This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Fierce Clarity: When Fear Becomes A Compass – Rev. Aimee Daniels
DESCRIPTION
This week, we explore the idea that fear, rather than being something to avoid, might be trying to help us. What if fear isn’t a warning, but a doorway to clarity? Come curious — and ready to see differently.
SUMMARY
This talk explores how fear can serve as a doorway to clarity rather than a stop sign, beginning with the speaker’s own experience of self-doubt after meeting potential collaborators and discovering that her fear masked deeper concerns about losing freedom and creativity after years of self-employment. Drawing on Gerald Jampolsky’s teaching that fear distorts perception and on Brene Brown’s concept of “fierce clarity,” it reframes fear as a compass that points toward what the spirit most deeply wants, especially when approached through spiritual practice that quiets the mind. Using Brown’s “strong ground” metaphor, illustrated by her pickleball injury and the need for core strength, the sermon links athletic stance to a spiritual stance of grounded consciousness that allows us to acknowledge fear “above the line” rather than be driven by it “below the line.”
New Thought teachers Emmett Fox, Florence Scovel Shinn, Ernest Holmes, and Michael Beckwith are invoked to show that fear is misdirected faith or “inverted faith,” and that attention functions as a form of worship that can either imprison us in limiting beliefs or be redirected toward love, good, and possibility. Stories such as the man who discovers his dungeon door was never locked and the businessman who unexpectedly receives a crucial loan illustrate how perceived limitations can dissolve when consciousness shifts. The sermon distinguishes grounded confidence—rooted in self-awareness, humility, and disciplined courage—from defensive arrogance, and connects spiritual liberation to releasing the “armor” that hides the authentic self.
Psychological insights from Gay Hendricks further frame fear as “excitement without the breath” and introduce the idea of an “upper limit problem,” where people unconsciously sabotage themselves when they exceed their internal tolerance for feeling good or successful, including fear of success itself. The intensity of fear is presented as a clue to what we care about most, helping clarify values such as freedom and creative autonomy. Practically, the talk offers Brene Brown’s “pocket presence” tool—notice fear without judgment, breathe with a longer exhale, and redirect attention toward presence, good, or a guiding vision—as a simple, portable practice. Participants are invited to reflect on decisions avoided, truths delayed, and boundaries not set, and to consider how fear may be pointing them toward needed change rather than away from it.
The talk concludes with a guided “breathing space” meditation adapted from Jon Kabat-Zinn—moving through awareness, gathering attention on the breath, and expanding awareness outward—followed by affirmative prayer affirming oneness with divine love, goodness, and freedom. From this state, the community is invited to release what they carried in, trust that “good is the only power,” and meet the week’s situations by seeing the good (or God) in them, supported by a renewed commitment to spiritual practice.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
Thank you. That’s beautiful. Get a little choked up listening to them sing. And that song says, “There’s a voice inside my head that says I’ll never make it.” Does anyone else have that voice in their head? I have that voice. But what if fear isn’t a warning, but it’s a doorway to clarity? I had a few weeks ago, I’ve been talking with an organization outside of Cityside. I work with an organization called Vistage, but I was approached by another organization about doing some work with them. And I had a meeting with the two founders and I just got totally in my head after the meeting about not being good enough. And I was like spinning for a couple days and I’m like, “What the heck? I know better than that, especially in this teaching.” But I realized that that was just fear talking to me.
It wasn’t the truth. And then I got some support from other people and then I started to look at what was it that really triggered me underneath it? What really caused the fear? And one of the things was just a feeling that I might lose my freedom or my ability to be creative because I’ve worked for myself for the last 15 years. And so it really served me because it made me realize what’s underneath the fear is something more important and that’s what my spirit wants. And so fear can really be a compass. Most of us were taught to treat fear as a stop sign. Oh, you’re afraid. It means something wrong. It’s a sign that you shouldn’t do that. And what do we do when we get scared? The voice might say, “Get out.” Or it might say, “Shut down.” Or it might make us angry, which Reverend Jackie talked about last week.
