Energy and Reality: How to Improve Your Relationship with Reality to Increase Your Energy Levels and Go Crush Life

Published on

Recharging your batteries and unleashing energy by revamping your relationship with reality and letting go of illusions.

Energy is for Everybody

This article is going to show you how you can increase your energy levels and have more fire in your belly to go out there and crush your goals. We’re gonna remind you of some basic stuff that may already know (but not necessarily be acting on) as well as some more off-the-wall approaches that you may not have considered before.

If you follow the tips shared in this article, I guarantee that you will have more energy – the only way this article won’t help you is if you read it and don’t act on it.

So many people, especially as they get older, start to convince themselves that they don’t have the kind of energy that they ‘used’ to and that there’s nothing they can do about it. They convince themselves that this is a product of getting older and that the lethargy and sluggishness that comes with it is just a part of hurtling towards death at an inexorable and unstoppable speed! Wrong!

This article is going to show you that the main cause of a lack of energy is a poor relationship with reality that leads to wasting the energy that you could be accessing on fighting to maintain illusions about yourself, the world, and reality instead.

Once you learn to understand where these illusions come from and why you ‘need’ them to play a role in your life, you can let go of them, stop fighting, and free up your realness to live your real life and make the most of your real energy.

Saying that you “don’t have energy” is ridiculous because it’s a denial of your true nature: as a human being, you are energy. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re energy in a ‘mystical’ sense – just that you’re connected to the whole of everything else and that you can tap into that no matter what as long as you make the right choices and set the right boundaries in your life.

Having more energy will allow you to:

Get more done with your time.
Make better choices.
Have better relationships with the people you care about (and the ones you don’t).
Feel more alive.
Have more confidence.
Be able to get more done with your life and dedicate yourself to a purpose that makes you more of yourself and the world a better place.

This article is going to help you examine how you can do this by letting go of some of your illusions about yourself, the world, and reality.

Energy & Reality: What We'll Cover in This Article

Recharging your batteries and unleashing energy by revamping your relationship with reality and letting go of illusions.

Illusions: The ‘Heaviest’ Things Known to Mankind

A major premise of everything that you’re about to read in this article is that the main ‘thing’ that takes away your energy is an over-reliance on your illusions, especially a tendency to fight for these illusions in the face of reality.

Getting more energy comes from understanding that things in reality work in a certain way and that you have to align yourself with this ‘way’ in order to reach the state of harmony that will allow you to energise yourself.

In short, you’re either identifying with a version of yourself that is in a state of flow and moving with life itself or you’re identifying with a version of yourself that isn’t currently flowing (because of illusory conceptual / fragmented barriers) and which is therefore in a state of friction between idea and reality. One of these versions unblocks energy and the other acts as a barrier to giving or receiving energy.

Low energy people have made ‘bad’ choices that have put them out-of-touch with reality and out of the state of flow that is required to feel a sense of really being alive and to charge our batteries. In other words, low energy people have made the choice for illusion over reality and this has led to a state of lethargy as the weight of their illusions holds them down and stops them from really flowing with life.

High energy people aren’t adding anything – they are simply choosing to remove the ideas that hold them back from themselves, the world, and reality so that they can truly flow and keep getting more energy the more ‘real’ they grow.

What you read below is going to help you identify some of the most common illusions that we carry which prevent us from accessing the amount of energy we’re naturally able to access in our state of realness.

Biopsychosocial Illusions and Increased Energy

To increase your energy and live in a real way, you need to ensure that you have the minimum amount of illusions about yourself, the world, and reality at three main levels:

Biological: You need to work on yourself at the level of your body – this almost goes without saying but so many people that I take on as coaching clients neglect this aspect of their growth and jump right into the mental or ‘spiritual’ side of things.

If you treat your body in an unreal way and cultivate an unhealthy relationship with it, then your energy levels will never be what they can be, and you will never reach your full potential and grow real.

More than just the aesthetic or physical side of things, the illusions that we carry about our own biological instincts or emotions and what we can do with them also affects our energy levels on a daily basis. We will discuss this in more detail later in this article.

Psychological: The illusions that we carry about ourselves at the level of our own psychology serve to put us in a constant battle with reality (which never goes anywhere) and this can lead to us wasting energy or draining ourselves as we attempt to keep these illusions alive.

These psychological illusions can take the shape of an unreal self-image (or mask) we try to uphold of ourselves to hide from our own ‘stuff’, erroneous ideas about ourselves, the world, and reality, or any beliefs that are motivated by the fear, pride, and desire of the ego over anything real.

