How to Live Fearlessly – Deep Psychology

Let’s talk about the principles of how to live fearlessly. We’re going to discuss many facets of fear and how it operates in our life, from the topic of internal resistance, to retraining our fear, to how fear relates to spirituality.

This is a crucial topic, and one that is close to my heart. My inspiration to write this article came after a transformative insight I had into fear – while sitting in a coffee shop.

A couple days later, I drafted my Declaration for a New Life, and at the end I’ll share it. This will bring this topic to life and starkly show my audience that this is an ongoing area of growth for me.

So let’s get right into the topic of how to live fearlessly.

My Huge Insight Into How to Live Fearlessly

My huge insight into how to live fearlessly came very recently (I’m writing in March 2025), when I was in a coffee shop on my own, reading a book.

I was reading a book about spiritual enlightenment by Evelyn Underhill, who was a highly influential writer in the early 20th century. She wrote about mysticism, the great saints and sages of the past, and how their spiritual realisations radically changed their lives, behaviour and actions in the world.

One of her most striking conclusions, and the one that perpetuated my insight into how to live fearlessly, was that when the great saints and sages came to their deep realisations about God, such as their own identity with and inseparability from God, they gained enormous inner strength and were consequently able to do some remarkable things in the world.

Think of Santa Teresa, Joan of Arc and Saint Paul, for examples of well-known spiritual figures who were able to do things that are beyond the average person. This wasn’t because of money or privilege: often they found themselves with minimal financial resources.

In Underhill’s opinion, what drove them was their deep knowledge of God, of their inseparability from God. That was the source of their power. She discusses their lives and feats in more detail in her work, and I’d highly recommend it.

So, as I was sitting there, reading about these people and their achievements, I suddenly became very aware of my own psychology. For the first time in my life, I got a very clear sense that for much of my life, my disposition has been one of fear and resistance. And for the next few hours, I had many deep insights about myself, along with many ideas for how I must change my personality and psychology to live a greater life.

While it’s true that I’ve achieved a lot in my life, often after years of persistence, doubt and struggle, I still think my fundamental disposition to life as a whole has been one of fear and resistance.

That’s not the only facet of my psychology that was deeply revealed to me; several facets were revealed, and they all feed back and reinforce the mentality of fear.

Let’s talk about a key facet of our psychology that I became aware of: resistance.

Internal Resistance & How to Live Fearlessly

One of the most powerful insights I had was that I have a considerable amount of internal resistance to life.

Life is always asking things of me, big and small. A small example is receiving a phone call. When someone calls, I’m being asked to do something: to pick up the phone, to listen, to speak, to respond, to act, to make a decision.

Another is when the car breaks down and needs to be taken to the garage. Or maybe the dishes need done. These are all examples of us being asked to do something.

A big example is when we’re in a career crisis and we’re required to make decisions and take action. Perhaps there’s a family issue we need to sort. Maybe we’re presented with the opportunity of travelling to a foreign country. These are further examples of us being asked to do something.

At whatever level we might look at it, life is always asking things of us. We continually have things to attend to.

I noticed at that moment, when reading about the great saints and sages, that my ingrained response to these requests is to resist them. As soon as the request comes to me, I can see my resistance to it. I notice that I simply don’t want to do it.

I can see that I would much rather the world left me alone in my own little world. I just want to sit and read my book, I just want to chill out, I just want to relax. Just leave me alone! You take care of it instead! I’ve been guilty of this in so many areas of life that it would take eons for me to list them all.

And sure, often I overcome that resistance, or I have no choice in the matter. But the problem is that even if I do respond, my actions are very half-baked. I might be feel like I’m taking responsibility and getting it done, but actually there’s a lot of resistance. I’m still fighting it in my mind, so I’m not really doing it properly.

This facet of my psychology became very obvious to me in that moment: my fundamental disposition to life is one of resistance.

You might wonder what this has to do with our topic, how to live fearlessly, so let’s talk about that right now.

The Topic of Fear

The topic of resistance is very closely related to fear. In observing myself since the day I had this realisation, I’ve noticed that in tandem with this resistance is an underlying fear of being asked to do things and of failing to do them to the right standard. I fear these requests, I fear opening up to the world, and so I feel great resistance when they come to me.

I’ve noticed I’m quite a fearful person in a way that I couldn’t have understood conceptually. It seemed that this bright spark of inspiration from the book starkly revealed my psychology to me. This fear is subtle but pervasive, and might not be hugely apparent to me or others, but the sum total of its effects is sizeable.

Even when I was in the coffee shop, as I was having these deep realisations, I could see I resisted basic things like asking for another coffee or for some cake, or asking to pay the bill. In every little action, I could see my fear imposing itself.

On a bigger level, this translates into falling short of my potential. I consider myself a very capable person, and in many areas I’ve been able to turn this into outstanding results. The reason I’m not doing it even more often is because I have this internal resistance and fear.

I buy into the fear, I buy into my limiting ideas, I see the limitations rather than the opportunities. I’m not present. And all this leads to inaction.

