10 Reasons to face your fear
Monday, January 19, 2009 at 12:55AM Everyone experiences fear. What sets us apart are the reasons why we create it, the ways we choose to react and whether we choose to learn from it. You can develop practical exercises to build confidence and break down your own illusions. This has potential to shift your perception and more if you allow it.
Brace yourself: every instant, you choose to imagine reasons for fear. You decide whether or not it will control you. You opt to confront your fear or not. Your behaviour sends out energy. People read it. You are inviting them to tell you what you think of yourself. Your words, posture, and gestures mirror for something deeper. Consider these ten reasons to face your fear;
1) You never know where disppointment is taking you. To reflect on jobs, relationships or roles you feared losing, lost or left actually paints an encouraging picture. Note how versatile, resourceful and resilient you become. Conditions stretch you to explore talents you never even knew you had. You accumulate knowledge in life stages and can share lessons. Your intrinsic value never changes. How aware you become determines how you share it and where this takes you.
2) You have reason to admire yourself. Exploring discomfort evokes intense feelings. Things may not appear to run smoothly. You may feel drained as you exert energy struggling against odds or an enemy you would prefer not to name. It may be a major inconvenience. And yet, underneath it all, your tenacity, staying power, and will to grow are astounding. Note where you have been got youwhere you are.
3) You can choose to reinvent yourself. Any turning point in your life invites you to rediscover your own courage. You are constantly gaining new insight into your personality and core nature. This helps you grasp which parts of you shape and perceive problems and which parts imagine how to solve them. As you choose to identify and develop certain traits and mask or disregard others, you reinvent how you view your strengths and weaknesses and what you manifest to the world.
4) You eliminate confusion. Just because you encounter fear, this does not mean you know why. The choice to explore possible reasons why enables you to dissolve misconceptions and eliminate confusion. This is also a means to learn how to atune to feelings inside yourself you did not notice before.
5) You raise awareness to new levels. Learning to step back and view fear from different angles enables you to increase your objectivity about yourself. This new awareness can carry over to how you viewother things. You may come to expand your perspective exponentially.
6) You redefine personal satisfaction. Human beings are on a silent quest to prove themselves. You have the power to create fear and also to use it to serve your own ends. Among your choices, you can opt to feel disoriented and negatively affected or, you can also decide to use fear to empower you on the path to greater independence, confidence, self-sufficency and self-mastery. You can draw the line before arrogance.
7) You move to sharpen self-discipline. As you learn you exert more power over your mind and control over your thoughts, you can learn to decide which thoughts to create and perpetuate and which ones to dissolve. As you discern what is not destructive or dangerous, you replace that with love.
8) You realize time is not your enemy. Many people are unaware that perceived time is an illusion. Human beings create it for their own ends. You decide if this will serve you and if so, how. How long you sense a fear may increase the intensity and draw your attention to it more effectively. Facing fear helps you begin to realize you are growing differently. Time and fear complement each other. To realize time is not your enemy enable you to sense how much it serves you.
9) You realize you can behave wiser. If you believe that you have finite amounts of time and energy, then you also believe what you can accomplish is limited and the time you have can become saturated. As you decide to narrow the focus of how you think and what you do, then you learning to pay more attention to the demands you place on yourself. You become more aware of how deliberate intent can be used to undermine or serve your own unconscious priorities.
10) You unveil the truth. People will jumpt to fear what they cannot readily explain or understand. Rather than accept something mysterious for what it is, rather than listen to your gut, you may deny or ignore possibilities that ly outside your comfort zone. Choosing to face your fear is an exercise in accepting levels of uncertainty. It is an exercise in building faith and trust in phenomena you did not initially desire to see. As you dissolve fear, you begin to sense differently. You expand the parameters of joy, bliss and open senses you forgot you had. You are already relearning how to use them.
Reader Comments (26)
This is a powerful post.
Ever since my life in the jungle and having to face all the fears that living there initially brought to the surface -- fears that I eventually saw had nothing to do with the rain forest itself -- I have experienced great freedom from fear. But if I do experience a fear I am immediately intrigued and compelled to explore it and to see it for what it is. If I let the fear hold me immobilized, the loss of freedom is far greater than facing any fear. I've grown too used to freedom to let fear hold me back anymore.One of my posts is titled "Fear: Doorway to Freedom." I think that has been very true for me. Facing fear was my doorway to freedom.
I think it is also true what Patricia wrote in her comment, "The first time that I faced my fears was such a wonderful experience of growth. I saw my fears for what they were---mostly imagined with no base in reality."
Long ago I discovered that when we shove down or bury a fear we not only shove down the fear, but much creativity, passion and joy with it.
I have learned fear is a powerful guide not only for getting to know ourselves, but also for understanding others and developing compassion. It is one of the most amazing guides for any soul journey, or into the "underworld" where soul thrives and loves to explore and grow.
Thank you for such an exciting post.
Hugs,
Robin
What is your feeling on 'irrational' fears like mine...the fear of flying? I actually get sick even thinking about getting on a plane - although I have managed to fly (forced myself) a few times in recent years. I've tried drugs (Xanex?) and hypnotherapy. Even some 'past life' regression. And yet...there it is. Any advice?