So, let’s talk about fear.
What is fear? Have you ever investigated it? It’s such a common and frequent experience for most of us, isn’t it? And we all react to and from it in one predictable and predetermined way or another. Often, we aren’t even aware that we are feeling fearful. Yet if we were to observe or reflect on many of our behaviors, we can often trace their cause back to fear.
Our everyday psychology has us labeling the different kinds of fear experiences we may have: Fear of failure/success, fear of rejection, fear of death, fear of commitment, fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment, fear of sickness, fear of dissent or disagreement, even fear of fear itself!
Looking through that list of things that we are fearful of, can you see that each of them is another form of life experience? So, we actually find that we fear various life experiences. How does that feel, recognizing that we fear certain life experiences?
I hope it encourages us to reflect further because, after all, life is about ongoing experiences, isn’t it? Yet, we fear some of them. Why?
I think it’s because we expect them to be unpleasant and to threaten our sense of wellbeing. Almost always that expectation stems from past experiences where we have felt discomfort, threatened or unwell. And so we expect that future experiences where similar triggers are likely to be present will also result in such negative feelings. In other words, fear is that experience we have when we believe and feel that our wellbeing, our happiness, is at risk.
We even talk about fear of the unknown. Why do we fear what is unknown? What is it about the ‘unknown’ that we fear? I actually believe that it is a misnomer. It is really not possible to fear what you don’t know. What we do fear, however, is what we expect we may find in that ‘unknown’. We fear we may find experiences that can cause us to feel threatened, unsafe, unhappy, just as they have done in the past.
You see, if we were to consider it logically, the ‘unknown’ is an open set, a set of many possibilities. However, our past experiences predispose us to being fearful that the most likely possibilities are ones that will cause us to feel bad, threatened, unsafe or unhappy.
Because, A has occurred in the past followed by B, we expect that to happen again and again and again…
Fear is just an event. We experience fear and as a result of our conditioning, our habits of thought, word and action, we react to and from it. We go on autopilot. We suppress, reject, deny, attack, defend or distract ourselves. And it is this reaction, this struggle with our life experiences (including fear) that makes fear a discomforting, threatening experience for us. We are not comfortable with the experience of fear.
But, as a thought experiment, what if we were to be comfortable with fear? Or at least, what if we did not react in our learned, conditioned, habitual ways? In other words, what if we kept our options open? It’s a radical thought, isn’t it? Almost liberating!
And that is why fear is really our friend, a very, very caring friend. For when we can see that our experience of fear is yet another opportunity for us to move into the free space of unlimited options/possibilities, we are likely to be thankful for it. It is in this open field that we can fully and freely make our choices.
For as long as we react in the same habitual way to fear, we are doing so from a pre-determined pathway of stimulus and response. We are likely to get the same results. But allow ourselves the open space of infinite possibilities and we enter the path of liberation!
We can be motivated by fear and many of us believe that not only is this a good thing, it is a necessary thing. We can also be motivated by that open, liberating space which I call love, that space that we can be guided to by fear! And there is a difference. We may end up taking the same course of action but the quality of that action and the intention behind it is quite different.
When motivated by fear, our action is fueled with the energy of struggle, of self-preservation (often over others) and constriction. When motivated by love, which we can be guided to by fear, our action is imbued with the energy of ease, interbeing and expansion.
That’s right. Any action, decision or choice can be motivated by fear or love. Which would you rather?
Peace, Lucy
How shall I serve you, my Love?
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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