A few years ago I went to a local meetup about spirituality.

I almost never go to those things because I am used to teaching and have to really watch myself to keep from stepping on toes.

It’s one of the side effects of teaching 2-3x a week about spiritual matters. You get used to answering people’s spirituality questions and automatically think people want to hear your opinion everywhere. Ha! (It’s not true, for the record.)

There was a man at this meeting who really opened my eyes to a serious problem in the spiritual community.

He was a law of attraction coach – or that’s how he introduced himself.

He asserted that we were not programmed to experience fear. I honestly thought he was kidding at first, because each human being is equipped with an amygdala and adrenal glands, two organs that are specifically designed to help us identify danger and give us an extra boost of energy if a bear tries to attack us.

In the event of a bear attack, your amygdala will send a signal to your nervous system to tense and prepare fight or flight protocols. Then, the adrenal glands give you a burst of adrenaline so you can outrun/outsmart/out fight said bear.

As society as evolved, there aren’t that many bear attacks (yay!), but our amygdala and our adrenal glands still function like they did when there were REAL dangers to our physical bodies.

This little science lesson is important for what happened next.

Well, the law-of-attraction guy stated that we weren’t programmed to experience fear. I thought it was a joke, so I responded a little sarcastically.

Then, I watched and felt as he reacted. He pulled his energy back because he didn’t feel safe. He felt fear (what, what?!?), and retreated.

I really didn’t mean to make him feel unsafe, but human communication is difficult, and sometimes my foot and my mouth are good friends.

I became intrigued by his response and his belief that we weren’t programmed – as human beings – to feel fear so I looked up his website. The one that was on his business card that he handed out to everyone when he was introducing himself.

There was no website anymore. He hadn’t kept it up.

I became even more intrigued. If his assertions about fear were correct – that it was a social construction and that each person could unlearn the experience of fear, then why was he holding back?

What the crap was going on

So I observed.

I observed lots of spiritual people who made similar claims.

I noticed something really strange.

The people who most denied fear were the ones who experienced it the most!

To be honest, I started looking with the hope there was some way to just turn fear off. Maybe they had simply discovered a trick or a technique I hadn’t heard of.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, I found that many of these people were living in denial, saying they weren’t experiencing fear when they were — pretending to be at peace when they were really too scared to admit they weren’t “evolved enough” to avoid fear.

Beware of teachers who say fear isn’t human or shows that you’re not spiritual “enough.”

It’s a load of bullshit, even if they are well-meaning.

Do you know how fear thrives? By making sure you’re not aware of it.

Because you are only as emotionally free as the emotions you’re willing to experience.

If you create a long list of emotions that you don’t give yourself permission to have, guess what? When they come up,  you’ll stuff them down, avoid them, eat them, start a fight with your friend or significant other, or simply try to convince yourself that you’re not experiencing what you experience.

Here’s what to do instead…

For emotional freedom, you’ll want to be willing to feel the whole range of human emotion fully.

You don’t have to impulsively act on every emotion.

It’s possible (and wise) to have an emotion, feel it fully, release it fully and not act on it.

If you’re feeling rage, you won’t necessarily go on a rage rampage because you gave yourself permission to feel that emotion.

If you’re feeling anxiety, you won’t *actually* die from a panic attack or the discomfort of that anxiety.

Being willing to feel every big emotion doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll need to, either.

You may find that being willing to feel a big emotion is all you need for it to dissolve.

And maybe it won’t be, but it’s safe to feel your feelings.

The more you are able and willing to do this, the easier it will be to let go of unhelpful emotions and release emotional clutter.

And that, my friend, is how you really release fear.