Reconfiguring all these psychological areas can alleviate the friction between us and reality and stop us having to waste time in battling to uphold something that doesn’t exist (and wasting our energy). Ultimately, our psychological relationship with our own ‘stuff’ (fears, doubts, emotions, beliefs, etc.) affects the levels of energy that we have in our lives.

Social: At the level of our social self, the illusions that we carry and fight to keep alive can lead to us wasting energy on unreal relationships with phantasms that don’t really exist, as well as getting caught up in drama or unreal conflict with people that don’t really need to be in our lives.

When we have illusions about other people and their positions in our life, we can create an unreal world for ourselves that is populated with energy vampires and dysfunctional people that can drain us of our natural vigour.

Understanding the biological and psychological reasons for us choosing to keep these ‘toxic’ relationships in our lives allows us to separate the real from the unreal and to let go of anything that is holding us back or weighing us down.

Once these three areas have been reconfigured so that you have the best possible relationship with reality at each level, you can become more real in yourself and live a real, energised life as your real self re-emerges.

If you don’t feel any energy, you don’t feel your real self.

What follows will give you practical steps to get there.

Body / Mind / Realness

This article is going to help you look at practical steps for building energy (or unleashing it) from the ground up: we will start on the foundation of your body (biological), then your mind (psychological and social), then look at how to operate once you’ve unplugged the energy of your realness.

The reason we look at things in this order is that this is the healthiest way for you to work on yourself: starting to grow real by improving your relationship with your body sets the healthiest foundation for you to understand what you’re capable of but to also learn the skills and qualities such as discipline etc. that will allow you to focus on the deeper ‘stuff’ of your mental and social experience of yourself.

In short, we’ll be looking at three main areas:

Body – The biological stuff and the illusions you can carry at this level.

Mind – The psychological and social illusions that you carry about yourself, the world, and reality (social is included as ‘mind’ because our social relationships affect our self-image and what we think is possible).

Realness – What you’re left with when you let go of your illusions and start to flow with your life by getting on the Train and living a life of purpose around your real values.

We can think of these areas in terms of a simple analogy around playing cards:

Biological: The cards you’ve been dealt by life and your genetic potential.

Psychological: What you believe you can do with the cards you’ve been dealt.

Social: What the world says you can do with the cards you want to play (or what you think the world will allow you to do).

Realness: The version of you that emerges (or re-emerges) as you let go of the illusions you were hiding behind at each of these levels.

Understanding the cards that we have to play with and letting go of any false ideas about what we can do with them frees us up to play the game of life with more energy.

BODY

Move it: So many people with low energy are stuck in their heads instead of embracing their bodies and all of its potential. This is the major illusion that holds most of us back at this level: that our bodies don’t need looking after or that we can just do ‘nothing’ and expect our bodies to maintain energy levels.

Newsflash: your body will give you as much energy as you ask it to give you – if you’re sitting in front of a computer all day during the week and going from one chair to another on the weekend then your relationship with your body is an unreal one and that will be reflected in your mental and energetic experience of yourself.

Start exercising and ask your body to raise its energy levels by putting it through its paces. You don’t have to climb Everest every weekend or run a marathon but go for a walk, do some push-ups, stretch, take up a dance class – it doesn’t matter as long as it works for you and it gets your body moving.

If you haven’t worked out in a while, start small and then build in increments. Everything is a process and you can build on your progress day by day (10 push-ups this week, 20 a month from now). The aim is to find something that works for you in the context of your life but to keep pushing yourself – if you avoid your body then you avoid your life and have less energy as you go about whatever else you’re attempting to live instead of it.

Every day, you need to do something physical – even if it’s only something ‘small’. As the old saying goes, you either use it or lose it; don’t fall into the trap of not using your body and then wondering where it went.

Your body is a machine: Your body has evolved over millions of years to be able to survive the harsh conditions of the fragmented earth that we live on. This ‘evolution’ has led to certain things being ‘good’ for your body and certain things being ‘bad’ for it. If you do the things that are ‘good’ for it, then you’ll have more energy; if you do the things that are ‘bad’ for it, then you won’t. This seems pretty simple, and it is, but we can easily forget this in the modern world.

Your body is a machine and what you put into it will affect what you are able to get out of it. If you put diesel in a petrol engine it won’t get anywhere, and this can be seen as an analogy for your body: putting fake, processed foods into it is going to make you feel worse than if you put real, whole foods into it. Keeping it hydrated with water is going to make it work better than if you try and quench your thirst with sugary drinks all the time or coffee etc.

