Find Freedom From What Does Not Serve You AT FORTY FIVE Magazine Issue 2101 06

AT FORTY FIVE MAGAZINE /09
I suddenly saw an opening in my mind and the
terrifying grip of fear let go; a huge sense of
relief washed over me. I couldn’t force them to
eat a certain way. Trust me—I had tried and it
hadn’t worked. Forcing them is not
empowering them. It is not up to me; it is up to
them. They must make the choice for
themselves.
I felt a freedom I never felt before. It was as
though I let go of a lifetime of attachment to
the choices others make or don’t make. It is not
up to me. I can empower them with knowledge
but ultimately they need to feel empowered by
making their own choices. I can show up and
play my part but the rest is not up to me. It is
like that old saying, “You can lead a horse to
water, but you cannot make it drink.”
In my life and in my home, I lead by example. I
buy healthy foods and make healthy meals, but
my family doesn’t need to eat a hundred
percent healthy all the time unless they want
to. By processing my fears, I let go of my
attachments around their health and accept
their choices. I have also slowly let go of my
judgments about their choices and freed them
to empower themselves. Still, I do make
decisions for my son around food, only because
he would eat sugar all day long if I let him. The
difference is when I do say no or yes to certain
foods, it is now coming from a place of love not
paralyzing fear and control disguised as caring.
We are programmed to care so much that we
want to help, give advice, fix, change, and make
right what we think is wrong in other people’s
lives. The truth is that other people’s lives are
none of our business, but we make them our
business and that can come at a great sacrifice
and much suffering.
Let’s take a look at the news for a moment. Do
you feel better or worse after watching, reading,
or listening to the news? I believe CNN is short
for “constant negative news.” We are
bombarded with images and stories that build
fear and make us feel guilty for what we have,
bad for what we don’t, and even worse for
others. When we care so much that we feel sick
to our stomach or we develop chronic anxiety
about everything that is going wrong in the
world, we are not helping; we are causing more
harm. We are causing more harm to our own
well-being, but we are also adding more fear to
an already fear-filled world.
I used to believe that caring showed others that
I loved them. People don’t need you to care in
the form of worry. That is the same as sprinkling
them with fear. People want to feel loved, and
caring too much is not an expression of love: it
is an expression of fear. So not only are we
adding more fear to the pot, we are causing
more suffering inside our own minds as we
learn to chronically fret and worry about others.
That is not loving to others or ourselves.
The world doesn’t need more fear and neither
do we. We need more authentic genuine
expressions of love sprinkled with empathy and
compassion. Empathy calls us to imagine how
they must be feeling and loving them in spite
of those feelings. It is about being present for
them to express and share how they feel
without our judging them or trying to fix them
or change how they feel. Just loving them in
that moment and holding space for them to
feel fully so they can heal is enough.
Instead, we are taught to sympathize by feeling
sorry for others and their situations. People
don’t need us to feel sorry for them and it only
leaves us feeling bad at the same time. Meeting