I am sitting on my bed, with Noah asleep beside me, with the doors wide open to the garden watching the birds outside and reflecting on how it has taken me so long to get back to writing newsletters and blogs this year. I had many good intentions to write more regularly; and while holidays, Olivia starting a new school and the lockdowns created less space to write; the real reason I hadn’t written was that I was also feeling a lot of resistance and fear in communicating in this way.

I love receiving email newsletters and reading blogs, but I was SO hesitant to do it myself.

I had thoughts running through my head like:
‘Who am I to write a newsletter?’
‘What if no one reads it?’
‘What if I can’t find anything interesting to say?’
‘My email list is so small, I should grow it more first…’
‘It takes too long to write, and I don’t have enough time and space right now’
‘I need to do X, Y, Z first before I write…’

In fear and resistance I kept putting it off, and kept putting it off. I am being gentle and compassionate with myself, while also seeing the patterns that were arising and deciding to move forward rather than stay with the fears.

Pachad and Yirah

Tara Mohr in her book ‘Playing Big’ talks about two different kinds of fear.

The first one is pachad. “Pachad is the fear of projected or imagined things, ‘the fear of the phantom, the fear whose object is imagined. Pachad is the overreactive, irrational fear that stems from worries about what could happen, about the worst-case scenarios we imagine.”

This is the fear which often speaks through your inner critic and can fire when we perceive a potential threat to our emotional comfort zone.

The second type of fear is yirah, which has three different meanings:
“1. It is the feeling that overcomes us when we inhabit a larger space than we are used to.
2. It is the feeling we experience when we suddenly come into possession of considerably more energy than we had before
3. It is what feel in the presence of the divine.”

Yirah. Even that word helps me feel more expansive.

For many women playing bigger, sharing our voice or stepping into something new brings forward both pachad and yirah. The powerful work is to shift away from pachad and towards yirah.

I was definitely feeling pachad as I thought about all the different what-ifs about writing a newsletter and sharing my wirting online. The external definitions around what success looks like, and sooo wanting to be liked and given a good girl star.

I felt the shift from pachad as I quieted and managed the little voice inside me. I honoured the fears and acknowledged them. Seeing how they were trying to protect me from being hurt or embarrassed, but also knowing that I am a 41 year old woman who can handle some emotional roadbumps if need be.

I would be more disappointed if I didn’t move forward to play and experiment.

I found yirah when I actually sat down and was present to what I wanted to bring forward. When I thought about what I wanted my life to look like, and how writing and connecting with others fell into that. How I WANTED to write to YOU, rather than a having to. Then I opened up to the more expansive feeling of yirah.

The yirah of stepping into a larger space than I am used to (I am much more comfortable writing a corporate board pack), and I feel the energy that is coming to me to write this. I feel like I am tapping into a part of myself that is yearning to come through. A dream to write, express, share and discuss what it means to have a wise, wild and free life.

Tools to support you

If you have pachad coming up in your life, there are many different tools out there that can help you move out of it. A few that have worked for me are:

• Tap into your inner mentor or wise woman and see what she would do in the situation
• Come back to the present moment through noticing your surroundings, or coming back to your breath, and asking “What is the situation right now”.
• Analyse it, getting specific about it and what could really happen. What is the likelihood of it happening? What would the outcome be? Tim Ferriss has a great exercise called the ‘Fear Setting exercise’. Where instead of goal setting you fear set. What is really the worst that could happen, and what would you do then?
• Be completely present to the fear, and allow it to move through your body. Feel where the fear is being held in your body, and hold your attention there, breathing and sitting with whatever comes up until the waves of emotion feel cleared (I instinctively felt into this one today, and held the tenderness of being scared to use my voice in this way.)

So….. here I am.

Writing to you.

Craving deeper connection with others, and wanting to develop a richness of conversation on the big stuff we lie in bed at 2am thinking about, and that I find hard to develop solely on social media.

Wanting to practice expressing myself in different ways, and be more open to play and experiment… and the only way to do this is to play and experiment

Thank you for being here on this journey with me.