But underneath it, there’s always something deeper for us to take a look at if we can calm ourselves down a little bit and bring ourselves back to the center. So we’re going to talk about fear and clarity. And I’m going to start with defining them because any word means what we think it means and it might not mean the same thing it means to someone else. So sometimes we’re talking to each other, we think we’re saying the same thing and we’re having a different conversation. So as Judy read to us from Gerald Jampolski in his book, Love is Letting Go of Fear, and that was based on a course in miracles by the way. He just greatly simplified it to talk about it. But his whole message is that fear distorts. Fear distorts our perception and it confuses us as to what’s actually going on.
But as we let go of that fear, we begin to experience transformation. And we start to see beyond the old reality that we’ve been experiencing and we are able to move into a sense of clarity. And that’s what we do when we do our spiritual practice. We quiet the mind. That’s what we do. So what’s waiting on the other side of fear isn’t numbness, it’s clarity. And Brene Brown would call it fierce clarity. And we’re going to explore this morning both from her book Strong Ground and also from a number of new thought teachers that build on the same thing. So somebody said to me, this is a leadership book that you pick for this month. And I’m going to say it’s a yes and. You’re the leader of your life. So you’re always leading something. But her book, when she. I don’t know if you’ve heard her or not, but everything comes down to a personal story with Brene.
So this book really came out of her deciding at midlife that she was going to be a pickleball player. And she’s kind of competitive. She was a swimmer in college, maybe high school. She was very good. And she goes out on the pickleball court and like many other people, she got hurt and pretty badly. And she was kind of laying around for a couple weeks. And one of her friends said, Brene, you really should go to this personal trainer that I’ve used. And so she goes and the guy gives her an assessment. And when she’s done, he said, “You got a 10.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I got a 10.” And then he says, “Out of 22.” And he said, “You have no core strength. You have no business playing pickleball because you have nothing to draw from.” And so a lot of the book is based on analogies from this whole idea of finding your stance.
They call it an athletic stance, but when you’re in an athletic stance, your knees are bouncy. You might be leaning forward a little bit and you’re stable and you’re ready to move. And her trainer was trying to teach her this and she’s standing there. He pushes her and she goes flying. And she got mad, of course. And he goes, “No, find your strong ground. Find that place within yourself where you aren’t going to be moved.” And to me, that’s our spiritual practice. Spiritually, it’s our spiritual practice. That’s our strong ground. So Brene says individually and collectively, we’re all looking for strong ground right now. We need to push into the source of our strength and sturdiness so we can navigate the world. And we need the ground to steady us. At the same time, we want to be in purposeful action. And that seems really timely to me.
Right? There’s just a lot going on. And I think people feel disoriented. I think we had faux. We had this false belief, like we had faux clarity about thinking like, “Oh, if this happens, then that happens.” Faux certainty, not clarity, faux certainty. We thought things were more certain than they are. And I think we’re finding out that’s not true. So we have to stay centered. So Brene talks to us about the line. And she says, “The line is fear. When we’re above the line, we feel fear and we acknowledge it.” So it’s not that the fear is not happening, it’s that we acknowledge it. And we’re not unknowingly acting from it. When we’re the below the line, we act out. Don’t we? It’s like driving the car without any awareness.
But if we’re above the line, we can maintain the wheel of our own car. That’s how she explains this. But we’re below the line, fear’s driving us. And so above the line, there is fear, but it’s acknowledged. It’s acknowledged. And we let it be. I always think about Tiknat Han with these things. He would say, “Hello, old friend. Welcome.” Right? “Oh, fear, you’re back. Welcome. “Not pushing it away, but like,” Oh, okay. It’s here. It has something to say to me. “And that’s the same thing Gerald Jampolsky was saying, just in a different way. So the teachers we are going to hear from in new thought would say that the strong ground, the stance is a state of consciousness. That’s our strong ground spiritually. It’s a state of consciousness. And we can train it. We can practice it. We can use it on purpose, and we can do that every day.