Your body also evolved to feel better in some environments than others – you don’t need to be sat down in a cubicle all day or festering in some office with clinically sterile lighting: go outside and get some fresh air and sunlight.

We don’t need to write loads here but your body has needs and you either meet them and feel the energy of being real or you feel the torpor of being unreal. The illusion that holds us all back is that our body is just some passive thing that we’re disconnected from – connect to it by getting in it and showing it who’s boss (by exercising it) and give it the fuel and environmental stimuli required for it to flourish.

If you want energy, you can’t sit around eating shit all day and then doing nothing. It’s pretty simple but easy to forget in a world of distractions where we jump right into the ‘mental’ causes of our problems instead of looking at our most basic relationships with our own body.

Master your instincts and emotions: Many of the problems in your life come from your relationship with your own biological wiring in the form of your instincts and your emotional life. Your instincts can be seen as evolved ‘prompts’ that come from your body and which are designed to push you in the direction of either survival or procreation (or both); your emotions are bodily sensations that arise as a response to what you perceive in the world.

Both instincts and emotions arise outside of your conscious awareness (i.e. you don’t choose for them to arise) but this doesn’t mean that you can’t choose to act or not act upon them. Get your balls back and be active; not reactive.

The illusion about your body at this level is that you have to act on whatever emotions or instincts arise within you. Wrong! If you only act on your emotions or instincts then your life will spiral into a state of chaos that comes from making bad choices – if every time you get horny (instinct) or angry (emotion), for example, you decide to act on it then your life will soon become a stressful one and you’ll have less energy.

Letting go of the illusion that you are a slave to the desires or compulsions of the body allows you to make ‘good’ choices by responding to what arises inside you instead of only reacting to it. This allows you to act in alignment with your values and purpose instead of just short-term motivations and to free up more space for you to have energy for yourself in the long-term.

In short, your relationship with your body is about the choices that you make – both internally and externally. Internally, you can choose whether or not to act on the instincts and emotions that arise within you and to either give in to short-term motivation or to channel your energy into long-term ambition. Externally, you can choose whether or not to put things into your body that are ‘good’ for it and to move it in a way that engenders lasting active health instead of passive vegetation and degradation.

Short version: If you treat your body as something that it isn’t, then you’re gonna have a bad time. Choose to relate to your body in a way that gives you energy – not only ever takes it away.

A lot of what you read on this website and in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is about the way we can relate to our own minds and improve our relationship with ourselves, the world, and reality.

In terms of letting go of our illusions, we can let go of certain ideas about ourselves at the level of our psychology:

Test assumptions about self, world, and reality: Our experience of the world is informed by our image of ourselves and the ideas that we carry as we make our way through life. If we attach too rigidly here then we will create friction between ourselves and reality and waste our energy. The ‘cure’ for this is to test our assumptions and to ensure that the interpretations we use to make sense of reality are actually pointing back to reality, not something else.

In short, this means living in such a way that we: 1) Keep uncovering the truth, and 2) Keep putting it into action.

See Personal Revolutions for a whole bunch of ‘Self-Guidance Questions’ to help you test your assumptions about yourself, the world, and reality or have a look at my ‘Unicornitis’ post which has a basic list of ‘realistic expectations’ at each level: Say ‘No’ to Unicornitis: A Public Service Announcement.

Cultivate self-acceptance: When you’re real, you accept yourself and acknowledge that you’re ‘enough’ no matter what. Anything that stops you from feeling this self-acceptance can be considered to be ‘unreal’ at some level and will take away energy as you fight to uphold the CONDITIONING that has taught you not to accept yourself.

Cultivating self-acceptance in this way means testing your assumptions in the way mentioned above, but it also means finding your balls and living from them, improving your own relationship with your own fear, and living in an unshakeable way because your realness is always in the driving seat, not your ego.

The best thing that cultivating self-acceptance can do for you is to help you destroy the false self-image that you carry of yourself that keeps you from reality and eats into your energy as you spend your life defending something that doesn’t even exist.

Be open-minded, not closed to life: The easiest way to waste energy is to convince yourself that you know everything that there is to know and that you’re ‘right’ all the time.

As soon as you take yourself off of the path of continuous life-learning you put yourself out of alignment with reality and end up going to battle with it as you take your learned ideas out into the world instead of learning new ones that are more reality-aligned. If anything is gonna take energy from you, it’s fighting a fight you can never win (and nobody is gonna make reality anything other than what it is).

