The Transformation Your Fear Doesn’t Want You to Have

Unveiling the secret longings behind your fear (and how it can ignite your fulfillment, instead of your self-doubt)

Your fear wants you to believe if you do everything “right,” you won’t have to feel it.

It wants you to think that if only you were in a different or better situation, it wouldn’t exist.

Yet unless you’re currently 100% satisfied with your life, fear will go with you on your journey of making it better (no matter what you do).

If you want to expand your self-concept — and by extension, open yourself to more creative fulfillment, financial bounty, or whatever else you want — you’ll need to expand your capacity to feel all kinds of sensations.

And this expansion will inevitably stretch your nervous system capacity, resulting in those spooky sensations we know as fear.

Your Fear isn’t Your Enemy: It’s Simply Much More Adventurous Than You

Lately, I’ve been seeing fear as an inevitable part of expanding my comfort zone.

Fear is simply a doorway I MUST pass through if I want fulfillment.

To have a bigger, brighter life, you have to do things you’ve never done. And the unknown is unpredictable.

It can jostle with your identity, making you ask questions like “Who am I to do this?” “Am I risking humiliation?”

But no matter how intense your fear becomes, you can turn these thoughts around before they degenerate into massive spirals.

Here’s what I invite you to do: Relate to your fear as a separate part, one with its own identity and will.

Experiment with seeing it, not as a nervous dimension of your regular identity, but as a distinct part that actually craves and consciously longs for the experiences you believe you want to avoid: humiliation, rejection, and total destitution.

As you experimentally adopt the perspective of your fear, you disrupt the polarization between your conscious personality and your shadowy delight in scary things.

When you do this, you do what Carolyn Lovewell recommends in her book on shadow work, Existential Kink.

You get on the side of your shadow, and as you do, you interfere with its ability to control your behavior.

This shift frees up energy that would usually go into dreading or hating your situation. And that liberated energy can make things that once felt impossible or daunting suddenly feel light-hearted and simple.

The Simple Perspective Shift that Transmutes Your Fear into Creative Fuel

If changing your perspective on fear seems unnatural, that’s understandable.

Every day, we pretend to be singular egos with coherent, relatively stable identities.

The very fact we have names implies there’s something constant and unified about our personalities.

But as Freud, Jung, and other psychologically adventurous folks knew well, the ego is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Thinking of our fear as having an incontestable will of its own — and celebrating things like rejection and humiliation — is extremely challenging to our egos, which are stubbornly fixated on only that which supports our survival.

And by definition, our shadow represents the unknown. It’s the stuff that doesn’t feel true or resonant to our egos.

Yet if you feel a strong resistance to taking the perspective of your fear, take heed.

The more alienating this perspective shift feels, the more power your fear has to compulsively control your behavior.

As mystic and psychoanalyst Carl Jung said:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.

At first, when you change your relationship with fear, you may only feel a tiny little flicker of resonance with it.

That’s perfectly fine. The key is to simply stop telling yourself a story about how much your fear sucks, and how much you want it to just go away.

All you need to do is this: Consider the possibility that the part of you who feels fear is ALSO the part of you that craves the very stuff you think you want to avoid.

This gesture in itself can substantially lighten the impact of your fearful thoughts on your life circumstances.

To Become the Author of Your Own Fate, Learn to Delight in the Spooky Stuff

“All aversion has a dab of irresistible curiosity woven into it.” Carolyn Lovewell

In an Instagram post, Carolyn suggested that we can’t fear something without also being curious about it.

This can seem insane, especially when it comes to spooky stuff like traumatic brain injuries, deep betrayals from our best friends, sudden and clumsy falls from high buildings, etc.

But you can feel the truth of this idea somatically, if you pay close enough attention to the sensations that arise when you think about it.

You might have heard the notion that “Fear is excitement without the breath.”

Said differently, fear is physiologically identical to excitement. The difference lies in the stories we tell ourselves about its sensations.

The Spiritual Implications of Finding Juice in Your Fear

According to many Western Esoteric teachings, when we incarnated, we recognized boundless manna as inherently bland.

