Uncovering the Awareness of Being”

The body holds onto old wounds, pains, fears, and unhealed contracted memories lingering just below the surface. These are the bruised and sensitive places that lie dormant until something triggers them to awaken and rally mind, body, and soul to react, serve and survive. Flooded with feelings we are taken over by the memories that came before and move right back into a survival loop of planning, strategy, worry, fear, movement, anticipation, and getting out of or away from the perceived threat even if we are home alone.

I found this narrative come through in a free-flow journaling session and want to share it here with you. Many can find the times and spaces when we are scared from within – left to defend against our inner world of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I had gotten so tired of this loop – the endless cycle of triggers, old wounds, and overwhelming feelings that would leave my life in ruins again, my nervous system on high alert, and my body and mind drained, sick, and tired. Yet, I was still the one left to pick up the pieces afterward and carry on. Whoever or whatever I think had triggered me in the present was no longer in the place where I stood yet I was left with an internal landscape shredded, shadowed, and shaking. In that loop, I saw what was happening to me and how I was scaring myself by believing and listening to my terrifying stories and thoughts.

PERSONAL JOURNAL:

She was locked inside with her emotions, fears, and feelings for so long that she had forgotten what life was like without them. A life lived surrounded by the screaming banshees of the past talking in her ear, wearing her like clothes, finding ways to bring up old wounds and painful memories. It was a normal formation of living, it seemed. One day she came across the words, I am at peace with my own feelings. This was a small sentence in a longer paragraph but these eight words hit her in a way that made everything stop.

It had meaning to her – it resonated in her ears – in her heart – in her being. She wondered at the simplicity of the eight and why she was so moved by them. It was in the question – her asking what meaning they had to her that she knew they were for her – gifted at this specific moment to show her a new way.

She felt a key pressed into her hand. A key to unlock the closed door that kept her writhing in pain with her feelings day in and day out. She had found spaces and moments of calm, times of peace, understanding, and rest from her torment but they were still there, waiting in the wings – in the space where pain waits to breathe fire again and answers to questions are burned to ash.