So Emmett Fox was a famous new thought author. And he wrote a short essay called The Golden Key. And he in it said, whenever you are afraid of something, you’re worshiping it. Whenever you’re afraid of something, you’re worshiping it. What does that mean? I think about it this way. Whatever we’re giving our attention to, we’re worshiping. And so we’re making it our source. We’re making it our God instead of saying like, no, whatever’s happening out here in the world, that’s not my God. My God’s inside of me. I am one with it. So fear isn’t the absence of faith. Fear is faith that’s fully engaged, but it’s aimed at the wrong outcome because we’re always working the same energy if you think about it. It’s like, where are you directing your energy in your life? You can direct it toward fear. You can direct it toward love.
Emmett Fox also says love is always creative and fear is always destructive. Our fear can feel like it’s tearing us down. At least for me, it can. And he tells a funny story. He said, this is an old fashioned story. He said, a man is arrested and he’s put in a dungeon. And he’s in the cell. He’s slammed in there with a big iron key. And he sits in the cell for 20 years. And every day they open the door, they put some water in it, and they give him a loaf of bread. And after about 20 years, he decides he can’t take it anymore. And so he’s not going to take his own life, but he’s going to try to provoke the guard to take his life the next day. And so the night before he decides he’s going to go plan. So he decides to walk up to the door and he wanted to understand how the door worked.
And he turns the handle and he figures out the door was never locked. He just thought it was locked. And he just walks out right then, walks past the guards. No one notices him and he’s free. And I love that story because we can think we’re locked in a prison, but it’s the prison of our thoughts. It’s the prisons of our belief in what we think is possible. Florence Scovil Shin, who wrote in the same era, she wrote a famous book, The Game of Life, and how to play it if anyone’s ever read it. It’s a great book. And she says, “Fear is inverted faith. Faith in evil instead of good.” Now, I don’t love the word evil. I’m going to use it again later. Ernest Holmes uses it too. I just think of evil as the not good. I don’t think of evil as a source outside of us.
So think about it that way. But a man comes to her in despair and he needs $50,000 for his business the next day. And he’s already gone to the bank. The bank’s like, no, and he can’t get any investors. So he comes to her and instead of trying to give him a solution or a strategy, she says to him, “You’re identified in love with the spirit of everyone connected with the bank. The divine idea will come out of this situation.” And so he protests, but he gets on the train and he goes to the bank and he gets the loan. And he says, “I’ll never again doubt this.” And I love that story, even though it sounds a little like crazy thinking, but I think it points to something that is true. When we can simply open our minds that something else is possible, things happen that we could never have expected.
And they surprise us, but we have to stay open. So we’re not trying to kill our fear. We’re trying to work with it. And we’re trying to shift our attention to where we want to go. So let’s talk a little bit more about Brene Brown. Last week, Reverend Jackie talked about courage and that seemed to really resonate with people, that word courage, having more courage. And I want to talk to you a little bit about confidence.
Real confidence is when we’re self-aware and we can be curious when fear happens instead of being triggered. Think about it. When people are arrogant and posturing and stuff like that, that’s just covering up fear. That’s like a need to be a certain way. And it might be fear that never got named. If I’m not important enough, I’m not good. All these things that we’re taught by the world. But we want to really be confident from a spiritual place. And Brene says, no one is fearless. They’re disciplined in their courage. No one is egoless. They practice humility. They’re disciplined in their humility. And these are choices. They’re the building blocks of grounded confidence. So it really points to us doing our inner work, doesn’t it? Doing our inner work. I had my 45 year high school reunion last night. I hate to admit it. I wasn’t going to say how long it was.
But somebody asked me about Cityside last night and I said, “You know what? I just didn’t. All my self-confidence was outside of myself.” I’m like, “That’s why I love this teaching. That’s why I’m still here.” It helped me bring myself back into myself and overcome that voice in my head, which I’ve really been realizing lately how much stuff that voice can make up. So Michael Beckwith tells us that spiritual liberation is becoming free from the neuroconfines of fear, doubt, worry, and lack and learning to live instead from what he calls the authentic self. I love those words. So when we wear armor, we’re covering our authentic self. When we’re protecting ourselves, however we might say that, putting on an air or a role, we’re really armoring ourselves. But when we let that go, we are in our authentic self. We can move from our authentic self.