Choosing to be open-minded instead of closed about things switches the stance from which you approach life to one by which you ‘ask’ questions instead of only ever asserting what you have been conditioned to think you know about yourself. This is a subtle distinction but one that allows you to let life in and fill you with new insight (which energises) instead of only ever attempting to recycle the insight you already took on board (thus taking all the life out of it and killing your energy).

Short version: A lack of energy is a sign that you’re resisting growth at some level (bio/psy/so). Aim to keep growing in all areas by learning about yourself, the world, and reality.

Those who stop learning eventually stop growing and run out of energy. Open up again and you can get it back.

Be creative: A creative life is an energetic life. If you lack energy then it might be because you closed yourself down to your creative side (which means you closed yourself down to your ‘real’ side).

Don’t buy into the hype that only some people are creative – see the reality that creativity is just about as human as it gets and that in order to be fully alive you need to live a creative life.

Real creativity allows you to be present and to tap into the best version of yourself so that you can express this and share it with the world. It’s also impossible to be really creative without being open and as being open is essential for letting go of illusions and moving with the ‘flow’ as we’ve said throughout this article, expressing your creative side is a shortcut to energising yourself.

I could write loads about creativity (and probably will) but, for now, all you need to know is that in order to energise yourself you need to find a creative outlet and dedicate yourself to it regularly. Not only will this allow you to express yourself and connect to others but it will remind you who you really are (a real human being) and recharge your batteries as you get new insight about yourself and get out of your ego and into reality (hence ‘creativity’ being in this section about psychological stuff we can do).

See the joke: If you lack energy, then it’s a sign that you may be taking life too seriously. Instead, you have to learn to see EVERYTHING about life as a joke because it is (even if there isn’t always a punch line).

Taking things too seriously just means that we have become too ‘fixed’ about our personality at some level in relation to ourselves, the world, and reality. When you allow yourself to stop being so serious about things, then you have more energy because you’re more aligned with the truth – the idea that reality isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (and therefore something we need to be serious about), it just is.

When you laugh, reality laughs with you – see the joke and stop weighing yourself down with bullshit that you don’t even need to worry about (the only reason not to laugh is because of those ‘heavy’ illusions we talked about).

In terms of letting go of our illusions, we can let go of certain ideas about ourselves at the level of our social experience:

Align the inner with the outer: The ‘success’ of your life need only be defined by one thing: how much of a gap there is between who you are on the inside and what you allow yourself to express on the outside. Not only does this apply to the psychological level of how you allow your creativity to ‘shine’ through etc. but also how you design your life around your values and ensure that the people in it are ‘real’ to the greatest extent possible.

Short version: If you lack energy, it’s likely because your inner world and outer world are too far out-of-sync. The solution for this is simple but will take a lot of work as you reconfigure your life and switch things around from outside-in to inside out:

Get on The Train and dedicate yourself to a purpose that allows you to become more of yourself and to give something back to the world.
Be aware of drama and where it comes from and then stop avoiding the conflict that leads to this drama in the first place.
Get your balls back.
Cultivate real relationships by finding your tribe and knowing your values.
Set boundaries so you don’t have to take anything unreal on-board (you’re allowed to say ‘No’ to unreality).

The more the world that you’ve built for yourself is rooted in the assumptions of your ego and your fears about life, the more the world will sap your energy. Break the cycle by injecting something real into the world by putting what’s inside you into the world instead of only having the world creep into your experience of yourself and screwing your energy levels up.

Say ‘No’ to energy vampires: Unreal people feed on your energy by chasing drama – the reason for this is that drama gives them the kind of attention that their ego needs to keep its hold over them.

The main cure for energy vampires and other unhealthy relationships is some of the stuff listed above: get on the train, set boundaries, and get your balls back. Once you do these things, you will realise that your time and attention are the most valuable assets that you have and you won’t give them to energy-sapping activities but life enhancing ones.

In short, your energy comes down to the choices that you make: either reality or unreality in the form of illusions at the level of ourselves, the world, and reality in our biological, psychological, and social lives.

Remember that you have a choice and make the real ones.

Realness

Aligning yourself with reality at the levels of biological, psychological, and social truth allows you to rid yourself of the dead-weight of illusions that are holding back from yourself, the world, and reality and to tune into your realness.

For the sake of simplicity, your ‘realness’ can be defined as the highest or most whole part of who are you in your experience and the version of you that feels most truly alive because you are flowing with life, constantly growing, and pushing through your edge into becoming even more real.