Understanding Fear

One crucial to realise about fear is that when we’re fearful, it’s mostly because we’re negatively projecting into the future based on past experiences, judgments and pre-evaluations. Often, we’re imagining a worst-case scenario.

If we don’t see these ideas for what they are, we begin to feel fear, and then we’re inhibited. Rather than being here, awake, alive, ready and available, we’re in the future, we’re in our imaginations of the future. We’ve lost our connection with the present and our ability to do what needs to be done, right now.

In my case, it means I dismiss requests of my time and attention, rather than being here, right now, and doing what I can to respond to the people that are asking something from me.

Spirituality and How to Live Fearlessly

I also realised that fearlessness is a very spiritual pursuit.

One way we can look at fear is that it’s based on separation. It’s based on the perception that: “I am in here and the world is out there. This is me, this is my body, this is my mind, and the world is outside of me.”

This is a fear-inducing paradigm, because we feel powerless, impinged on, limited, tossed around like a rag doll.

Yet when we work to develop spiritual awareness, through meditation for example, we start to realise that this paradigm has severe limitations and, though a useful model, isn’t ultimately true.

We realise the deeper truth of things, which include the realisation that we are life and life is us.

Everything we feel, see, hear, think or experience or know or perceive on any level is within our direct awareness, and that there is nothing outside our direct awareness. This includes all concepts and ideas about everything we have ever known or perceived.

So, think about this. Events (and people, and places, and obligations) and our ideas of them are both within our direct awareness. We cannot know the event outside of our own knowing of it. So any pre-conceived idea of the event is part of that event. It’s inseparable from it: anything we can say about it is also within our direct experience.

We cannot look at that event outside of our direct perception. Our direct perception of it and our ideas about it are the event. That’s all that exists for us.

When we feel separate from everything, we fail to realise this. We tend to think about events in our lives as elements that impinge on us, rather than as elements we’re directly influencing and co-defining in every moment.

With spiritual awareness we realise that there is no difference between the event, us, and our life. It is us, it is our life right now, just as it is. There is nothing else, no matter how we might try to escape, whether through conceptual or physical maneuvers. This is our life.

And our life is not only physical and time-bound, it is divine. It is a work of art. It’s a dance, a play.

When we resist, fear, or fail to trust, we’re not aware of our true identity. We’re not realising that there is nothing outside of ourselves impinging on us, other than disassociated portions of our own mind and our interfacing software.

If we flip ourselves inside out and realise everything is within us, we no longer fear it. It’s within us. Even if we do fear it, the fear is also within us. All perceptions are within us.

As such, it’s up to me to stand up, to feel my power, my divine power, to tap into that, to stand up and show it, breathe it in, stand tall and bring that forth into the world. Nobody else can do that for me.

And, yes, everything we’re asked to do is all part of us too. It’s not a nuisance, but part of the divine dance of our lives.

If life approaches us and offers us a dance, we have to step up and take it: when we do, we’re dancing with our own divinity.

And when we ourselves take the lead, we’re becoming divine creators, inspired and empowered by God to write more verses of divine poetry.

How to Live Fearlessly: Train Ourselves

We’re often asked to do things that we’re already used to. When I feel hungry, I receive the request from my body that I need to eat. By now, it’s easy for me to go the fridge or the cupboard and get something to eat. That’s no problem for me at all.

Or if the request comes in the form of rest, I can easily go to my bed. That doesn’t create fear because I’ve done it tens of thousands of times. No training is required.

However, I regularly get asked to do things that I’m afraid of, like taking phone calls. Yes, I know it sounds really silly, but it’s true.

What I was shown is that our fears aren’t being imposed on us from the outside. There’s nobody out there imposing their phone calls on me. It only seems that way because I resist them: if I didn’t, I wouldn’t feel the sense of pressure that I do.

Instead, they’re there as a kind of invitation, as a growth mechanism. When I respond to those things that I resist, I grow. I retrain my habitual response and undo my old conditioning.

The key is that when we notice that fear and resistance, we simply feel the fear inside us without responding to it, and we proceed to respond and act.

We don’t push it away. We don’t say no. We don’t shun responsibility. We don’t hide away; we take it on. In doing so, we realise we’re bigger than the fear and that it’s just an experience we’re having. And when we do this, we start to transcend and work through that fear.

When we repeat this process with those same old fears and resistances, we finally begin to reprogramme our habitual response from one of resistance to one of willingness.

Also, fear is not in the act itself: it precedes the act. Fear is a projection into the future that is only present before the event, not during it. As a result, the act of saying yes is itself a fear-reducing act. Once we say yes to a request and dive in, the original fear can no longer be there. In accepting the challenge, we’re already going beyond the fear.

In doing this, we train ourselves to realise that there is fundamentally nothing to be afraid of. We work through our old patterns and are no longer blindly conditioned into pushing away and resisting. Instead, our attiude is one of openness, availability, willingness.

Check out my episode On The Fearless Mindset.

Overcoming Fear to Grow

Another of the key insights I had is that fear is necessary as a growth mechanism. In life, we’re going to be asked to do things over and over again. Some of them will make us afraid. And when we act in spite of our resistance and fear, we grow as people. It’s one of the main mechanisms by which we grow, and so fear is a beautiful and necessary phenomenon.