So just notice yourself this week. When fear shows up, what do you do? Do you get quiet? Do you withdraw? Do you get loud? Think about what we always say, fight, flight, freeze. What’s your natural tendency when you get scared? When you get fearful. I think I freeze. I’m going to be honest. I think I freeze. I think I don’t know how I feel till later. I have to go off, I have to process. Then I can understand how I feel. I’m not good in the moment. So just be curious this week. Ernest Holmes, who founded our teaching, says, “Your thought operating through the law of life can meet your need. Convert fear into faith, loss into gain, failure into success. Act as though you already had dominion over evil.” There we have the evil word again. “Act as if you already had dominion over the situation.
“We’re going to change the word from evil. I just don’t like the word evil. “And refuse to entertain images of fear. Know that good is the only power that there is. Know that good is the only power that is nothing to be ashamed of if you’re afraid if you use his definition. It’s a way to redirect ourselves. Michael Beckwith has an expression. Pain pushes until vision pulls. I changed it up a little bit. I changed it to fear pushes until vision pulls. And right now, whatever’s most uncomfortable in your life, in my life, that’s probably doing the pushing. And it’s going to keep pushing. Sometimes it’s pushing hard until something on the other side gets clear enough. Or you desire something enough to move through whatever you’re feeling. This is where we should really get prayer to, just by the way. We should just get prayer when we’re feeling like we’re in that space.
It makes such a difference. And when we’re feeling uncomfortable, that’s actually our compass talking to us. It really is. We don’t like being uncomfortable, but sometimes that’s actually the path to growth. One of my favorite teachers, Gay Hendricks, talks about how a lot of us have an upper limit problem. And it’s this idea that we have an inner thermostat of how much good we can stand in our life. And when it’s pushed against, we might do something to sabotage ourselves. And so he himself said, “I have a limited tolerance for feeling good. When I hit my upper limit, I do something that stops my positive forward trajectory.” So in his case, he said, “I get into a conflict with my ex-wife. I get in a money bind. I do something that brings me back into my zone of comfort.” But we can be afraid of succeeding too.
It’s not just about failing. And that’s really the genius of his work. For us to fully step into, he calls it our zone of genius, other people call it other things. We probably have to move through some discomfort and fear. We maybe have to let go of an old idea of ourselves that doesn’t serve us anymore to step into something new. I think that’s what I was up against in the story I told you. I’m like, wow. Yeah. Anyway.
Gay Hendricks points to the same tool that Michael Fox pointed to. And it really comes out of psychotherapy. He says, “Fear is excitement without the breath.” I like that. Fear is excitement without the breath. So when you’re afraid, you feel like you can’t breathe. You feel constricted. So it’s the same energy, just going a different way. And the intensity of our fear, I just want to say one other thing. The intensity of our fear often tells us how much we care about something. And if we care about something a lot, then that can show us where to point. Like my opening story, I realized what I cared about is I want to retain the ability to be creative and have freedom. And I don’t want someone dictating to me in my work. If they want to collaborate, great, but I want my freedom. And that’s what my fear told me.
I like my freedom. So let’s talk about a few ways to practice. In Strong Ground, Brene Brown talks about something called pocket presence. And she says this is borrowed from athletes who go on the field and are under pressure. It’s very simple. First, you notice the fear without judging it. And you don’t fight it and you don’t shame yourself for having it. You just notice it. There it is. Hello, old friend. And then you just take a breath and just breathing in through your nose and breathing out with a longer exhale. And then you want to turn your attention, in our words, toward presence, toward good, toward the vision that’s trying to pull you instead of the pain that’s pushing you. And maybe you do that through a phrase. Maybe you create an affirmation. Maybe you have just a visual of what it is that is the state that you’re wanting to call in.