Everything that I talk about in Personal Revolutions or on this website is ultimately about the difference between wholeness and fragmentation, or between reality (wholeness) and ego (fragmentation).

When you get your illusions in check at the levels we have discussed throughout this article, you are basically removing the fragmentary barriers to your own wholeness. Your wholeness is what is most real about you and is the source of energy that will keep you motivated and keep you moving as you keep growing and manifesting your chosen, value-based purpose with your time here on earth.

If you follow the steps and ideas discussed above you will have more energy and the reason for that is that you will have cleared your own path of the illusions that hold you back from reality.

Without these illusions, you only have your realness – make sure you do something and make the most of it.

When you’ve freed your energy up and you have tuned back into your realness, you can use it to live your real life:

Get on the Train and live out your purpose.
Improve your relationships with others.
Get your balls in check.
Kill your fear and live with abundance.

The Final Word: Energy & Reality

Get your body in check, sort your mind out, and live real. That’s all you can ever do and it feels amazing.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to step up into your real life and to unleash more energy then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get into the zone.

What if you weren’t afraid? Fear: How to Live Without Fear by Living With it

Published on

Life Philosophy

Getting your real life back by overcoming fear and finding your edge.

I know a lot about fear because I used to fear a lot.

I used to be afraid of what people might think.

I used to be scared about what might happen if I did or didn’t do [X].

Mainly, I used to be scared about losing certain things: losing my ideas about myself, losing the things that I owned, losing illusory ideas that had no tangible reality to them like my ‘reputation’ or my ‘future’ or my ‘life’.

I’m one of those people who’s always tried to live spontaneously and to not hold anything back but, if I’m honest, I’ve had plenty of dark nights of the soul or moments of pain and anguish where I’ve had the world hold up a mirror to me and show me that I’m either nothing like I thought I was or, even worse, exactly like I feared I might be.

Life has been a wild ride. That’s how I know most of the stuff that I write about on this website or in my book(s) or that I share in my coaching sessions and elsewhere.

I know how to live a pretty good life now because I’ve screwed up so many times: I know how to be strong because I’ve had moments of weakness; I know how to be real because I’ve been unreal; I know how to get things done because I’ve wasted so much time on unreality which really just amounts to nothing.

I want to be as honest as possible in this article because it’s an article about fear and how you can master it. If the last decade has taught me anything it’s that the only difference between reality and unreality is the presence or lack of fear and that once you acknowledge that you have little if anything to ‘worry’ about.

The best thing that ever happened to me in my life was losing everything. I can say this with sincerity because the main motivation that had brought the things I lost into my life was fear and once those things went I was left to face myself and to rebuild on the only thing that still remained: reality.

This article is about the wonderful idea that nearly 99.9% of the things that you fear are unreal. Why is it wonderful? Because if you imagine the possibilities of a life without fear and you realise that most of your fears are unreal, you’ll see that you can do just about anything.

What if you weren’t afraid? What would you be doing right now?

Most of the things that stop you being who you need to be and living the life you need to live are just examples of you holding yourself back.

This article is gonna show you how to let go.

Two Kinds of Fear: Rational and Irrational

It’s all well and good for me to say that we can live without fear but that would involve denying a basic truth about the human condition which is that our bodies evolved fear and that they evolved it for a reason.

Before we go on, we need to acknowledge an important distinction between two very different types of fear:

Rational Fear: Rational fear is biological in origin and is an instinctual mechanism designed by millions of years of evolution to keep you (or your body) alive and ticking. This kind of fear isn’t always ‘right’ in the sense that it isn’t always triggered by actual danger but it will give you the jolt you need to GTFO in the face of possible danger so that you can live to be real another day (a simple example is that you might feel fear when you see a non-poisonous spider: your instincts don’t care about whether or not it can actually kill you – they just wanna get you away. Sharpish.).
Irrational Fear: Irrational fear is either sociological or psychological in origin and has only entered your life because of your CONDITIONING. This kind of fear is never ‘right’ (unlike rational fear which is hit-and-miss but always serves a life-preserving function). This kind of irrational fear is the stuff of nightmares as it will take you away from yourself, the world, and reality and give you erroneous ideas and assumptions at every level of your being. This sociological and psychological fear is the reason that we let the world hold us back and we don’t allow ourselves to be who we really are.

This article is about embracing the rational fear for what it is and allowing it to go about the business of keeping us alive and about managing our irrational fears so that we can live the real lives we deserve instead of hiding from ourselves and our own potential because of pure, unadulterated bullshit.

