Learn to move alongside your fear
A quick content warning heads up that today’s episode references health challenges and medical diagnosis. Please tend to your needs as needed if these topics bring up difficult feelings for you.
In this episode, Amy talks about how fears in business and life are so natural and how they often try to keep us stuck in place. She shares some life updates that have felt scary to her and how she’s navigating that fear to keep moving forward in her business.
Resource mentioned in this episode: My Friend Fear: Finding Magic in the Unknown by Meera Lee Patel
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[0:04] Welcome to Breathe Into Business, a podcast for folks who want to hear what it's really like to run an intuitive-led business. I'm your host, Amy Koretsky, a breathwork facilitator who helps,
service providers, course creators, and artists tap into their own inner knowing so that they can run,
businesses from a place of trust and self-confidence. I created this podcast to.
Help folks like you who are disillusioned with the overculture of online small business building to permission yourself to follow a different path.
In these episodes, you'll hear conversations that are direct, messy, and even a little bit scary at times.
My biggest hope is that each of these episodes helps you feel even 10% more confident in leaning into what your intuition is sharing with you and doing business your own way.
[0:54] Now, let's take a breath and talk business. Hey, y'all. A quick little content warning that today's episode references health challenges and medical diagnoses. If these are topics that bring up challenging feelings for you and your body and
your nervous system, I'm going to invite you to tend to yourself in whatever way you need and.
And then come back to this episode when you feel ready. Thanks.
[1:23] So it's fucking terrifying most of the time to run a business. I know this because I've been running a business for almost a decade. I know this because I work with clients who are feeling pretty afraid
a lot of the time. I'm guessing if you run a business, you are intimately aware of the fear that arises from time to time or is maybe kind of like constantly always there under the surface.
[1:50] There are so many reasons why we might be feeling fear. You know, our brain, our primal brain, might be telling us that making big changes is dangerous. We might be feeling like, well,
what if I fail? That means something horrible that I'm not good at this. Or maybe it validates the worst fears that we have about ourselves.
[2:13] We might be afraid because to actually acknowledge our innermost desires and take action towards them maybe requires us to shift the identity that we've held for ourselves or that other people
have held about us. And it's really normal to feel afraid that that shift in identity would maybe create a rift in the partnerships or communities that we've formed to keep us safe over time. Or maybe, you know, we're simply just afraid of the unknown, the vast unknown,
and that perceived sense of control gives us that false sense of security that keeps us safe.
[2:54] I could go on and on, and I'm sure you have your own reasons why you've been afraid in business in the past. But like I mentioned just now, you know, our brain tries to keep us safe.
It often tells us that things are dangerous. Our brain, its function, one of its neurological functions is to keep us safe. It keeps us from eating the poison berries. It keeps us
from running out into the street when there are cars going by. It is there to keep us safe and our brain actually creates fear. Fear stems from the brain and it does that to keep us
safe. And when we experience that sensation of fear in our body, it's so normal for it to stop us in our tracks. It's like just slamming on the brake pedal, just stopping us right where we are.
[3:47] A lot of you probably know that I have a background in Chinese medicine And in one of the classics, the Si Wen, it's written that fear makes the qi descend,
like the energy descend in the body. Think about a little kid getting scared during a scary movie, a big fright, and wetting themselves. All of that qi, all of that energy is descending down.
And through the urination is coming out. And that makes total sense. Fear, big frights, big boo sort of experiences, drop the chi, descend the chi, make it go down. However, there's a lot of
classical Chinese medicine scholars that also believe that like the not sort of like boo,
fright sort of scares, but the like deeper fears, the sort of fears that we hold on to for days, months, years, generations, think about epigenetics, there's generational fear.
This sort of fear actually stagnates the chi, so it binds up the chi. It makes it stuck and unable to move freely.
So from that perspective, it makes total sense that we often will feel paralyzed by our fears, just completely unable to move forward in any sort of capacity when we are experiencing fear.
[5:12] But I don't believe that our fears have to keep us stuck. I have over the years found myself that if I can befriend my fear,
then I can begin the process of moving alongside the fear. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to share some of my own fears that are coming up right now,
how I'm befriending them, and how I'm going to keep moving forward alongside them.
[5:44] Little caveat, I'm going to be sharing a little bit more personally than sometimes I do in this podcast, although many of you know that I'm kind of an open book and so I share quite personally
all the time. But this one might feel a little bit more raw. So just naming that right here and right now. Because a few weeks ago, I received some pretty difficult medical news and diagnoses.
Twice. So the first one kind of landed like a ton of bricks. You know, I have had Crohn's disease, which is an autoimmune disease of the digestive system for, goodness gracious, close to 20 years now.
[6:23] It is something that I have long come to grips with. I have managed it quite well over the years. I feel very grateful around my health in this moment, around that disease. And yet,
there were some symptoms that I was still having that other practitioners had always attributed,
to Crohn's. But guess what? I found out that it was a completely secondary autoimmune issue that had been undiagnosed for the last 10 or 15 years. Super fun, right? Okay, so like that
happened and then like a week passed and I had like mostly digested that first big news. I was like come to grips with it. I was like doing new routines, had some new like medications,
things were feeling a little bit better and I was like all right I got a handle on this.