So you notice, you breathe, and then you redirect yourself basically. So it’s pretty simple. You can put it in your pocket and use it when you need it during the week.
And so just to keep this personal, I want to ask you for a second just to think about any decisions you’ve been avoiding in your life or a truth that you’ve been delaying in your life. Or maybe there’s a boundary you haven’t set yet in your life. Maybe something that’s causing some discomfort for you. And I’m actually going to ask you if you have someone next to you, I’m going to create a little chaos. To turn to the person next to you and say, “Fear has been pointing me toward. Fear has been pointing me toward,” and fill in the blank. I’m going to got to be quick. We’re going to do this in like 30 seconds. Person next to you, fear has been pointing to me toward.
I don’t feel very fearful at all. I love that. Which direction are you going? I love that. Okay. Also with the person you’re speaking to, I’ve been arguing with my fear instead of listening to it about fill in the blank. I’ve been arguing with my fear instead of listening to it about fill in the blank. Share it with the person next to you. And if you’re online, type it in the chat. Yeah. Oh. If you can. If you can’t answer it, you can take a picture of this and think about it during the week. We’re going to give it just another few seconds.
Okay. I’m going to call everyone back. I’m going to call everybody back. It just was pointed out to me that evil is live spelled backwards. I love that. That’s a good one. Okay. We’re going to move into a closing practice together. This is something else that you can also do at home. And last week, Reverend Jackie invited us to hold a coal, the burning coal and set it down. This week we’re going to have to do something different. We’re just going to get quiet enough to actually notice what’s present for us right now. And we’re going to use a simple practice from John Kabat Zinn, which is called the breathing space.
Just to tell you a little bit about it, and then we’re going to move into it. The first step is to come into awareness. You can also take a picture of this. The second he calls gather. So it’s like just bringing yourself into this moment. And then expanding is just letting our awareness go out beyond us as we’re sitting. So we’re going to do this together. So I just invite everyone to close your eyes and then we’re going to go into prayer from here. So as you close your eyes, I just invite you to take this time just to notice simply what’s here in this moment.
Notice any thoughts that are moving through you. Notice any feelings that you’re having at all, including fear if it’s present. And just notice how your body feels right now. Any sensations you’re feeling in your body. Any place where you’re feeling any tightness. Notice you’re breathing. Where are you breathing? Just notice what is. You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re just noticing where you are in this moment and just naming it. And now I want you to focus on one thing. I want you to focus on your breath. Just the breath moving in the belly or the chest.
Follow your breath in and out. Follow your breath in and out. And if you notice your attention wandering, just simply bring it back to the breath. Your breath is the gathering point. Everything else can wait. So keeping your awareness in your breath, that steadiness in your breath. Just begin to let your awareness expand out your whole body. Just feeling that awareness in your whole body. Feel that awareness expanding beyond you to this whole room. Allowing your awareness, your energy, your light to expand beyond the room. Just embracing this healing energy. Just notice the peace, the love, the expansiveness in this moment, this natural state of wellbeing.
And in this moment, I know the presence of spirit, the presence of God by whatever name you call it, this infinite love, this infinite life, this infinite possibility, this infinite grace and goodness. And I know that I am one with this. I am one with this grace, this goodness, this expansiveness, this divine wellbeing, this freedom. And as I know this for myself, I know this for each person hearing my words. I know that we are all one with this light, with this love, with this grace, with this goodness, with this divine wellbeing, this divine freedom, this divine possibility. So from this place of oneness, I speak a word of transformation for all of us. I know that we have set down whatever we carried in, we have released it, and we are free to move forward in life. I know that the only things that are happening are love and peace.
That’s the spiritual truth. God is the only thing that is ever happening. And so I know for us in each and every situation that we encounter this week, that we see the God, we see the good. We turn our attention to what is calling us and what is desired to our whole self. And we release anything that isn’t that. I just know for each and every one of us that we have a new level of commitment to our practice, to practicing the presence, knowing that God’s got this, I am grateful for this.
And together we say, and so it is.