Hello, Salam, Shalom, Aloha, Sat Sri Akal, Namaste, Hola! So good to be back here with you. Hey! If you don’t know me, my name is Samia Bano and I am your happiness expert and author of the book - “Make Change Fun and Easy: How to Create Inner Peace to World Peace in 3 Simple Steps”.

So, that’s the topic I love to talk about the most. And one really important thing that can make change NOT fun and easy is when we feel fear. Fear is an emotion that has held me back from living the life I love, from living the life I’ve dreamed of more than any other emotion. It’s such a powerful controller of my behavior, and I think that’s the case with pretty much all of us. After all, fear is a signal from our brain that is warning us that hey, I foresee some kind of danger, some kind of threat. I’m concerned that I’m going to get hurt, my safety is in jeopardy. So when the brain senses any danger it produces the feeling of fear and so no wonder it is such a strong feeling, such an intense feeling, and it tends to have such a huge impact on our behavior.

And so for years, I struggled to figure out how to deal with my fear. How do I get over it? How do I continue to work through it if necessary? I‘ve listened to hundreds of different youtube videos and read so many different books on this issue of how do I deal with my fear? How do I overcome it? How do I transform it? You know when I was first introduced to this idea of transforming fear, I found it very exciting because...I was like “Oh! That’s the direction I want to go in. Then I don’t really have to feel fear, it'll transform into something else”...

Actually in my book, I have a whole section in here talking about how we can transform our fear into our friend. When I talked about that in this book, that was the best advice, the best wisdom that I had access to at that time. Since then, I have grown even wiser. And I have found an even more amazing way to understand fear and to just have it disappear from my life! And I’m so excited to share that with you.

“Fear is an Illusion” - that’s right! I really have come to believe in the truth of this idea that fear is actually an illusion. An illusion in what sense? Well, I’m going to share with you something I learned from one of my teachers, Johnnie Cass. He said, “fear is an illusion created because we have bought into the myth of abandonment”. Think about that.

What he was teaching us, or inviting us to consider and reflect on, is the idea that really behind all our fear is that we feel abandoned, that we feel alone. We have developed a deep belief that in this moment when I’m experiencing fear I am alone. I have been abandoned, I don’t have help. I don’t have enough strength myself, I don’t have enough capacity, knowledge, whatever else may be required. I don’t have enough of it myself to deal with this situation. And there is no one else here capable of helping me, protecting me through whatever this difficult situation is, through whatever is triggering these signals of “danger, danger, danger” in my brain.

Because when you feel alone and believe you’re alone like that .. that is actually at the root of the fear that you’re feeling, and that fear could take on many forms. For example, for me the fear of not being believed as a survivor of child sexual abuse was a huge one for me. And you know there’s so many different reasons fear can crop up. But Johnnie Cass, my teacher, invited us to reflect and go beyond the surface to the root of why I’m feeling fear.

And you know one of the things that really helps me to understand this idea and that actually convinced me that this was true is something that I actually shared with you in my broadcast last week... I was telling you that as a Muslim, one of the things we are taught to do is when you find yourself feeling stressed, worried, anxious, scared in any kind of difficult circumstance, is that you call out to God and you seek God’s refuge. Why should we do that? How does that really help us?

At a time when you’re feeling fear, and think about the definition of fear as what my teacher Johnnie taught us, “fear is an illusion created because we have bought into the myth of abandonment”... Doesn’t it make sense? Can you see the connection? This is something that I also talked about last week...

So remember one thing that we are able to do is actually remind ourselves of God’s presence in our life right now. As a Muslim I also believe that God is ever present. And God is not only ever present, but God loves me completely and continuously. There is never a moment when God doesn’t love me or when God abandons me. God’s always with me, always taking care of me, always helping me, wanting to help me, through whatever the difficult circumstance or adversity might be. It doesn’t matter. And the thing is I also believe that God is all powerful, God is all knowing, God is all wise, God is just, the most just, the most compassionate, the most merciful. I also believe that this being who has all of these qualities is with me now, every moment, helping me, protecting me, loving me…

When I recognize I’m not only seeking God’s refuge, but I’m actually already in God’s refuge now, I cannot feel alone anymore, true or true?! And so in that moment my sense of loneliness or being abandoned is broken and the fear disappears. Because now the brain has no more reason to keep giving me this alarm, to keep putting out the signal of “danger, danger, danger”... It has no more reason to send out the signal because it’s feeling so calm and relaxed in the knowing and the recognition that God is right here with us, helping us, loving us, taking care of us. No matter what the situation is we can get through it, we’ll get through it one way or another and come out just fine on the other side.

I reflected on this and realized the truth of it. For me, it changed my life, it changed my relationship to my experience of fear and how I deal with my feeling of fear whenever I experience it. And I’m telling you, with practice you can really use this technique to make fear disappear from your mind, from your feelings, from your heart. Sometimes all it takes is a few seconds of just really focusing on this reminder, and raising your consciousness to this idea of, “I’m not alone, and I’ve not been abandoned”.

If you don’t believe in the concept of God in the way that I do, that’s alright. I still encourage you to find other evidence in your life experience that you are not alone. That you can access help and support when you need it. So even if you feel alone in this moment, can you at least believe that you can find someone to help you?

Don’t give up hope… Focus on finding some help, some support, that can get you through this difficult time, that can help you feel not alone in this moment. Then your fear can lessen and at least you can bring it down to a point where it becomes very manageable.

If you find yourself struggling even with this, remember what I shared a week or two ago… Albert Einstein said, “One of the most important decisions that you make in your life is whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe”.

...Like me, put in some real effort in your life to find what evidence you can that you do live in a friendly universe. Because if you can believe that you live in a friendly universe then you can believe that you can find the help and support that you need when you need it.

So, yes please do this to yourself and I assure you that if you really practice implementing these ideas in your life, it will change your life for the better. It will help just transform your relationship to how you see fear, understand fear, deal with fear.

Until next time, Salam, Shalom, Namaste, Sat Sri Akal, Aloha, Hola!