And then I got the second thing.
[7:15] I got a diagnosis that was a little bit harder to swallow. And as somebody who like lives with a chronic condition and has had like several surgeries and has surgical related pain,
like you would think that maybe receiving difficult medical news would be kind of an old hat for me.
I honestly kind of thought that myself, like haven't I had enough of these conversations with doctors over the years to be like pretty hard to shock. But the word cancer came up and anytime you throw
around the word cancer, even in my case, which is very early stage and I am so grateful for that.
[7:56] It's pretty fucking scary. So letting this new news and this new diagnosis move through my body doesn't really feel trite or predictable.
It feels pretty frustrating, exhausting, And of course, scary.
So along with like lots of follow up visits over the last couple weeks and a scheduled surgery, which like by the time you listen to this, I will hopefully be already home recovering from. I'm also doing a lot of breath work.
[8:29] Like a lot of breath work. I'm practicing breath work for so many reasons.
I'm doing it so I can like hold space for myself and have other people hold space for me to like really feel the emotional side of what I'm moving through. You know, because my MO for years and
years and years was to disassociate or get like super logical and try to like find the reasonable solution. So that's not happening. I'm like breathing through it. I'm letting the tears
come up even after I'm telling you almost a year long tear free breathwork streak where I've been breathing regularly but just getting a lot of like creative downloads and not crying a lot like the tears they are coming now.
I'm also practicing breathwork so I can just like reconnect to my body in a way that feels more loving and more empowering and like as a partnership.
You know because it's it's really real that anytime we're handed a medical diagnosis there's There's usually a small part of us that starts to see our body as the enemy.
I've been there myself. I don't want to feel that way and breathwork helps me not feel that way.
[9:41] I'm also practicing breathwork so I can feel the optimism and like universal support that always shows up at the end of a breathwork practice because that shit feels good and I want to feel good right now.
And I'm also practicing breathwork so I don't fall into a pit of stagnation.
There's fear, there's stagnation. And it's also cold here in Minnesota winters and I'm not able to get outside and go for walks in the sunshine like I do in the summertime.
And it would be so easy for me to like rewatch all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and go into my very dark place right now.
But instead, I'm breathing, I'm moving energy, I'm keeping things moving.
[10:29] And lastly, I'm breathing because I want to befriend my fear. I've spent a lot of the last few years learning to befriend my fear in more like business-related settings.
And this is like such an opportunity for me to befriend my fear in a more personal way.
What this generally looks like is like seeing my fear less as a problem and more as like I look at it with curiosity seeing it as like an.
Interesting information This looks like not minimizing my fear or pretending that it doesn't exist, but it also.
[11:10] Does not look like succumbing to it completely and letting it take up like all the air in the room. I I would say that's the biggest resource for me, like as I've moved into this new way of viewing fear.
There's actually been two resources. I think one in general, tarot, we're going to talk about that in a minute. Tarot has been such a tool for me to like redefine my narratives around fear.
[11:37] But there's also a book that's been really helpful for me. really liked the book My Friend Fear, Finding Magic in the Unknown by Mira Lee Patel. That was a real big inspiration for me when I was writing the entire module about befriending fear in the
incubator coaching program. Because really there's this amazing thing that happens when we start to see our fear as a friend. It can actually motivate us to move forward. Here's a quote from Mira Lee
Patel's book. It says, if we had done something differently, would we still be afraid? Fear will still be there because fear is not a consequence. It is not a punishment we receive for doing
something wrong or behaving badly. It is not something that we feel because we lack the strength to overcome it. In fact, fear isn't an obstacle to overcome at all. Fear is a light.
[12:33] That's meant to guide us. It builds strength and provides us sustenance. It has the ability to split us open like a knife does a pomegranate, spilling seeds of beauty and incredible possibility from the inside.
Oof, I love that quote. If I was listening to this podcast, I'd probably rewind it 15 seconds and listen to it again. But yeah, so like right now, I have a fair amount of things that I'm kind of feeling afraid of. Of course, I'm feeling a bit afraid of what's going on with my health. It is.
[13:07] All a bit scary as surgery and big diagnoses often are. But I've moved through scary health things before and while I might be getting sad and frustrated by it all, I'm not quite as scared.
[13:21] Of it as you might think. I'm leaning on my past experiences navigating Western medical industrial complex, which let's be honest, it is not an easy thing to do and I feel immense privilege to have,
both the medical knowledge, the mental capacity, and all the other privileged identities that I hold.
To do so. I'm using all of that to like gain the trust and strength that I need to move through this.
Plus I have so much support emotionally and practically from friends and family. Thank you, thank you to everyone who has reached out with love, everyone who has promised to light a candle
on my surgery day, and all y'all who are bringing me home cooked meals. I love you. And this support really allows the fear to actually be less scary.
[14:17] However, the things that do feel a bit more intensely scary right now are the vast unknown.
And that is like both personally, but also professionally. You know, because of these recent updates,
I'm taking all of the plans that I had for 2023 and just throwing them out the window and starting over from scratch.
