Lift OneSelf Podcast - Mental Health, Healing & Wellness Transform your mental health through real stories and real-time healing practices.
Host NatNat Be invites experts and everyday people to share their personal journeys navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, and emotional challenges, then guide you through the healing practices that helped them transform.
Experience breathwork, meditation, somatic techniques, and therapy tools in real time. Whether you’re seeking emotional healing, stress relief, or personal growth strategies, you’ll find raw, authentic stories and actionable practices you can use immediately.
This is emotional sobriety in action. This is LiftOneSelf. New episodes weekly. www.LiftOneSelf.com | @LiftOneSelf And remember always be kind to yourself.
Fear doesn’t just warn you. It can recruit a whole committee, draft a presentation, and convince your body to brace for a future that hasn’t even happened.
In this episode, I explore why fear can feel more familiar than trusting Life, how our nervous system uses the past to predict what comes next, and why trying to control Life can really be an attempt to avoid feeling disappointment, grief, rejection, uncertainty, or pain.
I also challenge the idea that if you manifest properly, think positively enough, or stay perfectly aligned, Life will always unfold according to your design. Painful experiences are not automatic proof that you failed, weren’t positive enough, or somehow deserved what happened.
For me, the work is not creating a Life where nothing painful ever happens. It’s becoming internally resourced enough to navigate what does happen.
We talk about surrender, psychosomatic stress, fear versus certainty, and what it means to stay connected to yourself when you don’t know what comes next.
I’ll also guide you through a short breathing and somatic reflection practice to notice how uncertainty, trust, desire, and receiving actually feel in your body.
Because fear can inform us without becoming the authority.
And trusting Life is not the same as believing you can control Life.
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Welcome to the Lyft One'self podcast. I'm your host, Nat Nat, and I'm recording this from a remote location today. So you may hear some nature sounds, a little traffic, maybe some voices in the background. And I'm going to let some of that just be a part of the moment. Because being here, listening to the water, the wind, the sound around me, feeling the sun on my skin, I'm reminded of how much life is always happening in real time. And yet, so often we are not actually in the moment we're in.
We're somewhere already ahead or somewhere behind, predicting, preparing, bracing, which is why I think most of us have a better relationship with fear than we do with life. Fear is familiar. We know how to brace for it. We know how to prepare for disappointment, how to scan for what might hurt us. Fear loves a project. Give fear five quiet minutes, and somehow it has created a full presentation, supporting documents, and three disasters that have not actually happened yet. Yet life, life asks us to enter places we have never been before without a guarantee of what we're going to find. And let me tell you, life has brought me into places where I was kicking and screaming and grabbing, saying no, not graceful surrender, not me floating peacefully into acceptance. Heck no. There have been moments where every part of me was saying, I did not order this, I didn't ask for this, I don't deserve this. And that last one took me a long time to unpack because painful experiences are not always about deserving. Fearful experiences are not proof that you did something wrong. Some experiences are painful because being alive means we are going to experience things we could never choose.
What has been harmful for many people is the concept that if you manifest properly, think properly, align properly, then life is always going to unfold according to your design. And when it doesn't, people can start believing they did something wrong, that they weren't positive enough, that they weren't aligned enough, that somehow their pain is evident of failure. And I want to call BS. Life happens, pain happens, disappointment happens, loss, uncertainty happens. And experiencing any of that does not automatically mean you did something wrong. It does not mean you deserved it. Trusting life is not the same as believing you control life. And I think we have to be careful not to turn manifestation, spirituality, or even nervous system work into another illusion of certainty, of control. Because sometimes what we call trying to control life is really us trying to control whether we ever have to feel disappointment, fear, grief, rejection, uncertainty, or pain or other things. We're trying to control our emotional experience of life, and that is exhausting. For me, the work is not creating a life where nothing painful ever happens, because that's unrealistic. It's developing the tools to become internally resourced enough to navigate what does happen
the breath, the presence, the discernment, the willingness, the capacity to stay within my body, with myself, when life does not look the way I had hoped or prayed it would be. That is where surrender started becoming real for me. Not surrender as giving up, not willingness as pretending I liked what was happening, yet learning how to stop fighting reality long enough to meet myself inside of it, to breathe inside what I could not control, to recognize that my resistance was not changing what was happening. It was exhausting me inside of what was already here, not being able to access my tools and my toolkit. Fear has its place, don't get me wrong. Yet the way we relate to fear is what needs to change. Fear can inform us without becoming the authority. It can remind us of what happened before without convincing us that it already knows what's happening next. Because possibility is
not prophecy. Think about something as simple as driving. You're driving, nothing is happening, the road is fine, and suddenly your mind says, What if that truck comes into my lane and now we're off? What if something happens? What would I do? How would I handle it? And within seconds, your body can begin responding to something that is not actually happening. This is where the word psychosomatic comes in. Psychosomatic does not mean fake, it means the mind and body are interacting. The scenario may be imagined, yet the stress response in the body can be very real. Meanwhile, reality is sitting there like, hello, we are literally just driving. This is how quickly abundance or possibility can turn into lack or a closed door. Nothing has actually changed in the moment, yet the mind has moved from what is here to what could be lost, what could go wrong, or why something may not be available to us. The as is of reality is I am driving, I am here. That thing is not happening right now, even though it might feel like it in your body and in your mind. I may not be able to control the pain I experience in life, yet I can become aware of the suffering I create trying to predict it, prevent it, control it, or reject the as-is of reality.
