It’s been a few years since I deliberately started learning about emotions and emotional health. You may call it the side-effects of once being borderline depressed.
Or maybe it’s because I had high-performance anxiety. And anytime something bothers me, I become a nerd and do my research on that topic.
The more I read about emotions, the more I could see the patterns forming.
From everything I’ve read, I’ve come to understand that there are only two prominent emotions in the universe — Love and Fear, all the other emotions are the derivatives of these two emotions.
Emotions like joy, happiness, acceptance, compassion, etc. — these are all derivatives of love. Simultaneously, the emotions of jealousy, guilt, shame, anxiety, anger, depression are the derivatives of fear.
In any given situation, it’s our choice to shift from one emotion to the other. This, however, does not mean you should ignore/reject any emotion. Ignoring /rejecting emotions will only cause them to pile up, and we have to face them eventually.
Emotions are there to provide us messages and signals. Nonetheless, shifting from one emotion to the other is totally one’s choice.
Why Is It Necessary to Choose Love Over Fear?
When you make a decision out of love, it will be based on acceptance, abundance, and kindness. On the other hand, decisions made out of fear are mostly based on scarcity, ego, and insecurities.
Fear is a protective emotion. It has helped the human species in evolution and living through tougher and violent times.
Now that we don’t have to hunt animals or risk our lives every time we want to eat or move, we can slow down the fear-based mind and allow the love-based mind to take over.
The fear-based mindset helps us in survival, and the love-based mindset helps us in growth and prosperity.
Consider this — Your friend came to you and verbally abused you. And this is the friend who never spoke violently about anyone or anything. Your fear-based mind will act protective, and it will evoke you to respond back impulsively. You would either fled the scene, or you will fight back.
On the other hand, if you don’t let your fear-based mind make any judgment, you could have a moment of stillness. If you decide to respond with love, you will show compassion and kindness to your friend. It might help your friend grow through the tough time that pushed him to practice violence through words.
This is how a fear-based mindset differs from a love-based mindset.
The fear-based mindset helps us in survival, and the love-based mindset helps us in growth and prosperity.
The 3-Step Choose Again Method
Gabrielle Bernstein has mentioned the 3-Step Choose Again method in her book “Super Attractor.” This method is about how to choose love over fear and make the shift as quickly as possible.
To mention a reality check, fear can never go away. Sometimes we might wish we could live without fear. But, it’s necessary for our growth to understand risk and discomfort, and that’s exactly what fear teaches us.
Our growth lies in how quickly we can shift from a fear-based mindset to a love-based mindset.
Here’s this 3-step Choose Again method from Gabrielle Bernstein that we can use to make this shift —
Step 1: Recognise your thought
This is the self-awareness step. Consciously ask yourself, how do I feel about this decision? Why am I making this decision?
Pick up a pen and paper and answer these questions. Recognize if this is a love-based decision or a fear-based decision.
Fear-based decisions have their roots in scarcity and insecurities. Love-based decisions have their roots in abundance and growth.
You can’t get better without admitting you have a problem.
Here are some questions you can answer to recognize your thoughts —
- What am I avoiding here?
- What’s the inspiration for my decision?
- How am I feeling today?
- What’s the root of this feeling? Is it love or fear?
- X ways my fear fools me most of the time.
Do this kind of self-awareness journaling for a few days straight so that you could go to deeper levels of your consciousness.
Step 2: Forgive Yourself
It’s terribly easy to fall into the pit of self-hatred when we recognize we have not been doing something we needed to do.
This is an important step: forgive yourself. If you don’t forgive yourself, you will hold on to the past and the negative patterns you were a part of in your past.
Accept your past. Embrace your imperfections. And realize that these incidents have helped you grow and prosper.
One way to forgive is to feel gratitude for them. Be thankful for your thoughts for showing you what you don’t want in life, and now you can move forward to have what you want in life.
Forgive your thoughts. Forgive yourself.
Step 3: Choose again.
Ask yourself, “What’s the best-feeling thought I can have right now?” Follow it through.
You may feel stuck here. And it’s perfectly human to feel stuck. Here’s something you can do in that case. Make a statement, write it down, or say it out loud — “I am open to the creative possibilities for abundance.”
It has been a personal affirmation for me, saying out loud this statement — “I am choosing to learn with love.”
And the follow-up to this step would be to see the situations with love and curiosity.
Love and Fear Both Cause Suffering
Love and its derivatives of kindness, acceptance, joy, happiness can pull us down the road of infinite unfulfilled desires.
Fear and its derivatives of hate, anger, anxiety, guilt can pull us down the road of depression and hopelessness.
Hanging on to the emotions causes suffering. Even chasing these emotions is a sure-shot way of attracting suffering your own way.
The ultimate practice to avoid suffering is detachment. Remembering that both happiness and sadness are impermanent, will help you avoid suffering.
You need to choose love over fear while making decisions or responding to someone, but holding on to any emotion will only bring suffering in life.
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