Stop the Shakes
Let me give you a stunning solution to help deal with the physical affects of fear. For those of you who get super shaky in face of scary things this little gem my friend taught me this week is quite literally a life saver.
When that feeling overtakes you, the biological feeling that fear and terror bring, take TEN drops of Frankincense under your tongue and breathe slowly & deeply for 5 minutes.
Now for the story. I wrote the rest of this on my social media pages but wanted to share in here as a real time example of why fear is not a liar, And, to remind us all, we have tools to assist with this type of thing. May we use them well.
Enjoy the story!
Fear is not a liar.
It is actually a truth finder, a biological fact checker, if you will.
I use to be a classic overachiever. Type A. Only child. Driven. Then I began to get healed of my legitimacy issues and well, I’m fairly chill now. I still goal set, but mostly because I love to dream and think big thoughts. If they happen, super, if not, I’m cool with that too.
As a recovering OA, I still have times when I grow irritated at myself for FEELING the emotion of fear.
To be fair, you do not need to be an overachiever to step into frustration for feeling fear.
In our culture there’s a lot of chatter about having faith over fear, conquer your feats, that sort of thing. While I am totally on board with messing with the negative narrative in life and pushing past pain, there’s something to be said about awareness of our carefully crafted biological design.
In recent days I have had an experience that has caused a great amount of fear to well up. I felt fear. My mind sort of kept going there, but I knew truth and fairly soon my mind settled down, but the body was another frustrating story altogether.
I was shaking for no lie, 3 hours.
My dear friend told me to put 10 drops of Frankincense oil under my tongue. Sadly I had to wait 3 hours to get to some Frankincense because I didn’t have it on hand. Lesson learned apparently.
I knew the truth about the situation, but no matter how much I told myself the truth, and took deep breaths, my body on a cellular level was betraying me.
That is irritating.
I recently wrote something about experiences I have had that have caused a bit of severe trepidation and a comment was made that perhaps I ought to consider some serious ministry to help with fear.
And that’s where our story begins.
You see, you cannot minister out biology.
You cannot cast out butterflies in your stomach or weak knees or shaking hands.
The feelings of fear are often demonized and chastised because we aren’t suppose to fear, right? We are told 365 times do not fear, right? Ok so tell that to my cells. Which I did but the body wasn’t having it.
When my husband died, I was sick at my stomach for weeks because it is a normal response my particular molecular make up of cells have when faced with incredibly difficult circumstances. It’s just how I was designed.
The thing is I didn’t know until just a few days ago that this was in fact, NORMAL.
For years there was this incessant feeling that my faith was lame or needed some increase all because shaky hands and rumbly tummy plagued me when the everything hit the fan.
Let me ask you a question.
Would you fault me or anyone else for getting weak-kneed from standing on the edge of a high cliff? Of course not. Why? Because the weak knees have nothing to do with the faith a person has in God to protect them from falling off said cliff and everything about begin concerned about the sudden impact of pain should that actually happen.
Or what about that butterfly crazy feeling you get on a roller coaster that makes you scream so loud no sound comes out- is that wrong or a lack of faith?
Nope. The body is designed to respond certain ways to certain things.
If someone doesn’t respond in a typical fashion they are likely ex-military or some such and have had a ridiculous amount of training.
For the rest of us, FEELING the fear response is simply the body’s ways of “shaking off” the ick.
So why the write up today?
We are in a season in our world where weird and frankly unnerving things happen globally and individually on the daily and my concern is folks will be told do not fear, fear is a liar. Fear is not a liar. Fear tells the truth, that there is a perceived danger. It may not be a true danger but guess what? Just like with trauma, the body doesn’t choose always respond when we use our logical mind to let it know there isn’t an actual threat. And sometimes, when we tell the body, “hey, danger gone, no biggie, it still needs to eject that gross amount of cortisol and adrenaline in the form of shaking or the need to fast food for awhile etc.
The other reason to share this new to me revelation is because I know some of you work so very hard at not feeling the effects of fear and get frustrated because you can’t seem to shake it.
I know many of you and YOUR KIDS deal with anxiety and shame because of it, no matter how much you pray, use your holistic tools and all that.
It’s like everything else- maybe the problem isn’t that you or I need to conquer the negative emotions. Maybe that’s already been done. Maybe, just maybe now the challenge lies in respecting the body’s natural response to perceived danger, acknowledging the need to get it out and proceed accordingly with however and whatever helps flush the response out.
Some people go for a run. Some sit down and furiously journal. Some people start mad cleaning sprees decluttering. Some people go behind abandoned grocery stores and smash plates.
Whatever it is for you, consider respecting your design of trauma and danger response, and then proceed accordingly.