Today I would like to talk with you about fear.
Fear is quite important to us, even though it may not be very pleasant.
The acronym for fear is: Friendly energy announcing risk
So in and of itself, fear is neither good nor bad but it can work both positively in life and negatively.
For example if we are climbing a very high ladder, fear may prevent us from going too high or being extra careful. So the true nature of fear is to act as a warning signal in order to protect ourselves.
However, fear can become paralysing and it can prevent us from doing all sorts of things and from transforming situations.
A couple of days ago I got a call from someone who was going through terrible fear. In fact they were petrified that certain things were going to happen and although the situation was very real; because he was so fearful and because he was completely worrying constantly about what might happen rather than looking for solutions, the fear took complete control over him.
As a result, he was unable to see any solutions. As I say, although the situation was quite real, during the course of our conversation it turned out that what he was actually fearing would not happen and that his fear was just based him misreading certain things.
Fear prevents us from seeing clearly. Fear actually closes down our ability to see clearly and to figure things out properly.
Fear is actually at the core of most of the world’s problems. If you boil it down most wars are started through fear. You may believe that its greed but if you boil it down you will discover that the core of greed comes from fear of lack.
So fear is the underlying problem of so many situations we have in the world today. Also in our own lives fear can actually destroy us. Fear can shrink our lives until they are incredibly small and when this happens our mental capacity also starts to close down.
I experienced this myself several years ago when I lost everything. It got so bad I wasn’t even able to feed my wife or our newborn son.
When it comes down to basic survival and you cannot look after your own loved ones and when you cannot even feed your loved ones it’s incredibly frightening. Every single morning I would waken up and run to the toilet because the fear was so strong that all I wanted to do was vomit. It was that bad.
We can also use fear to propel us out of a certain situation and to look for solutions to transform our situation, or as I say it can also destroy us. For quite some time fear was a very dominant force in my life. It was an incredibly painful time, but I learned a lot of things about how the mind and how our emotions affect what happens to us.
And my own experience with fear is that every morning I would waken up with this awful feeling, because we had lost absolutely everything. In fact my father was just incredible; he lent us money to keep the roof over our heads and to keep us fed. It was that bad.
However, every morning through sheer effort and meditation I was able to break through this fear, so that I could at least function normally. But then terrible things would still happen. All of this occurred because I had trusted the wrong people and made the wrong business investments and I went into the wrong type of business.
We went from being millionaires to losing everything in a very short period of time. One of the things about fear that I noticed was how is it shut down all my abilities to think clearly and find solutions.
Because when you’re full of fear you’re not solution focused, you are problem focused. And if you’re focusing on the problem all the time it actually gets worse. This is because, what we think and what we feel manifests in our environment. We actually create the circumstances of our lives through our thoughts and emotions.
And if you are manufacturing or feeling lots and lots and lots of fear and worrying about the problem constantly….because our minds and emotions affect the environment then what were are doing is; we are transmitting out into our environment, into the universe the very things that we don’t want to happen and they get even worse. This is what happened to me and it was extremely painful.
For many, many years I had been a very positive thinker and that served me incredibly well and I achieved a lot of remarkable things and my self-esteem and self-confidence built strongly.
But then experiencing this terrible fear I really had to experience the power of negative thinking and I learned this very clearly; that are our minds really do create. Some we have got to be very careful what we are dwelling on daily. Now I’m not suggesting for one moment that we cut constantly analyse our thoughts as that could drive us nuts. However, what I am saying is if we have dominant repetitive thoughts; particularly if there is emotion behind those thoughts…then we need to be careful.
Because as a great man once said; (he was talking about gratitude and resentment)…he said that our mind of appreciation and our mind of resentment……at first the difference may just seem to be subtle. But over the course of a lifetime…over a course of many years whatever thoughts and emotions we allowed to dominate…the results in our lives and how our lives turn out and what we achieve in life will be very different if we have an appreciative attitude, or “an attitude of gratitude” compared to if we have the nature to be constantly complaining and moaning. Even if it’s only internally.
How our lives progress…the difference is huge and he said just like particles of dust pile up to build great mountains…what are dwelling on over time…we need to careful, because we can create a mountain of gratitude or a mountain of resentment. We can see this quite clearly in the lives of elderly people who have lived a tough life…a hard life. They usually end up one of two ways; full of understanding, kindness, compassion and gratitude…or they can end up bitter, resentful and warped.
It is a truth to say that as we grow older our tendencies become more ingrained that that is a fact. Because when we have a repetitive thought cycle and we think that same thought again and again and again…then through cause-and-effect we are actually ingraining that thought pattern more deeply so that we will think the thoughts again rather than break the thought pattern.
So as I say, we need to be quite careful if we are allowing fear to dominate in our lives; because we can as a result bring into our lives the very experiences that we don’t want.
If we are going to obsess on anything it should be solutions and strategies and looking for the solutions and the direction that we want to take in. For the outcome that we wish to see…rather than worrying constantly about what might happen.
So a technique I have found incredibly useful for breaking through fear is once again through gratitude. Bringing up gratitude (even artificially) immediately shifts our emotional state. And all we need is to shift our emotional state for a moment if we are seeped in fear.
A well-known author once told me that if you ever wish to return to any state of consciousness you have experienced in the past, then all you have to do is remember what it feels like. We’ve all had times in our lives when we felt great gratitude when something wonderful happened to us. And if we simply remember such an event we can start feeling gratitude quite quickly. It may take a few minutes if we are really feeling great fear or anger or if we are stuck in an emotion and can’t get out of it…we really can get stuck in an emotion. However, artificially bringing up gratitude through remembering the event in the past where we felt it sincerely…things start to melt and we cannot stay fearful when bringing up gratitude in this way.
We simply cannot stay fearful if we are bringing up gratitude intentionally and after awhile as we become more proficient at this, we can begin to do it very naturally. And bringing it up at will no matter what is happening around us…I really tested this and it really works!
So I hope this short and talk about fear has helped you and please do feel free to ask questions or leave comments below and I will do my best to answer them.
I really look forward to speaking with you in the next video…
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