The Confident Heart. From Fear to LOVE by Nils Klippstein - HTML preview
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1. How Our Inner Protector Keeps Us Safe
Take a look back at your life. Think about the challenges you've faced, the goals you've achieved and the times you've picked yourself up and carried on. How did you manage it? You were equipped with a powerful innate survival mechanism: your inner protector.
This part of us, often referred to as the ego, is part of our brilliant, strategic mind that has learned to navigate the world. Its primary mission is to keep us safe from threat. To understand its ingenious, and sometimes frustrating methods, we must first understand what it considers to be a threat. Its operating system is built to guard against a core set of human fears:
- Fear of pain, loss and suffering. Experiencing physical or emotional hardship and separation.
- Fear of helplessness. Having no control over our safety or life circumstances.
- Fear of abandonment. Being left alone and losing essential connections.
- Fear of scarcity. Not having enough resources (such as money, food, shelter or loving care) to survive.
- Fear of failure. Not meeting standards and being judged as inadequate.
- Fear of engulfment. Being controlled, losing our freedom or independence.
- Fear of being unlovable. Believing we are flawed and will be rejected.
- Fear of exposure and shame. Being revealed as flawed or weak.
- Fear of meaninglessness. Life lacking purpose or significance.
- Fear of inferiority. The constant comparison of ourselves to others and being afraid of being seen as lesser.
- Fear of constraint. The feeling that our life path is limited or that our freedom is being trapped.
- Fear of death. The end of our physical existence, or of conscious existence itself.
From the primal terror of a child facing pain to the complex social and survival anxieties of an adult, the mission of our inner protector was clear: to predict, avoid, and overcome.
Looking at this list, it's clear that all the strategies our inner protector employs – the need for control, the drive for achievement, the walls around our heart – were logical and sometimes life-saving responses to real or perceived danger. Our ego evolved to solve specific problems. It learned to build a fortress because we were taught to believe that there were strangers, enemies and criminals who we had to protect ourselves from.
The work ahead to find our confident heart involves gratefully acknowledging the service of our ego and, from a place of newfound strength, gently showing it that the outside world can be much safer than it perceives. Once we open our hearts, we can begin to trust in our friendly personal universe.