We knew our lives on earth weren’t going to be about endless servings of soft-serve vanilla ice cream, laughter, golden retriever hugs, and all-night massages.

We wanted roller coasters. We wanted the fear, the anxiety, the shame, the limits. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have incarnated here.

It’s a truism, but how would we even recognize the thrill of abundance if we didn’t first come to know and dread the 10-day-in-succession rice and broccoli dinners?

Why would we ever crave deep friendship if we didn’t first experience uprootedness, solitude, and loneliness?

As many spiritual teachers have said, desire is born in contrast.

It’s the “negative” experiences that ignite and sharpen our desires for positive experiences. Without the darkness, our motivation for the light might remain unrefined or shapeless.

So, this is the transformation your fear doesn’t want you to have:

You’re not a constricted, powerless being who needs to prove herself worthy of love and a bank account massage: You’re secretly limitless, and that’s boring as f**k.

Let me ask you this. How vanilla would life be if as soon as you decided you wanted something, you got it, with no strings attached?

Depending on how you’re feeling right now, you might think, “Life would be a lot easier.”

And you’re not alone in that assumption. But if you sit with the question for more than a second, you may notice a very small, barely perceptible part of you that craves the drama of limitation.

Can you feel her? She’s quiet; she’s demure: you may not even feel her unless you’re really in touch with your subtle bodily sensations.

And of course, you may not resonate at all with the idea of enjoying your limitations. By definition, the unconscious is the unknown. We stuff our unconscious longings into the storage closets of our psyches.

But the tricky reality is that the more alienated you feel from the sensations of secretly enjoying your limits, the more authorial power they have over our experiences.

In other words, as long as she stays quiet, that fear-loving part of you may be the secret director of your life path.

But only as long as you keep pretending she’s not there.

Here’s the thing. If you were to shift to a parallel reality where everything you wanted was instantly yours, I bet you couldn’t last a week without conjuring up some fresh way to suffer.

It may not necessarily be that you want to be nailed to the cross or prostrated in front of your entire community.

But think about every book or movie you’ve ever consumed. Think of the hero’s journey. There’s always the trial before the entry into the kingdom of bliss and success.

Would the manna even exist, in all its sweetness, if the hero didn’t first go through the valley of doubt and torment?

How excited would you be about publishing your first book or reaching your first 1 million streams if you never had to work your way through the drama and the pity of rejection or scarcity?

So next time you feel afraid, don’t let your fear eat away at you. Play its game. Consent to it.

Your fear puts the delight and magnitude into your future success, ease, and fulfillment.

If You Want to Trap Yourself in Scarcity Consciousness, Program This Belief Deep into Your Psyche

Release these trances for greater freedom with money.

Our beliefs and our actions are two sides of the same coin.

We don’t take action when we have the right information. We take action when we trust our actions will yield fruit.

Whether you have that trust or you’re riddled with self-doubt depends on your conditioned beliefs about money, power, and the value of your time and attention.

Has Society Conditioned You to Push Away Abundance?

My subconscious beliefs have repeatedly interfered with my creative and financial momentum.

I’ve invested in degrees, courses, and teachers only to procrastinate, feel guilty about not acting, but then cringe at my attempts to move forward with the information I’m learning.

From these experiences, I know transformation doesn’t come from having the right information.

Transformation happens when you identify and re-write the subconscious beliefs conditioning how you think about yourself, the world, and your chances of success within it.

But unless your parents carefully curated your reality & were conscious reality creators in their own right, you were exposed to many noxious money beliefs.

Even if money isn’t a problem for you, there’s a high likelihood you could be making more — or experience more ease and flow while stewarding the money you already have — if you examined your unconscious perceptions about money.

The Subconscious Mind Learns Through Repetition

Our money programs come from what we absorb repeatedly.

Our repeated conversations, interactions, and messages from our caregivers influence us through osmosis.

In my case, my parents had jobs they only tolerated. The message I received was something like, “Work is inherently sucky and draining, but that’s just reality.”

