CHAPTER I: HOW TO OVERCOME YOUR FEARS
1. HOW I LEARNED THAT FACING YOUR FEARS CAN EMPOWER YOU
As a child, I was terrified of performing on stage or answering my teacher's questions on the blackboard. My knees would shake, and my legs would buckle. Sweating, I'd fall to the ground, petrified to be in the spotlight. Physically, this made me feel bad, but my reactions weren't simply fitting. They resulted from paralyzing fear that prevented me from living, making friends, and winning. Eventually, I decided that my stage fright was holding me back. I wanted to be a winner because my mother believed and loved me so much for a reason.
But to manifest my worth, I needed to learn to speak in front of people.
I've learned that you can learn everything in life, including performing. And I started right away on the big stage of the Childhood Palace on New Year's Eve. I was eight years old. That year, it was a freezing winter at more than -50 degrees Celsius in my Siberian hometown in Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia. I was born in a place where we have so many extrasensory people and shamans due to our extreme climate and frigid winters. When it's -50 or -60 degrees outside, you feel deprived of oxygen, as if you live on the tip of the mountains where there is little air and oxygen is discharged. The pressure is, therefore, also different here. So, I think in such weather conditions, the third eye can be opened, and you can feel and see much more profound than others. In our town, primary school pupils do not attend school if the temperature is below – 45 degrees, so we didn't attend school during these days. Instead, my classmates and I signed up and performed in the New Year's Eve show, dancing as animals and flowers. Every day, a dress rehearsal took place before the performance, and as the composition of the participants changed daily, the dance was changed and re-performed every day as well. I really enjoyed being in the atmosphere of rehearsals and the creative process, but I was terrified to go on stage. Every day, I persuaded myself to overcome that fear and went out. And so on for 10 or 14 days. It was a powerful training and a voluntary way out of the comfort zone for an 8-year-old child.
Afterward, when I was 12 years old, I flew to the small town of Bournemouth in England for English language courses. My vestibular system was fragile all through my childhood. I suffered from motion sickness. At the end of every trip to my grandmother's village, only a few hours away by car, I'd arrive green in the face. And I couldn't fly by plane easily either. A flight to England was the same. I felt ill all the way there.
In Bournemouth, we were regularly taken to amusement parks. At one point, I decided that motion sickness wasn't suitable for me either; I didn't want to put up with it. I wanted to live a full life and have fun with my friends, but I needed to fix it somehow, so I just started riding the scariest roller coaster ride in the dark and backward with my teeth clenched. Oddly enough, surprisingly, I didn't feel sick back on the plane anymore, and it was a small but significant victory in my life.
A victory over myself! Over my body!
I have learned that you can train your body to cope with something previously inaccessible; the main thing is to find the right approach. Subsequently, this helped me overcome obstacles in life related to physical ailments, psychological blocks that prevented me from living a full life, as well as vivid manifestations of fear. Later, I was surprised to encounter adults who put up with their problems, fears, and phobias all their lives. They seemed to cherish and even be proud of them, depriving themselves of the greatest opportunities, experiences, and pleasures that travel offers. For example, I know one married couple who lives in Europe and has enough money to travel, but they don't leave their mainland because he doesn't sail and she doesn't fly.
If we look at life from the point of view of the tasks of the soul, I am convinced that the only way to grow from within is to meet your fear. We can even fix our Karma by meeting our fears and facing them. Karma is the consequences of our actions from past lives that are unconscious in our current life. Meeting your fears is the only way to resolve Karma. But the process requires incredible courage, perseverance, curiosity, research, and the ability to win by conquering yourself. If you take the path of least resistance and choose pleasure and comfort, it is not development that takes place sometimes, but degradation. Everyone, regardless of birth conditions and Karma, at any stage of their life, can take the path of freedom from fear.
Basically, we're meeting the potential to transform our whole life when we face our deepest fear.
This skill can be honed, just like pumping up our buttocks in the gym. We can learn to cope with our fears and even enter another dimension to change our quantum. The easiest way to start working on yourself is when you're a kid. It's like riding a bicycle. Neural connections of overcoming oneself are established during childhood, and after puberty, unused skills fall off as the body believes they are not necessary for survival. Everybody has already done it but forgot that growing up by itself is overcoming many children's fears, such as first swimming, dancing, singing a song, riding a horse, first time answering at the blackboard, or writing a dictation. But if you did not learn to cope with fear as a child and were always escaping these moments, starting in adulthood would be difficult but still possible. Everything is possible! Again - like riding a bicycle!
