[00:00:00] You might not think of yourself as a fearful person. You're capable, spiritual, self-aware, resourceful, and yet you might notice yourself hesitating more than you used to.
Hi, I'm Nicki Kuurman, and this is the Practical Mystic Podcast, where universal wisdom meets modern life. This week, I'm going to talk about fear and how it could be subtly eroding not only your confidence and your decision-making, but the way you see the world, and the subtle shifts around the choices that you're making that are making your world smaller and smaller.
In the trying to control, trying to encapsulate a sense of security, especially in insecure global times. Fear doesn't always look dramatic. Fear doesn't always look like some big, wild [00:01:00] collapse of ourselves, it can creep in subtly to the point where we don't even notice it until it's too late.
And this quiet moving fear is fed by our social media feeds, by marketing, by the big businesses that want you in a state of fear in order to buy. And if you just think about that for a second, how many late-night purchases have you made out of fear of getting older and need a new face cream, or needing some kind of piece of clothing to make yourself feel young and hip?
We've all succumbed to buying things because we feel like we are less than, and that a product or something outside of ourselves is going to make us better. And I think the shift that we are in right now at [00:02:00] a conscious level, or a consciousness level I should say, is that we are shifting from a fear-based reality to a soul-led reality.
But of course, we've got no experience as to what that actually looks like in our everyday life, and so things are changing, and it's uncomfortable for people. As we're waking up, as we're seeing systems collapse, as we're seeing the structure of our world change from how we've known it to be in the past, these fears seem to be coming in at us thick and fast, right?
And so how do we hold centre? How do we hold true to something that we don't know how to hold true to? We don't even have a sense of self in order to map back in. And so, the scariest thing we can ask ourselves right now is, "Who am I without that productivity?" Who am I if I don't have a job [00:03:00] description?
The reason I studied kinesiology some 13, 14 years ago was because I was doing some spiritual work for friends and family, and I had studied reiki, and I was incorporating that in with my own spiritual healing And I could see that I needed a framework I could lean into for safety while I grew in my confidence.
And for years it was great. I combined the kinesiology and the spiritual healing and the reiki, and I was really loving the way that my practice and my skills were unfolding. And then at about 10 years ago, I kept having this calling that I needed to reach more people.
There's been this pull to be more public, to share my knowledge and gifts with the world, and I've tried lots and lots of different things in the past, and in 2016, I started writing an online course. And [00:04:00] online courses were still pretty new 10 years ago, right? Like, they weren't flooded like they are now.
And in it, I spent a lot of time, money, and energy setting it all up, and I really trusted the work because I channelled the work, but I didn't really trust myself in delivering it. Fast-forward a year or so, and I'm starting to promote this course, and I'm taking it into workshops, and I'm doing different things, and one comment crumbled it all.
I lost everything. The fear was so overwhelming that my world just seemed to stop. I was so frozen. My fight or flight responses just cut it all off. I spent the next eight months creating the back end and delivering what I had promised to deliver to the people who had purchased, [00:05:00] but as the time got closer, I was getting more and more relieved that it was nearly over, that it was done.
And I had so much shame around what I was creating. So much shame. I couldn't look at it. I couldn't promote it anymore. I couldn't offer it to my clients in good faith, even though I knew so many people would get value out of it. The story I told myself was that it wasn't good enough One comment destroyed 10 years of my work.
And on the flip side of that, in this last 10 years, I've had to relive that work on so many different levels that I can see now it was an early version of the work that I do today, and how I help clients now, how I help myself today, [00:06:00] especially when it's scary.
So, two years after that, shock with the comment and me closing down the business, a very close friend of mine passed away who had been helping me on my journey, of producing the course material. And not only did her passing shock the hell out of me, but the resulting grief just fuelled the freeze, and then the freeze became resentment and anger at myself, and the shame just seemed to multiply.
Several times I heard Spirit say to me, "It's okay. This work is 10 years ahead of where it needs to be." And I don't know why that kept in my mind, but I feel like in this last decade, all the things that I've said back then are relevant at exactly now. And so, whether I created all of that [00:07:00] content for myself back then or for other people, I don't know.
But when I look at it now that I have dealt with all the shame and the fear, I look at it, I go, "You know what? It wasn't that bad." Okay, the, the filming and the way I'm dressing is a bit out of date now, and we've moved on too much more cleaner technologies,
But the content, when I look at it now, is still relevant, and I think it's even more relevant now because we can see it showing up in our world. We know that we have to change. We know that we can't keep letting fear rule our decision-making. We know we have to be a different version of ourselves for the next decade than the one before us.
Our world is going to change so dramatically in the next 10 years We are going to change. We're going to move. We have to pull on confidence even when we're not ready. Last episode, I talked about aligned confidence. [00:08:00] The aligned confidence is when we sit back and we know, right?
And it feels good. But when we have to pull on confidence, are we pulling on confidence, or are we just pulling on courage? Because we need the courage to face the fear. When my son was in primary school, one of his teachers said to him, "You just have to face the fear and do it anyway." And it... He came home and told me this story, and I was gobsmacked.
I'd never heard that before. And I, I got, uh, prickly, right? Like, I didn't like it. It didn't sit well with me, but it was true. We do have to face our fear and do things anyway. But we have to also listen to the fear somewhat to guide us in, are we going in the right direction? And this is where spirituality is really, really important now we have to listen to the other aspects of ourselves.
Not what we've been trained to listen to. [00:09:00] Not the fearmongering. Not the ego voice that is doubt and scared. the self that I am experiencing in this moment, and how am I showing up for the world around me?
Self-awareness isn't the focus on how the world affects you. Self-awareness is how you affect the world.
