If anxiety had a best friend it would be fear, and believe it or not, fear is your friend also. Fear is your informant; it tells you when you are out of alignment with knowing your own capacity for strength. Most of us ignore fear, as admitting to fear is admitting to our inability to cope. But without fear, you wouldn’t be able to break through your limits and grow to be the amazing person you were born to be.

 Anxiety is not your friend, but if we don’t listen to fear’s message and step up to life’s challenges, fear goes and gets its best mate anxiety, thinking two voices might get your attention. We then become paralyzed with indecision and we freeze.

 There are two forms of intuition, the gut brain, which responds to fearful situations with a “freeze, fight or flight” reaction, and the heart brain, which feels its way into understanding. By becoming curious about our feeling of fear, it opens and offers up and intuitive heart lead knowing. Often without words, but we have a course of action that has a sense of grace about it. It follows in the right direction and not always the direction you were pushing for, but a better one in the long term. Fear always gives way to grace, which moves you, when we listen to it.

 No matter how terrible the situation, grace is always waiting for us, like a boat on the side of the water, when the jetty is on fire. When we feel we are at a point of impasse, when everything feels impossible, we just need to become curious and open to our heart intuition. We might not know the way out, but when we listen to our fear and acknowledge it, then it gives way to hope. We start to hold for a resolution and in this hope, grace steps into the boxing ring and our obstacles no longer feel like blows. We hope for a grander purpose behind our troubles.

 They say everything has a meaning. But I don’t believe it has, unless you turn every difficult thing you live through into a lesson you have grown from. Otherwise the pain of the difficulty grows through you, like the red in raspberry ripple ice-cream. Fear is your friend; don’t overcome it, but work with it as a student to a teacher.