Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,
A time to feel calm and think clearly.
I'm Claire Downham,
The Queen of Calm,
A Transformational Life Coach.
I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.
The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,
Which is calm and clarity.
Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.
There's nothing else to do.
Now let's relax into today's episode.
So today we're exploring fear of the unknown and it came up to do this because it's,
It comes up a lot in conversation,
Not just in the conversations I have with the people I work with,
But often it comes up just in conversation,
Particularly at the moment when we're going through an interesting time in history.
And I really started to see something about this whole concept of the fear of the unknown quite some time ago,
But I really see it more deeply now,
So that's why I've come to share it with you today.
There is something around that word unknown that deserves some exploration and some looking into I think.
And it's,
Well,
Any word that you put on in front of kind of negates it,
Doesn't it?
So if we think about the known,
What we actually know,
Or what do we actually know,
Actually,
That's a big question,
Isn't it?
But there might be some things you know right now in this moment,
Like what you're eating for breakfast or what you're doing while you're listening to this live,
Or whatever you happen to be involved in.
And then we put un in front of it and then there's nothing.
That is the thing with this concept of the fear of the unknown,
That as soon as we take the word known and put un in front of it as a prefix,
I remember from my primary school teaching days,
That that negates it and therefore we've got nothing,
That there's nothing known at all.
Now if we could sit with that,
How wonderful would that be?
If we were okay with the space,
With the gap,
With the unknown,
Then I suspect we would find a whole lot of calm and peace there.
Now we don't do that,
Do we?
Because when there's a space,
There seems to be something within us that wants to fill that space.
And we do that in so much of life,
Like how busy we can make ourselves and when we see something in our environment and then we attach a big story to it,
That there's all of that going on all the time.
And when we talk about fear of the unknown,
We've generally filled the space where the unknown was with some stuff from our store of memories and ideas about how life works.
So we will take the past and project that into the future.
So where there was unknown,
There will be a made up story about the future.
Well it will definitely be based on what is intellectually already in our headspace,
What is already in our store of thoughts.
And it is in that innocent process that we get caught up.
And it is innocent,
Like I'm not standing here talking to you and telling you that you're doing something wrong because you're not.
You're doing being human and being human involves you doing this kind of thing because we can't comprehend of a space where there's nothing there very easily.
So it's really,
Really easy to put something into that space.
And the things we put into that space,
As I've mentioned,
One of them comes from the past.
When we make up that space,
We generally don't put particularly useful things in it.
We don't put helpful thoughts about the future in it.
We generally put something that perhaps is a little bit frightening.
And thus when people say to me that they're experiencing fear of the unknown,
I find myself in a conversation of exploration around what they've put into that space.
And the wonderful thing is that all it takes is for you to see that.
That really is all it takes each time is for you to see that that's what's happening.
That you have taken a space invariably in the future because I think that's where fear of the unknown generally comes into people's awareness.
And you've put something into that space.
And when you see that you're doing that,
It's like the wonderful Eckhart Tolle quote,
Which I'm probably about to misquote,
Is that as soon as you become aware that you are not in the present moment,
You fall into the present moment.
As soon as you become aware that you are filling up that unknown space with some things you have collected together and made up and put into that space,
Not consciously,
Not deliberately,
But that is what the system is doing,
It allows you to just have a different relationship with those things that you have put into that unknown space.
It allows you to feel lighter about them,
I think.
It allows you to become more detached because you're seeing what you're doing.
As we go through life,
We're collecting information all the time,
But it's information that comes to us via thought and then just gets stored away in like a dusty filing cabinet in the back of your mind somewhere.
But that's all you've got to fill that space with.
And the exciting thing is that when you allow that space to be,
When you don't fill it with your made up stories about the future,
Made up from what's stored in your intellect,
When you do that,
From that space,
The most amazing things can happen.
It can really allow you to connect to your intuition.
But it starts with allowing that space by seeing that what you're filling the space with is not helpful,
Not true,
Not real.
It's like you've gone into that filing cabinet and just picked out five random dirty folders and gone over that.
That's what fits in the unknown space.
I'll just shove that in there.
And discovering that it's just a random collection of stuff that isn't even connected to each other.
And that's why sometimes we can make up real horror stories about the future in this unknown space because it really is an awful lot of random stuff that's been collated together by us.
So what's helpful,
I think,
Is to see that this is how it works.
What you choose to do in the moment to help yourself,
To help yourself see this,
To help yourself let go of it,
Whatever it is,
Will be what makes sense to you.
And what makes sense to me will be different.
But it comes from that place of knowing.
It always comes from that place of knowing that there is nothing in the unknown,
That it is being made up by you in the moment and not deliberately,
Of course,
Innocently.
And that really,
As soon as you see that,
It will start to melt away because that's just how the system works.
When you catch it,
It stops.
And how you choose to catch it will be up to you.
It's just about keeping on looking in this direction and realizing that this is the truth about where your experience is coming from.
Thank you so much for listening.
There's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.
Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.
This has been The Calm Cast with Clare Downham,
Queen of Calm.
Take care and keep listening.