The sad part is that if we’re unable to face our fears, we’re not going to grow at all. Like an unwatered plant, we’re left malnourished, suffocated and shrivelled in our comfort zone.

This is because we’re not integrating new experiences, or changing our psyche, or upgrading our view of ourselves and the world, or working through our old traumas that keep us stuck in infantile behaviour. We’re stuck in that same old fearful identity.

After my deep realisations in that coffee shop, I went on a long walk, and I could clearly see how walking down the same well-trodden tracks was ruining my life.

As I was walking, I was just talking to myself, being loving but being very firm, and demanding much more of myself:

“Ross, you’re better than this. You’re better than being stuck in this fear. You’re better than saying no. You’re better than playing victim. You’re better than blaming people. You don’t have to do all this. You have to take the high road. You have to trust in your divinity, your divine power. And you have to say yes to life. You have to take everything on as a challenge. You have to see that you’re being called to do things all the time. Say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done. If not, you’re missing life.”

Fear-based Living Causes Stagnation

We’re defined in large part by how we respond to life when it asks things of us. And on a very high level, when our default response to life is “No!”, we’re not really alive at all.

Like a stagnated river when it’s overtaken by algae and bacteria, and its water goes brown, smelly, murky and unappealing, and no fish can survive in there, when we don’t say yes, when we hide away and are unavailable, our psychology and personality become like a smelly, apparently comfortable but suffocating jail.

Years go by, society changes, people die, babies are born, and the world moves on, but we remain with the same old fears. We do the same old things in the same old way. We resist the same things. We live in our little comfort loops, circling around and around endlessly, even though we feel dead inside. At least it feels familiar, though.

Make no mistake, life is a challenge, even if we have reasonably comfortable lives. Regardless of our life situation, we’re all being challenged every single day to do things that we don’t really want to do.

But being truly alive is about taking on the challenge, breathing it in, feeling big, seeing the fear but not buying into it, and diving in. That’s when we feel most alive.

The Results

Ever since I had this deep realisation, I’ve been very vigilant with myself, watching for resistance and willingly stepping into my fear.

I’ve reminded myself all the time not to resist, not to buy into my resistance, to see my fears, to see the things I don’t want to do, and do them anyways. Yes, this has involved answering the phone, and I’ve probably tripled the amount of phone calls I usually answer or make.

This includes doing things around the house. While I’m good at cleaning entire rooms, I resist the little jobs: folding clothes, washing and drying the final dishes, taking out the rubbish.

Instead of resisting it, or procrastinating, or going into victim mode, or acting like a little boy (which I often do), I’ve said, “Yes, let’s get it done.”

Another poignant example is saying no to people and asking them to change their behaviour when it’s annoying me.

In the past, I’ve often avoiding this like the plague. I usually prefer to sit there and moan about them in my mind, feeling angry and self-righteous. I’d happily sit there, bitching about them in my mind, concocting all kinds of imaginary fights and confrontations, but I wouldn’t dare say anything.

But on a couple of occasions this week, I’ve found myself in that situation, needing to confront somebody about their behaviour. I could see my resistance, which was sizeable, and for a few moments I wanted to remain wallowing in it.

But then I said, “No, this is no way to live life. I need to say what needs to be said.” So I did, and afterwards all was well.

What’s even more remarkable is that I’ve stood up and responded to a big event in my life. Just a few days after my coffee-shop insights, someone very close to me fell and badly broke their arm.

As a result, I’ve had to do a lot of things I ordinarily would not want to do. I’ve had to look after them, dress them, shower them, make phone calls, take charge of all the dinners and do all the housework. I’ve also not been able to work as much as normal.

I’ve repeatedly seen my resistance and said, “No, that is no way to live life. I can’t buy into my resistance. I need to look after them, I need be available. I need to respond to what’s happening here.”

Even in the short time that has passed since that day, I’ve noticed it’s had wide-ranging implications for my life.

Final Thoughts

The key to how to live fearlessly is responding to life, seeing our resistance, working through it, and realising that real life is on the other side of resistance. It’s no way to live by resisting life, fearing things and playing victim. It’s our job to respond to life.

And it’s our job to realise that these requests are not mundane. All these seemingly mundane things are part of our divine journey, our healing process, our growth process. They’re part of our refining process, of us being sculpted into better people.

To finish here, I’d like to share my Declaration for a New Life. After a few days of digesting my insights and their implications, I made a list of things that I wanted to say goodbye to and things that I wanted to welcome in.

So to finish off, I’m going to share that.

Declaration for a New Life

I’m done with moaning, victimhood, fear, excuses, negativity, limitations, shunning responsibility, laziness, aloneness, isolation, giving up, pessimism, indecision, fatigue, indifference, blaming, repression, separation, sensitivity, insincerity, hiding away, rigidity.

And I bring forth passion, purpose, action, socialising, energy, tirelessness, willingness, openness, unicity, divinity, confidence, power, optimism, reintegration, transformation, presence, sincerity, trust, creation.

Listen to the audio version of this post on Spotify.