Fear’s seductive. It comes in 97 flavors and has 127 pairs of shoes.
It’s brazenly unabashed.
It’s convincing; relentless; lethal to your dreams and mine and all those things that make our hearts smile.
It’s loud. It’s quiet. It’s a master shape shifter and it can get in through the tiniest of cracks.
Sometimes for sure, it’s legitimate.
But oh so often, way more often than I like to admit, it’s smoke and mirrors all the way.
I have a story for you…
In 2007 I started thinking that it’d be really fun to lead retreats.
I looked to the mountains around me and the shores and the forests. I love them all, but none of them seemed quite right for this retreat I was dreaming up.
Then one afternoon, just as easy as that, as sometimes things go, I got a postcard from Costa Rica.
A postcard from a retreat center of all places.
I looked them up and the “organize a retreat” tab practically jumped off the page and bit me in the nose.
Are you kidding me?
I clicked.
My mother was sick at the time; in fact she was dying. She was losing her battle, already a year beyond her “4 months to live” marker, and we knew she was on her last leg.
I thought it was safe to schedule a retreat 9 months out. I naively thought I’d be done grieving by then and ready to move on.
Boy was I wrong!
Not only was I not done grieving (uh, no, it turns out you can’t “preemptively” grieve someone’s death), but my mother didn’t die until 2 weeks before the retreat.
Oh, this was NOT how I thought I’d offer my first retreat. I had visions of myself centered and grounded. A wise retreat leader. Calm, cool and collected.
Instead I was open and raw.
I wanted to crawl under a rock and live there for a long time.
But Life was calling and I had a retreat to lead so I got on a plane to Costa Rica.
And there, we zip lined through jungle tree tops, we hiked waterfalls, meditated, yogaed, swam, laughed and laughed until we had tears running down our faces.
And in that oh so human, vulnerable, imperfect kind of way that life has, it became a life changing week for all of us.
It was imperfectly perfect—on every level.
This first retreat was a gift.
I literally didn’t have the time or bandwidth to stir up too much fear around it. The logistics were taken care of—the retreat had even filled up in the first week I offered it. And my attention was with my dying mother whose tenacious hold on life was something to behold.
Sure, there were smatterings of fear here and there, but not the gut wrenching, sit bolt upright in the middle of the night kind.
I wasn’t so lucky the next time.
Before I even left Costa Rica, another retreat had hatched in my imagination. It was like someone had dropped the idea fully formed right into my head.
This retreat would be swimming with wild dolphins.
I knew nothing about swimming with dolphins, wild or otherwise. I didn’t even know where one would go to swim with wild dolphins. But I could see it.
I could see dolphins…
I could see the blue of the water and the sky…
I could feel the energy of the group.
It gave me goose bumps.
On the bus back to the airport that day in Costa Rica I told a couple of my retreat participants about the dolphins.
“Are you kidding? We’re in. Consider you’ve got your first 2 sign ups.”
Awesome. OMG! So cool. I love when it happens like that.
I got home from Costa Rica and before my bag even hit the ground I was on the internet.
Enter: swim with wild dolphins.
The very first thing that came up was a guy who lived on a catamaran in the Bahamas and took people swimming with wild dolphins. My heart jumped forward. I “knew” this was right. And in that exact same millisecond fear lurched forward and beat my heart to the gate. Fear.
F.E.A.R.
Visceral fear. Fear with a dry mouth and metallic taste fear.
Fear with pit in my stomach.
Fear with “NO way I can do that.”
I can’t live on a boat with my people for a week.
I need space.
I won’t be able to stay centered.
I can’t do this.
NO WAY.
#fearonsteroids
And so I searched.
I pushed and pushed.
I looked and looked for something different.
Something else.
Anything else!
There had to be some other outfit that could facilitate this adventure.
But I ended up back at that catamaran over and over and over again.
I knew it was right. Every fiber of my being knew it was right.
And yet, still, fear.
I tried to orchestrate it my way, obsessively (yes, I cringe at the word) trying to make something else happen.
Hilarious really.
It’s like trying to stare down a coconut tree until it drops a walnut on your head.
And so I set it up.
I put it out there and again, to my excitement and horror (in mixed measure) people signed up. In fact too many people signed up.
My last participant begged me to be included so I called the Captain. Anyway we can squeeze one more in?
Well, we can if you’re willing to sleep in the hull.
The hull? What’s a hull?
Turns out it was the hollow thingymajigy on the side of the boat. Mine (because yes, I did say okay) was 4 feet tall and 7 feet long. I’d climb in through a hutch and pull the lid closed every night. My little cocoon in the water.
The adventure was set for September. By midsummer I was squirming.
Freaking out would actually be a far more accurate description.
Literally freaking out.
I even went so far as to calculate what it would cost me to reimburse every single person, including the money they’d spent on airfare, and cancel the whole thing.
But the call to this adventure was stronger than fear.
Barely, but just enough.
Forward I went. Quaking knees. Uncertain. Scared shitless (there’s no pretty way to call fear like it is).
And guess what?
The fear passed.
By the time the plane landed it was wide open seas (no pun intended). Again, another journey of massive transformation—on so many levels.
Laughter, tears, adventure, so much growth. I felt so proud of my people. So proud of how they were stepping into their power and their dreams, into their authenticity and genius.
One of my participants, I’ll call her Mary, jumped into 30 feet of open sea water to swim with the dolphins. This, from a woman who was terrified of being on the water in a boat (talk about the courage it took for her to show up—she was one of the ones who committed on the bus in Costa Rica), let alone getting into the water. She came back up from her first dolphin swim with tears streaming down her face and a smile so big it could’ve cracked open the heart of the world. A truly understated metaphor for the massive transformation that was to follow for her.
Yup, there are times when fear is legitimate. It’s a whispering that something’s not right, that we’re in danger.
But far more often than not, it’s ego fear and that my friend is the kind that just needs to be ignored, as best as possible, and taliho forward we go.
You can’t wait for fear to pass to start living your dreams.
Your dreams by definition are going to call more out of you than you’ve given up to now and that’s for sure going to feel majorly scary somewhere along the way, maybe even the whole way.
Life is short and time flies. So what’s been calling you? What have you been putting off?
What are you waiting to do when you feel more confident, more fearless, more empowered?
What if you started taking the steps now?
What if you just walked right on through that fear and did it anyway, shaking in your boots if need be.
Are you game?
I hope so.
You’ve done this before. You know you have. You’ve got it.
There have been times when you’ve burst through fear like a Olympic runner bursts through that finish line tape.
I’d love to hear about one of those times when you left fear in the dust. When you just went ahead and did what your heart was calling you to do anyway.
Fear be damned.
Leave me a note about it in the comments section. I can’t wait to read about it.