That subliminal message has led to my discounting my authentic interests, and expecting money to come from stressful work alone.

Similarly, there are so many repetitive money messages in mainstream films and music.

One common trope is that wealthy people are evil, dull, or selfish. Remember Titanic?

But here’s the good news.

As long as you remember repetition is key, you can erase 95% of your dysfunctional money beliefs by being radically selective about the information you consume.

Then, you can also use hypnosis, subconscious mind reprogramming techniques (such as affirmations or subliminals), and listen to podcasts or read books that inspire forward-moving thoughts around your finances.

Along with those habits, make a habit out of writing down the stories you’re telling about money.

When you make those stories conscious, you defuse their power to control you.

Beware of the Childhood Message that Makes You a Stranger to Money

After lots of introspection, I’ve realized a phrase I heard in childhood may have been the mother of all my scarcity-driven thinking.

It was the dreaded slogan that“Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

In my experience, I subconsciously interpreted this to mean money isn’t readily flowing. It’s hard to make.

This can also show up as the belief money comes from struggle, suffering, and sacrifice (rather than trust in your natural instincts & preferences).

Hello, contraction.

These ideas gave rise to a giant wall between my younger self and the natural flow of money.

This belief can manifest in so many different ways:

• Believing the only stable, feasible way to make money is by doing something you hate or only tolerate.
• Seeing work as a perpetual, inconvenient, taxing struggle, and as a result, pushing away the possibility that what you’re genuinely interested in could ever bring you financial freedom
• Over-committing to projects. When stress feels more familiar to your nervous system than ease, you’ll compulsively take on more work than you can handle.

The most insidious result of the belief “money doesn’t grow on trees” is this:

It diminishes your awareness of the core foundation of positive momentum.

The reality that the small seeds you plant today will soon compound, and you’ll be free to devote the same amount of time & energy to your work (while reaping deeper benefits).

As explained in Atomic Habits, most people delude themselves into believing they have to take massive action to see big transformations in their lives.

But the truth is big transformations come from the accumulation of small, yet consistent daily actions.

If you believe money doesn’t grow on trees — or it doesn’t spring from tiny seeds you water gradually over time — chances are, you’ll believe writing a book, growing a podcast, or starting from ground zero as a course creator will be futile.

You’ll give up before you try.

Or you’ll overwhelm yourself with 10+ hour days, burn out, and quit before you see any momentum.

A Perspective to Help You Burn Through Overwhelm, Fear, or Futility While You Work

Reduce the responsibility until it’s tolerable. You don’t have to fix everything at once. You can just start by fixing the things you want to fix. — Jordan Peterson

This statement is potent medicine against imposter syndrome, fear, and overwhelm because it allows you to start with the low-hanging fruit.

On the days when you feel completely unmotivated, take the smallest possible step.

For example, if you’re interested in creating a course, set a timer for 20 minutes, and brain dump ideas for it.

If you want to write a song, pick 2–3 chords, spend 10 minutes noodling, and note whether anything stands out to you.

And here’s the key: Every time you take those small steps, celebrate them. Reward yourself.

The more you celebrate the actions you feel willing to take, the more naturally and bountifully your motivation will flow.

And remember: Our capacities are different every day.

Sometimes, you’ll only feel the capacity to show up for 20 minutes.

On other days, choosing to devote 20 minutes will be a bridge to a better state: You’ll find that by simply getting into action, your next steps will unfold naturally.

Small steps, learning and returning to the fundamentals of your craft, and consistency create positive, sustainable momentum.

It’s how you go from seeing money generation as a gated garden accessible only by a lucky few…

to knowing it emerges naturally through a potent combination of patience, trust, and consistency.

And if you want to make this process even more concrete, buy a Money Tree, and shower it with love, water, and attention.

See its growth as a devotional to your growing relationship with Money herself.

For more perspectives reality creation, mindset reprogramming, and honoring your unconscious money kinks, join the Fate Hacking Academy, my free newsletter about using occult philosophy to author your own fate & break free of the limiting societal beliefs keeping you stuck.