Close your eyes and turn your awareness inwards, to the internal sensations of your body- and simply breathe. 

Use your new skill of somatic awareness to tune into your body. What are the sensations you feel there?

And ask yourself- are you allowing yourself to be fully affected by the sensations of your inner world, and if not see if you can allow yourself to feel everything. 

Begin to reflect on these self enquiries that can help you get to know yourself on a deeper level and help you live with less stress and tension. 

There is the true inner self, the core self that is the reality of you. This is where your body holds the reactions without the mind’s stories. Reactions to stress, overwhelm, events from childhood, grief, loss, fear and disappointment.

We then have the outer layer that is like a mask that we present to the world. We all do it- this is not a judgement. This is our ego and this is what it is designed to do. But if the gap between our core self and the outer self gets too big we start to live out of balance, and our core emotions are pushed down into our cells, muscles, organs and this is what becomes our conflict, our stress, our fight or flight response, our freeze and potential illness, and behavioural patterns that don’t serve us. 

We start to purposefully constrain ourselves as children. We do this to please our parents. To fit into our family model. To fit into school. It takes energy to maintain this defence. We have a vicious cycle of maintaining the outer us and closing off the inner us where the suffering is and the true emotions. We carry armour, a defensiveness, a guarding against this suffering and this is what InBalance is always trying to integrate.

Identifying too much with the mask diminishes us. 

When we’re in balance with our inner self, we’re operating from our whole. We’ve all had glimpses of this- feeling connected, love, happy but it is mixed with blocks, stress and tension.

But we all have the ability to stop identifying with the ego as much, to lessen the mask one bit at a time. Through this work we can meet challenges and opportunities with our full potential, that is our full self and not be held by the constraints of blocked emotions and energy.

We can either live from a fear based reality where we protect our world, preventing ourselves from fully feeling all our emotions or we can live from a love based world, where we accept that life can be tough. That we will hurt, that we will be afraid but that we will develop and grow from living in this full spectrum of our emotions. 

Fear comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, phobias, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening.

It can be Fear of loss,  failure, of being hurt, looking stupid, fear of being alone and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, and not death as in the end of our lives, but death of the safety that we have trapped ourselves in. By wearing our mask.

Stepping into the fear allows us to make mistakes and recognise that this is where the growth lies. 

When we deny ourselves the full experience of our expression as a human, we not only deny the things we don’t like, but we also deny ourselves the full ability to love. To give. To receive. This is the true cost of fear. 

It is not possible to create separation in our lives without denying our whole selves. 

Let’s not be afraid. The only thing to fear is being held in by fear. As you start to spread your wings to a life with a more balanced nervous system, use your breath and your body-mind connection to feel the fear, feel the stress, feel the anxiety and from this place allow it to transform into acceptance, courage, resilience and love. 

And now we will do a brief inquiry into our fear.

I would like you to ask yourself, what are you most afraid of? 

And as you ask this question, I want you to notice where you feel a constriction in your body. This might be in your chest, your belly, your back.

And if you don’t feel anything, repeat the question again.

What if I couldn’t make this fear go away? Breath slow and deep.

What do you get out of that contraction being there?

How is it serving you?

And I want you to take a pair of metaphorical hands and place them round the fear and just be with it. Like a parent would a child and say, “Thank you for being here. You’re welcome to stay.”

Say thank you to yourself for doing this work. Show yourself gratitude. Let it resonate in your body. Take it on in every cell.