Before we move on, here are some quick examples of the kinds of fears we’re talking about:

Rational Fear

Biological: “Oh no, if I fall of this bridge/cliff/abyss/etc. I’ll die” / “Holy shit, a spider.” / “OMFG, he’s got a gun”, “This food looks a bit mouldy”, etc.

Our biological fears are protective and are triggered instinctually – they can become irrational fears if we cling to them in the face of evidence that they are pointing us away from the truth (for example, if we learn that the spider isn’t poisonous or that what we thought was a gun is actually something else but still act like the fear is real).

Irrational Fear

Sociological: “I’d better not follow my dreams/say what I really think/wear what I want/grow my hair/whatever because people will think [X]” / “I should [X]” / “It’s really not appropriate for somebody of my age to be doing this”, etc.

Psychological: “I’m such a piece of shit” / “If I show my real self, I’ll be rejected” / “I can’t forgive myself for this thing I did twenty three years ago” / “I’d better hide my anger/horniness/love because I don’t know how to control it”, etc.

Irrational fears are triggered and kept in place by our CONDITIONING – in other words, they always enter our psyche and experience of ourselves, the world, and reality from the outside in (instead of being sourced in the reality of inside out).

Just like rational fears can become irrational the longer we cling to them in the face of evidence, irrational fears can sometimes become rational if there is evidence to support them based on the feedback we get from reality (for example, maybe you really will be rejected if you show your real self – it doesn’t matter though).

Knowing whether or not your fears are rational or irrational will help you decide whether you can – or even need – to get rid of them. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of what is written in this article.

A Word About Jail

When I talk to coaching clients about fear and getting rid of it (the irrational stuff), I often find that a lot of them put forward the objection that if they abolished their fears they’d be the best versions of themselves and that they’d be acting on infinite possibilities and opportunities but…they’d end up in jail.

This isn’t just something I’ve heard a couple of times, it pops up a lot.

For some reason, we seem to think that we need our irrational fear to keep us in check and that if we didn’t have this illusory mental barrier we’d all be running around in a state of debauched anarchy, ripping each other’s clothes off without permission, looting department stores, and killing each other.

I beg to disagree.

What these future jailbirds are forgetting is that, when we’re real, it’s not our fear that keeps us in check but our sense of wholeness in ourselves that allows us to relate to everybody and everything around us. Even if you don’t want to see it in those terms, it’s not like as soon as your irrational fears are taken out of the equation that your sense of rationality and ability to think for yourself will be cancelled out too.

You’re not gonna go jump off a cliff or leap out the window just because your social programming is under better management.

When you’re real, you have the discipline and self-control necessary to be able to move forwards with your vision (choo choo) and to manage your biological wiring and social conditioning. In other words, you have mastery over yourself – this means that you can have a life without fear and stay out of jail.

Fear is the thing that makes us unreal in the first place – when people think that without fear they’d turn into lunatics and go off the rails, what they’re really saying is that they have a co-dependent relationship with their fear and that they’ve allowed it to define them.

As you read the rest of this article, think about how you can live some of these ideas without being in a cage (mental or physical). If you have fear about losing your fear then you’re in deeper than you think but it’s all part of the same process and you can free yourself whenever you’re ready.

All you gotta do is get real.

Fear Without Fear: Wholeness Over Fragmentation

Most of what you read on this website or in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is about letting go of your fear. As you start to live a more real life of purpose that is shaped around your real human values and aligned with your realness, you will start to feel less fear anyway.

On this site, we’ve already looked at getting on The Train and living your purpose as well as learning to kill your fear of loss by developing an abundance mentality. Ultimately, all of the things we talk about boil down to the same thing: knowing yourself in your wholeness, instead of attaching to fragments, and then doing something to express it.

The rest of this article will build on that basic idea: that a lack of fear means you are being real / whole and the presence of (irrational) fear means that you’re being unreal / fragmented at some level (we’ll elaborate).

Stop Holding Yourself Back with ‘Nothing’

Here are some basic things you can start doing to stop giving attention to the ‘nothing’ of unreal or irrational fear:

Step out of your black and white thinking by letting go of ‘good’ and ‘bad’: Reality just is what it is – it isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; it just is and you either accept it or you don’t. This doesn’t mean that you become passive or nihilistic because being real is about being full, not empty (as passivity and nihilism suggest) and about putting this ‘fullness’ out into the world by connecting to what is whole inside you (connected to yourself, the world, and reality) not what appears to be fragmented (disconnected from yourself, the world, and reality).

