Fear is Just a Feeling, It Can Not Harm You
One of the biggest obstacles I faced before I started to write was my fear of not being good enough to write. With that came the realization that I had more than a few fears I had to face up to and only then was I able to work past the one thing we have in common that holds us back from exploring our infinite potential, fear.
Fear has its place in our spectrum of feelings and it is incredibly important. If it wasn't it would not have survived two and a half million years of evolution. Fear alerts us to danger and empowers us to either fight or run. Our survival as a species depended on the proper application of fear. The problem in our modern lives is that we actually create the response of fear when danger is not present.
If you take a moment to audit your experiences and ask yourself the last time you were in danger you'd be hard pressed to recall a time with any regularity that called for your biological imperative. If you live in the developing world under severe conditions of oppression with unstable governments, this element of danger will present itself more often than what many of us experience in the first world. Not being accepted by our desired social group, being rejected by a love interest, failing at something in the eyes of our peers, these are all things that do not put us in danger but we respond to them as if they do. As we have evolved to be the apex social mammals that we are, our social matrix has become more important than our actual physical realities to a degree. How else can we explain the reaction people get when they are unfriended on social media? Truly no one is in danger when they are unfriended but we can have an emotional response to this that makes us want to fight with William Wallace against King Edward Longshanks.
It turns out we have only two fears we are born with, a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. Think about this for just a second. This means that every other fear that exists has been conditioned into us. This is not an attempt to invalidate any of these fears but to put things into perspective. We create our emotions and feelings through the conditioning and experiences we've had. This means we can recondition our emotional concepts and reapply feelings we have to these concepts to make our emotions and feelings work for us instead of against us. When I first started to write my writing was pretty horrible. This is not say my writing is good now, but I can say with confidence it is less horrible. My fear of not being good enough was something I was able to successfully condition out of my working concept.
It doesn't matter what fear you have that is holding you back from whatever you want to do, be, or have, it is something you can condition out of you. Most of the fears we have are simply feelings we learned and nothing more. If we are mindful of this when we create the experience of fear, we can work to deconstruct the concept from inside (this is the one way to accomplish this) and gradually we will free ourselves from its grasp and be able to move forward in our desired direction without fear.
Fear has its place in our spectrum of feelings and it is incredibly important. If it wasn't it would not have survived two and a half million years of evolution. Fear alerts us to danger and empowers us to either fight or run. Our survival as a species depended on the proper application of fear. The problem in our modern lives is that we actually create the response of fear when danger is not present.
If you take a moment to audit your experiences and ask yourself the last time you were in danger you'd be hard pressed to recall a time with any regularity that called for your biological imperative. If you live in the developing world under severe conditions of oppression with unstable governments, this element of danger will present itself more often than what many of us experience in the first world. Not being accepted by our desired social group, being rejected by a love interest, failing at something in the eyes of our peers, these are all things that do not put us in danger but we respond to them as if they do. As we have evolved to be the apex social mammals that we are, our social matrix has become more important than our actual physical realities to a degree. How else can we explain the reaction people get when they are unfriended on social media? Truly no one is in danger when they are unfriended but we can have an emotional response to this that makes us want to fight with William Wallace against King Edward Longshanks.
It turns out we have only two fears we are born with, a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. Think about this for just a second. This means that every other fear that exists has been conditioned into us. This is not an attempt to invalidate any of these fears but to put things into perspective. We create our emotions and feelings through the conditioning and experiences we've had. This means we can recondition our emotional concepts and reapply feelings we have to these concepts to make our emotions and feelings work for us instead of against us. When I first started to write my writing was pretty horrible. This is not say my writing is good now, but I can say with confidence it is less horrible. My fear of not being good enough was something I was able to successfully condition out of my working concept.
It doesn't matter what fear you have that is holding you back from whatever you want to do, be, or have, it is something you can condition out of you. Most of the fears we have are simply feelings we learned and nothing more. If we are mindful of this when we create the experience of fear, we can work to deconstruct the concept from inside (this is the one way to accomplish this) and gradually we will free ourselves from its grasp and be able to move forward in our desired direction without fear.
Comments
Post a Comment