And fear is we're scared of something affecting us. But where the fear really, uh, has trapped us in the last few years, especially with social media, is this constant, you're not enough, you don't have enough, you don't have the right things, you don't know the right information, and somebody wants to sell you some information.
I, I think that times passed. [00:10:00] What we need to learn now is how to be more fully ourselves. We were not taught that in school. We were not taught that purposefully. So, what is it that you need to recognise is fear-based decisions versus what is soul-led decisions? Basically, anything you're fearful of in the future is not faith, it's not trust, it's not knowing, it's not of divine source.
It has come from an external intention placed upon you. When you come back into alignment with yourself and you're sitting in your own energy field, there is no fear. There's knowing, and there's peace, and there's excitement when the next thing arrives. It's a spark of, "I want that." [00:11:00] And there's an uptake in your energy, and your vibration shifts, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite dramatically, but it's a hell yes.
And even if you don't know how to get there or what the next step- steps are, we've got to let go of the how, because that's our mind coming back in, trying to control the situation,
You still have to hold that uptick of energy, that excitement, and go, "Yes, that's what I want, and what do I need to do to get there?" That's your job. What's the next right step? And it's probably something you haven't thought of yet, and that's why you have to be really tuned in to your own soul guidance to go, "What is the next right step for me?"
It doesn't come from somebody telling you what the next right step is, although sometimes we can get inspiration from that, for sure. But your right next step comes from you, and no one else can tell you what that is. [00:12:00] I can guide you there, I can help you get there, but the answer is solely yours.
We're at a turning point. What is the cost of letting fear lead your life? What's it going to cost you to not do the thing you want to do? What is it going to cost you to keep small, to keep safe, to keep hidden? Like I was telling you in that story of where I lost my confidence years ago- It has taken me every ounce of my energy to pull myself out of that space.
And the fact that you're watching this podcast is testament to how much I have done in the last 12 months. I have been thinking about creating this podcast for at least six, seven years, but I didn't have the courage to do it. And it's going to be imperfect, and it's not going to [00:13:00] be showy and glossy and made up with fantastic editors at this stage because I'm just starting out.
It's just me in front of a camera. But it's me in front of a camera with an intention of helping you find yourself. It's not something out there for you to find, it's something within you to find when you turn your eyes in. This turning point in our life, in our society, in our global politics at the moment, this is the point where we have to turn in.
We have to tune out the noise and the agendas and everybody else's fear, and we have to go within and think about, what is it I need most right now?
Because the stagnation leads to resentment.
I was so resentful of myself for not taking the steps for 10 years. [00:14:00] I was so angry.
I was listening to Danielle LaPorte speak this week with this most beautiful, passage of where anger comes from, and she was explaining how we start with a disappointment. And so, the disappointment I felt from that one comment all those years ago turned into grief.
And the grief of losing what I had built, and then the grief of losing my friend, and then the grief of losing my beautiful dog, Basil, everything happened in such a short amount of time, and I was just spinning out of control. I was so unwell. I was in so much pain, physically as well as emotionally, with the grief.
When the grief is not dealt with properly, it moves to resentment. And then I started to really [00:15:00] resent the person who made the comment, but more at myself than at them. I was resentful that I could let somebody else's opinion rattle me so much, and I was so shocked that I let this almost destroy me.
And then comes the anger Because I didn't have the resentment healed, the anger rose. this was all myself, but I can easily see how this disappointment anger happens with people, with expectations. We're disappointed something didn't happen the way we wanted it to. There's a grief period. If that's not dealt with properly, we become resentful and angry.
And this is part of Danielle Laporte's work with Bless and Release, and her new book that's going to be coming out, and she was sharing this beautiful concept of we cannot let things go, [00:16:00] and I've known that for years. We don't let go of anything. Our ego mind will not, not let you go of anything. But we can bless and release each stage and each step, and as we bless and release our past and we bring forgiveness in, the fear dissipates.
The fear doesn't have the same hold over us anymore. And even though Danielle Laporte's explanation was so much more refined than that, I realize that that's the journey I've been on over the last two years.
so, if I circle back, it's like the cost of that fear, I lost years, and I see now that it was the early stages of the work that I do now. That 12-step program that I created 10 years ago is really [00:17:00] the foundation of the work I still teach in my one-to-one clients and in my Aligned journey.
It's part of the Aligned methodology that has been refined because of my experience of overcoming my own fears, my own resentments, my own angers.
 No one else is coming to rescue you. This is about you rescuing yourself. How we get out of the spiral, how we get out of the fear and the craziness, is we have to turn inward. We have to tune our eyes, our ears, our psychic abilities into our own inner knowing. Inside first, then follow with action.
But when it comes from an aligned place, that action is so easy. It's not productivity. It's not pushing. It's not [00:18:00] hustle. It can be. It can be productive. But it comes from a very, very different energy. It comes from a joy of doing it, not from a fear of not doing it. Courage is not the absence of fear.
It's the willingness to stay connected to yourself even though you're scared. If fear has been shaping your life and your decision-making, then I really would love you to come and experience the quick shift with me.
I want you to experience the shift of what it's like to drop the fear and come back into your body, to empower yourself to no longer be looking outside for your answers, but to be able to tune in and come back in for your answers. This is your time to come back to yourself, to look at your fear dead in the [00:19:00] eye and say, "I see you, and..."
And with that and, you give yourself permission for something else, something more, something different. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you're watching this on YouTube, please hit subscribe to support the channel, and follow me on any of the other podcast channels. That would be great. I'm Nicki Kuurman, and this is The Practical Mystic Podcast.