Killing your irrational fears and moving with your life instead of against it is about letting go of this fragmented dualism in the form of our learned value judgments about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (etc.) and learning to see things in terms of real or unreal instead. When we look at the world and our intentions for it in terms of ‘real’, we see things in terms of wholeness and become more whole; when we look at the world and our intentions for it in terms of ‘unreal’, we see things in terms of fragments and become more fragmented.

Fragmentation always leads to fear because it is unreal and leads to the kind of friction, frustration, and eventual misery that comes from taking reality out of the equation.

In short, if you can learn to be honest with yourself (if nobody else) you can let go of the ideas of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that hold you back and just do what needs to be done – if it’s real then it will be about wholeness and won’t harm anybody and will allow you to grow into yourself as the world grows around you.

Set boundaries by learning to say ‘No’ (it’s a magic word): The only thing worth saying “Yes” to is reality because reality is the only thing of any value.

Many of us have been conditioned to say “No” to reality and “Yes” to unreality which means that we end up sending ourselves into hiding, building our lives according to somebody else’s agenda, and then wondering why we’re not living our own lives and being scared to shake the foundations of the unreal life that we’ve built to keep hiding from ourselves.

The easiest way to get your fear in check is to start saying “No” to anything unreal… This is your life and it’s flashing before your eyes. Stop tolerating the bullshit that isn’t serving you or which only serves to reinforce your lack of respect for yourself.

Say “No” to the job that’s holding you back and putting you further and further away from your own soul.

Say “No” to the unreal relationships that sap your energy and take away the valuable time and attention that you could be using to get to where you need to be.

Say “No” to the image you have of yourself that stops you from being whoever it is that you really are.

If you keep tolerating unreality that’s all you’re ever going to get.

Life is too short and the only thing keeping you from your real life is the fear of saying “No” to anything but.

Don’t be scared to ‘break’ your own heart: A broken heart is always more real than a closed one but a real heart can never be broken.

Anybody who ‘closed’ their own heart is just living in fear and that fear comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about who you are, what you’re capable of, and what reality is.

The truth is that your ‘heart’ (or whatever you wanna call it) can’t be broken because your heart is that part of you that is connected to the whole and nothing that is whole is capable of being broken into pieces.

The feeling of being ‘broken’ just means that you’ve exposed a gap between your ideas about yourself, the world, and reality and that you’re growing more real by healing this divide.

You keep your fear at bay by trusting and believing in yourself and not worrying about being broken because you understand that everything is a process and you will rise again with a stronger connection to reality.

The most fearful thing you can do is ‘close’ your heart because you’ve been hurt in the past, perceive yourself to have failed, or because somebody judged you and you treated this judgment as being real… A closed heart is just the illusion of stasis and will lead to a lack of activity and an attachment to the ego.

Kill your fear by knowing nothing can break what’s real about you. Close nothing about yourself and be open to everything (whilst still setting boundaries by saying “No” to unreality).

Stop Listening to the World Over Reality: Irrational fear is what happens when you don’t really understand that there is a difference between ‘The World’ and ‘Reality’. The short version is that ‘Reality’ just is what it is but ‘The World’ can be changed if you’re real enough.

The reason ‘The World’ can be changed is that it’s just a bunch of conceptual ideas that we’ve collectively decided to treat as being real, not something that’s actually real in itself (we spend a lot of time arguing about and shifting these concepts based on our own interpretations of things which are influenced by our inner ‘stuff’).

Listening to the world instead of reality is the cause of your conditioning: the shoulds that make you hesitate instead of being spontaneous and taking real action; the ideas about how you should look or feel or think in certain situations.

Flip the script and listen to yourself before you listen to the world – the world is really just the unreal product of everybody else’s fears and it gives you more fears to be controlled or influenced by.

Stop listening. Tune out. Listen to yourself and nobody else. Ball up and live real.

Learn to manage your fear internally and externally: Rational fears can usually be dealt with externally – by either exposing yourself to things incrementally (if there’s no danger) or by removing yourself from the source of that fear in some way (literally GTFO or abolishing whatever has triggered the fear).

Irrational fears need to be dealt with internally at the level of your belief system: this might require testing your assumptions about yourself, the world, and reality (check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness) or by learning to manage your interpretations of things at the psychological and sociological levels to make sure that they’re as real as possible (more real, less fear).