And this is where I want to walk alongside you for a moment. I want to ask you some questions. And if you're willing, don't rush the answers to these questions with your mind. So to begin, let's take three collective breaths together. Wherever you are in your seating, get comfortable. Now, wherever you are in your breathing, just exhale. Now through your nose, take a deep inhale and out through your mouth, a gentle exhale. Another deep inhale and gentle exhale. One more deep inhale and let it all go. Now just notice. No need to change anything, no need to make anything happen. Just notice what is here. Now hear this. I do not know what is going to happen next. What happened in your body? Did anything shift? Maybe something tightened, maybe something softened, maybe your breath changed. Maybe your mind immediately started searching for an answer. Maybe some part of you said, no, we need a plan. Or maybe nothing obvious happened at all. Just notice there is no right response. It's simply information and awareness. Now hear this next question. I do not have to know what happens next in order to remain connected to myself. How does that land? Notice whatever is there. Ease, resistance, curiosity, nothing obvious at all. Again, no right answer. Just information. Now, when I say trust, courage, self-worth, presence. What do you notice? Maybe one of those words feels familiar. Maybe one feels uncomfortable. Maybe there is openness. Maybe there is resistance. Maybe you don't have language for it yet. That's okay. The invitation is simply to listen. And now I want to invite you into something else.
Bring to the front of your mind something you really want or desire. Something meaningful to you. Something good. Now imagine not grasping for it, not chasing it, not trying to control every detail of how it has to happen. Just allow yourself to be. Let yourself experience the possibility that it can flow toward you. That you do not have to force it. That you do not have to grip it. It can naturally come towards you. And notice what happens in your body as you imagine receiving in that way. Maybe something opens. Maybe something contracts. Maybe your mind gives you ten reasons why that could never happen. Fear loves a committee meeting. Just notice. What happens when you allow yourself to receive without immediately deciding how it has to arrive? What happens when possibility does not have to be controlled before you're willing to experience it? This is what I mean by becoming internally resourced. Not getting rid of fear, building a different relationship with it. One where fear can have a voice without dominating the whole conversation. One where there is also room for curiosity, possibility, desire, receiving, expansion. I can hear my own protective system say, We've been hurt before. We don't know what is over there. And I can say, I know, and we're still allowed to see. That is not overriding the body. That is recognizing that fear is information. Yet fear does not know what life is going to do.
Trust is not certainty. Trust is knowing I can remain with myself even when certainty is not available. And maybe that is the leap of faith. Not jumping blindly, not pretending every situation is safe, yet recognizing I have reached the edge of what my past can tell me. And if I want something different, I have to leave enough space within myself to experience something I do not already know. So ask yourself, what has fear convinced me it already knows? Where am I demanding certainty before I allow myself to move? Am I responding to what is actually happening or to what my mind has predicted might happen? And where might I allow a little more possibility? You are not entering the unknown empty, you are entering it resourced. Your breath is there, your presence is there, your discernment is there, your capacity to meet the moment is there. You do not need to know everything that is coming in order to stay connected to yourself. So maybe leave a little room, a little room between the prediction and the truth, a little room between yesterday and today, a little room for receiving, a little room for possibility, a little room for life to show you something you did not already know. This is an invitation to release the belief that fear already knows what life is going to do. And as I sit here beside the water, watching the glimmer move across it, feeling the breeze on my skin, I'm reminded that this is the moment I actually have this breath, this body, this moment. And I get to share a little piece of it with
you. If these conversations support you, there is a really simple way you can help support this podcast. Like the episode, subscribe, and share it with somebody who came to mind while you were listening. Those simple clicks help that wonderful algorithm know these conversations are worth sharing. And they help them reach people who may actually need to hear them. It costs you nothing, yet it genuinely helps support me and the work I put into these conversations. And if something in today's conversation opened up curiosity and you want to explore this work more deeply, you can find my workshops, my one-on-one work, and other resources at liftoneself.com. That's L-I-F-T-O-N-E-S E L F dot C O M. Thank you for being here and wherever you are right now, please remember to be kind and gentle with yourself. You matter.