I'm taking a sabbatical from patient care at the clinic. I'm not gonna be running a spring cohort of the incubator.
I'm really just leaving the door wide open for my body to lead the way this year and just seeing where it takes me.
[14:57] And you know, to go alongside that, I'm definitely a little bit afraid of like not having enough work to be able to pay my bills, doing the things that I want to do.
I'm afraid that I'm gonna have to go back to working in the ways that I was, in like more unsustainable ways in order to make a living.
I'm kind of afraid of trying this wildly unconventional way of planning my year and working and having it fail.
But also like in the end, I'm also kind of more afraid of not trying at all.
[15:31] And I'm able to see how these fears are like born out of my brain's desire to keep me safe. But let's be honest, my brain hasn't done a bang up job on that so far. So like, why would I let it,
start running the show now? Because like none of these things that I'm doing my business are like new ideas that are just showing up right now because of the medical issues. They are all.
Things that have been sitting in the back of my mind and showing up in my intuition for years now.
[16:02] And this is the universe's push that I guess I needed to make them. And I 100% do not subscribe to the like, everything happens for a reason sort of adage. But I do believe that sometimes Spirit
will intervene when we're starting to veer off the path that spirit or soul or like use whatever word you want wants us to go on. And like I know this might not resonate with everyone who has gone
through hard things and I do not want this to sound minimizing or like putting rose-colored glasses over everything because it's not. Like this is just for me and from my experience right now now, this feels like one of those wake up calls where spirit is like, all right kid,
it's now or never. Are we going to do this or what? And like to that my answer is, fuck Yes, we are doing this.
I do not want to miss out on my life.
[17:00] And when I think about it in tarot terms, which I mentioned is the other thing that has supported me in befriending my fear, I don't subscribe to the idea that there are quote unquote scary cards.
Yes, there are cards that can feel more challenging when we are moving through them absafuckin'-lutely, but they are not impending doom cards. And the tower is one of those cards.
Like the tower does not feel fun to move through, but when I pull the tower, I'm not like, oh shit, what's going to happen?
It's just like a reminder that there are unsustainable or like there are cracks in the foundation that need to get shore up.
[17:45] And I'm not actually someone that even pulls the tower all that often. But in the last month or so, I've pulled it at least three times.
So I definitely see this as a tower experience. almost like a mini tower. And like from the outside, you might hear the word cancer and
be like, oh, that's a big T tower moment. But honestly, for me, it feels more like a little T tower moment because they caught it so damn early. I'm going in, I'm getting.
It cut out. And there's no talk of chemo. Like I feel so, so grateful in that. But it's.
Funny because I was already kind of planning on taking a sabbatical from patient care at the clinic. It is something I have been talking about for years. Let me say years, but have.
Have done zero follow through around.
[18:37] So now, here comes the tower to force my hand a bit and really make me take some time to regroup. Because I've known for some time that things needed to change, but I put off those changes.
For valid reason after valid reason. I mean, the pandemic was a big one. I've been wanting to take a sabbatical since before the pandemic even happened, but I wasn't just about to walk away
from my business or my employees or anything when that happened. And then the pandemic never really seems to end because let's be honest, we're still in a pandemic. And the changes that we've made at
the clinic over the last year being in a new space, building up our new team, these just were very reasonable reasons why I couldn't just walk away for six months. I'm not about to be leaving Kim high and dry, that's not how I roll.
[19:33] But that's the whole thing with like little T tower moments. They tend to show up after we've been handed the death card over and over and over again, being like, hey, there's something that needs to change.
There's something that you need to let go of. There's something that is ready to decay that needs to like go back into the earth.
We keep getting handed the death card and we keep declining the invitation. So when that happens, the tower just kind of comes in without any invite or RSVP and just like crashes the party unannounced.
So I'm not saying that everything happens for a reason, but I am saying that my body is sending me a signal right now and I am definitely not going to ignore it.
It's like, I'm ready to say, hello, vast unknown. It is me, Amy. I am scared as shit, but I'm also totally ready for you.
[20:31] So like, those are the things that I'm afraid of right now. And those are the things that I'm befriending right now.
And to like bring this back to fear and our ability to move alongside it instead of letting it stop us in our tracks, I want to share another quote from Mira Lee Patel's book that I think says it best.
She writes, the more I walked with the fear, the more the fear itself changed.
And I wholeheartedly agree.
The more I've learned to acknowledge that fear is like my brain's way of trying to keep me safe, and the more I've grown to see my fear as an invitation and less as an obstacle,
the more I've been able to let my own fears walk alongside me while I keep moving.
So to all of you who are afraid right now, I see you.
Please try not to ignore the fear or beat the fear into submission. See if you can play nice, befriend your fears, and even ask yourself, what might change if.
I let my fear walk beside me while I took steps towards my dream?
[21:45] Thank you for being here today. I appreciate each and every one of you, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
[22:21] To find deeper clarity and trust in yourself and in your business. You can find it at amykaretsky.com slash breathe.
[22:30] Breathe Into Business is recorded on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples. It is created by me, Amy Koretsky, with the production help from Softer Sounds Studios.
Thanks again for listening and breathing into your business with me.
[22:44] Music.
