Table of Contents

Welcome, brave human. In this article, we’ll begin to explore gentle ways to navigate anxiety, trauma, and fear. Know this: your tiny brave steps forward are the path to true courage.

Lessons from half a lifetime of anxiety

I was 40 years old before I realised I had “anxiety”. And I was in my early 50s before I realised that not everybody who has “anxiety” experiences the same flavour of incessant-existential-dread that I've lived with.

For most of my life, I existed without much awareness of my body. Whole areas of my body were numb… but I had no idea.

Most of my energy swirled around in my head. I lived inside a perpetual swinging between excitable overstimulation and overwhelmed collapse.

It was completely exhausting.

It’s always irritated me when well-intentioned therapists or meditation teachers or innocent bystanders say: “just take a deep breath and relax”. Because it's never been that easy for me.

For as long as I can remember, my body carried high levels of tension. Any potential threat triggered total readiness to fight, fly, freeze, fawn or faint (depending on how extreme the threat seemed).

For more than four decades, there was no gap between any scary stimulus and the response: instinctual contraction followed by immediate shutdown. There was no space where I could intervene and make a different choice.

I was addicted to process work for years because I believed in the myth of the big breakthrough: one spectacular display of spiritual fireworks that was going to fix everything and set my life on a completely different track.

That belief led me on many excellent adventures, from ice bathing in the Ganges outside Rishikesh, to shitting my pants in the mountains of Montana with only my soul for company, to meditating with an elderly wizard monk in Myanmar while he insisted I was the reincarnation of a long-dead Burmese queen.

Along the way I burned through several passports, tangled with a few narcissists, and tried so many different healing modalities I can’t remember them all.

My life began to improve after I stopped designing my days around the quest for that mythical breakthrough, began paying attention to the mundane details of my life, and started noticing what my body was trying to tell me.

TinyBrave was born as a blog long before those decisions - in 2014, which was when I started to take tentative steps towards fear instead of away from it.

TinyBrave in 2024

Now it’s 2024 and the tinybrave blog is being reborn.

This time around, the mission is to share what I've learned over the past 20 years about working with trauma in ways that support a highly sensitive nervous system, and harnessing the horsepower of a neurodivergent brain that works quite differently to many others. (I prefer the term “neurospectacular”.)

For now, I’ll leave you with my first post from ten years ago. The intention I declared then has aged remarkably well.

If you’ve struggled with anxiety or fear, this blog is largely for you. I hope it’s useful. Welcome to TinyBrave, lovely.

………………………………………

The bravebot

17th July 2014

I have a weird relationship with fear. It's been my constant companion for over 40 years. If I was a fish, fear would be my water. I've been swimming in it all my life.

But the reality is that I avoid feeling fear, naming it or even acknowledging it. For me, avoidance of fear has been unconscious, instinctual and compulsive. For now, I won't go into why. What I will say is that it's time for the avoidance to stop. And this blog is one of my tools for stopping it... an ongoing, public declaration of intent.

I intend to live bravely. I intend to be courageous. I intend to make at least one gutsy decision every day and after that (with a deep breath) let go of the incessant struggle to control life.

While I'm hellbent on living courageously, I'm also done with scaring the shit out of myself by setting impossible goals and then freezing in the face of (potential) failure. So I'm making tiny changes.

Starting this blog is enough - I'm not declaring a publication schedule or holding any agenda for where this might go. It's simply a place for me to show up and do what scares me most of all... find my voice and speak about some of the stuff I usually keep hidden inside my head.

This blog is dedicated to Chris Guillebeau and to the staff, speakers and attendees of the World Domination Summit 2014 - because starting to write was the commitment I made on the final day.

The creature in the photo is a bravebot, created by a guy called Gary Hirsch. On the final day of WDS 2014, he gave all 2800 attendees unique bravebots he'd hand painted over the past year.

(I'm not sure exactly what else he got done in the previous 12 months, but that's a pretty impressive accomplishment for someone who also has a day job working to help businesses do better using improvisation!)

Gary also asked us a question/issued a challenge - what's one brave thing you've always wanted to do but haven't yet? That day I made a public commitment on Instagram to start writing.

So Gary's big heart and the bravebot are responsible for the initiation of tinybrave. Thankyou Gary - I probably wouldn't have done this without you.

………………………………………

big love

Belinda Noakes ❤️‍🔥

Mentor, Energy Alchemist, Lighthouse Keeper for TinyBrave

View my bio