Why Love is the Opposite of Fear

Would you agree with me, if I said that all of our past and present problems come from fear?

Where do wars come from? They come from fear. Fear of scarcity first of all –  you might call it greed, but that’s just an exacerbated fear of scarcity. And  fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar.

Where does racism come from? Fear again. And bullying? And sexism? And religious fanaticism? Fear, fear, fear! We’re scared of death, but we’re equally scared of life.

We’re scared someone else might be stronger than us, better looking, smarter, richer, more successful, more loved… We’re scared of other people’s opinions, we’re scared of putting on weight, of getting dumped by our spouse, of getting betrayed by our friends, we’re scared of the opposite sex, of speaking in public, of being ridiculed, rejected, fired….

That’s a tough, grim life. Fear destroys our spirit and our body. It weakens our immune system, lowers our intelligence, our overall capabilities, it makes our heart and mind race, it makes us fall off track, deprives us of all joy, all hope, all confidence.

Imagine if we knew no fear. How would we go through life? I’m not talking about being reckless of course, we don’t want to do silly things and injure ourselves or others. I’m talking about knowing, understanding, deep in our hearts, that all’s well – even if it doesn’t always look like it is.

Imagine if we were able to appreciate others for what they are, and respect them and their life journey as if it were our own. Because you see, chances are, their life journey actually IS our own.

Please bear with me for another few lines, before you call me a fool and leave these pages.

I’ve been to the place where we all come from. It’s a beautiful place. And I believe that everyone should go there a few times in their lives.

Are you still with me?

The place I’m talking about is where we go when we’re not busy living one of our lives over here. Yes, we do live many lives, we do incarnate many times, and the memory of all these lives is stored in our brain, in places that we get less and less used to accessing after the age of 5. Small children often remember things from their previous lives and talk about it, and we might think it’s all fantasy… but they’re sometimes recalling things from their past.

When we go to school in the West, we almost exclusively develop our analytical, rational mind, the one that controls speech, writing, abstract thinking, mathematics; the one that’s used for absorbing data, filing information, translating it into different codes and languages, the one we use for all practical purposes. So we lose touch with our subconscious and unconscious mind more and more, and just forget how to access it. This part of our mind is related to emotions, creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, inspiration, and to everything spiritual and also dreamlike.

But an experienced hypnotherapist can help us unlock this part of ourselves.

It’s nothing woo-woo or magical, nothing to do with superstition or special powers only a few people have. We have so many memories, that are very important – although hidden –  part of us all, of our lives, of who we are. In order to access them, we need to enter our unconscious^[1] mind, and this is done by lowering the electrical activity of our brain.

The energy level our brain is at when we are awake is called the Beta state. Here our waves have an average frequency of around 22 cycles per second. When we calm our brain waves down in the direction of sleep (called the Delta state, with an average frequency of around 2 cycles per second) we go through two more electrical activity levels, the Alpha state, at around 10 cycles and the Theta state, at around 6 cycles per second. The Theta state is where we get to access our unconscious mind.

Now, with someone experienced guiding us there and talking to us, we won’t fall asleep, and we’ll experience this much lower energy level of our mind while remaining awake. That’s why, when we’re doing a hypnosis session, we are perfectly aware of everything around us, and we will remember everything when we come back to our waking Beta state. We can stay there for as long as we need to, so we can follow our memories back and forth, and look for clues and answers to our questions. These sessions typically last a few hours.

The memories from our other lives are no different than the ones from this life. They’re not any stronger or weaker, they’re just another set of our own memories. And we see ourselves as us, but with a different name, maybe different gender, maybe living in a different culture, and usually living in a different time. We see some people we recognise straightaway. Some of our nearest and dearest have already shared some other lives with us. Maybe our mother in this life was our husband before, our best friend was our sister, our mentor was our kid. Sometimes our spouse has been our spouse a few times before, sometimes with switched genders for one or both of us.

It’s amazing when you’re a middle-aged woman as I am now, for example, experiencing yourself again as a small child, but somewhere else, a totally different childhood. Or experiencing yourself as an old woman and seeing the moment of your death, which by the way, is an amazingly beautiful moment… Or experiencing yourself as a man, in a couple with your same blond husband from this life, only that he was a dark-haired woman that other time.

These are just a few random details (and that’s already amazing enough!) but what absolutely blew my mind was, understanding how everything we do in life, could be done in many different ways as well. At every moment, we are choosing between a series of different turns, and each one of them would take us on a completely different path.

In one of the lives I remembered, I left my country and went abroad looking for a better life. I died rather old, after a very average, uneventful life. Then my hypnotist took me back to the moment I decided to leave and asked me to look at how my life would have been if I had made the decision to stay in my country instead. I didn’t question that, I just did it, and I saw a shorter and more difficult life, but it was so happy, so fulfilled. I burst out crying and jolted out of hypnosis.

All possibilities are there at all times, all choices can be made, it’s up to us.

I was so confused… how could I see a life I didn’t really live? And how could I get so emotional about it? It really hit me like a storm. And he explained to me that all possibilities are there at all times, all choices can be made, it’s up to us. They’re all equally present, equally likely, equally valid. They’re on parallel timelines. This might sound a bit strange – unless you’re familiar with quantum physics – but they’re all equally real. Do you remember the movie “Sliding Doors”?

“I screwed up there”, I said. He smiled and said, “Well, in a way, you did!” He then got me back under, took me back to the shorter but happier life, and had me ask that “version” of myself what I should take away from that. And the answer came very clear, “don’t run away from things because they look hard!”. Exactly what I needed to hear.

Now imagine for example a chauvinistic white male going back and reliving that time when he was a woman, that other time when he was black, that other time when he was gay; and that rather tough life when he was a woman, and black, and gay, all at the same time, haha! Imagine a rich person experiencing themselves as poor, or the other way round. A bully or a murderer experiencing themselves as a victim, or the other way round. We have all been an artist at some stage, a criminal, a king, a baker, a prostitute, a genius; we’ve been disabled, we got killed in a battle, we’ve been mentally ill, we’ve been a mother of six, we drowned when we were five…

That was – or better, IS! – us, you, me, all the way. And when we really understand this, my bet is that we will become more tolerant and compassionate with all those people we would have thought are not like us… But here’s the thing, everyone on the planet is like us! No one is different from us! They might be playing a different role from ours right now, but it’s all a big game or a big theatre play, and we’ll all play a different role again, next time around.

When we are doing a session of this kind, we’re revisiting our past experiences, no matter if they go back a few years, or a few hundred years, or a few thousand years. In our minds, it’s just one uninterrupted string of memories.

Can you see what this ultimately means? It means that death does not exist.

We do die to people around us, for sure. Exactly like a character in a theatre play who exits the scene at the end of their role. They’ll walk backstage and won’t be seen again, but they’re far from dead! They’ll sit in their dressing room, looking at themselves in the mirror, reflecting on how they played. Some nights they’ll feel fantastic, some other nights they’ll be less pleased with themselves. They might take off their shoes and put their feet up, and think about something new they want to try out next time.