In general, it comes down to remembering that there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

If you’re lacking truth at some level, then the likelihood of fear increases because a lack of truth means a lack of wholeness and an attachment to fragments at the level of your identity. This is where things start to get interesting because the presence of irrational fear means that you have constructed an unreal personality for yourself and need to dismantle it by remembering that you’re wearing a mask and taking it off.

Find your tribe: No man or woman is an island – we have evolved to be social creatures and to live and share our lives with others. A lot of irrational fear comes from the fact that you’ve been living an unreal life and so have surrounded yourself with unreal people that aren’t part of your tribe.

Your tribe = people who share your values and who are growing in the same direction.

When we lose touch with our tribe, we feel isolated and restless and start to lose social momentum because we keep hitting illusory external barriers in the form of unreal people and situations.

The first step to finding your tribe is getting in touch with your real self and getting out into the world – the more real you are, the more real other people will be in your presence. Get on the Train, live your purpose, and find others who are going to share it with you.

Help those that are more afraid than you: As you become less fearful as you stop giving into the fragments that you carry, you’ll begin to see the fear that you left behind in the faces of almost everybody around you.

Most people are afraid because they’ve been conditioned in the same way that we all have – they’re in a kind of woken dream as they go through life responding to the ideas in their heads instead of the reality that’s in front of them.

Helping others by being compassionate and speaking with your actions, not just your words, allows them to become less fearful, but also allows you to go deeper into reality as you learn more about your own fear by helping them with theirs. Ultimately, you will see that both are unreal.

The greatest way you can help others is by responding and communicating to what’s real in people when they come to you, not their fear. This might anger those who are trying to hide their souls from themselves behind their unreality (see this post about drama and taking the mask off) but, ultimately, you’ll be doing them a favour by seeing the best in them and respecting them enough to not buy into the bullshit that they tell themselves.

The price for this, of course, is that you have to be real with yourself. Get over your own fear and then guide others down the path that you’ve walked on: it’s always about being more or less real than you currently are.

Live on your edge by taking action and thinking big: To grow real, you have to keep learning and keep taking action so that you can spend as much of your life as possible in the ‘sweetspot’ of your edge.

Your edge is just where your ideas meet reality and you get new insight that sets you free of the fear-motivated patterns and ideas that are holding you back.

Without finding your edge (not having somebody else tell you where it is) you will only ever go around in the same circles and repeat the same patterns that are familiar to you.

Find your edge by actively chasing the goals that challenge you and even scare you a little bit; put yourself in the lion’s den and face the parts of yourself you know you’ve been hiding from yourself.

Think big and take action. Don’t spend your life just doing what you’re comfortable with – that’s the embodiment of fear and it will only lead you to where you already are.

“Only ever doing what feels comfortable is a form of suicide.”
-Personal Revolutions

Know where you are and don’t judge yourself: A lot of the fear in our life comes from the fact that we’re constantly judging ourselves and our progress in relation to the imaginary standards and ideas that we have about ourselves in relation to other people.

Not only is all judgement unreal because it’s an example of fragmentation over wholeness but it is also usually rooted in unnecessarily complicated ideas about what human life is.

Here are the only three stages of human life that you really need to concern yourself with:

Stage One: Childhood – In which we have no (irrational) fear because we are in a state of wholeness.

Stage Two: Unreality – In which we have nothing but (irrational) fear because we are in a state of fragmentation due to the shame that we have been taught about our wholeness and the mask we have been CONDITIONED to wear because of this shame.

Stage Three: Personal Revolution / Realness (Reality) – In which we return back to wholeness because we have found ourselves in a situation that exposes the gap between our ideas about ourselves and the world and reality or because we otherwise ‘wake up’ to the truth somehow and put it into action.

If you look around you, you will see that most people never go through a ‘Personal Revolution’ and die clinging to the little fragments of unreality that they define themselves by and which leave them in a state of confused frustration that leads to lives of quiet desperation.

Be honest with yourself about which of these three stages you’re in – going through a ‘Personal Revolution’ doesn’t mean that the world won’t creep in from time to time and that you’ll never experience irrational fear again but it does mean that you’ll be more whole overall.

If your life is defined by fear in the form of friction, anxiety, or any other shades of unreality then you’re still in stage two and you have to get back to being real at some level (yourself, the world, and reality or all three).

Knowing where you are and where you’re going will keep your fear in check – especially if you design a process that allows you to start becoming more whole again (like getting on the Train and making your values valuable to others, etc.).

Fear is a normal part of our human lives but it isn’t life itself.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to start pushing through your edge, overcoming unnecessary fear, and living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get moving again.