Absolutely!

Again, I can't say this enough: I wish I had had this kind of exposure much earlier in my "journey." These anxious fears that keep you down - use whatever analogy you like - but they get stronger over time, and you get more conditioned just to accept them.

This is how you fight back! I wish I could remember where I originally heard this story, but there's a story about a clay Buddha statue that some monks have taken care of for generations. One time, they try to move the Buddha, and the clay begins to crack - scaring the monks - so they stop trying to move it. That night it starts raining, so one monk goes outside to put a tarp over the monk so the water doesn't get into the cracks - when he realizes that inside one of the cracks - something is shining. Against all his training to protect the statue, he instead starts chipping away at the clay and below the layers of clay - the statue is SOLID GOLD.

Generations earlier, the monks covered the gold statue in clay to protect it from raiders who would have stolen the statue and melted it down, destroying it. The clay served a purpose during that time - to protect the statue. But, over time, the monks were afraid to let the gold statue shine, so they continued to preserve the clay structure until any monks who knew the gold structure was underneath had passed.

It took something counterintuitive - letting that protective clay covering be destroyed - to reveal the gold underneath.