SOME DIFFERENT THOUGHTS ON FEAR

(OR, ARE WE REALLY UPSET FOR THE REASON WE THINK?)

From the many jobs that we have done, involving snakes, bats and stinging insects (including “killer bees”), we see that often fear can be more overwhelming than the creatures themselves.  It is amazing that we do as well as we do when we consider our past experiences.  Fear can be our worst enemy – or our best friend, when we understand what is going on within us.  The Chinese word for danger also means opportunity.  Most likely it is an opportunity to resolve an old unresolved issue.

A customer related how her fear of snakes occurred.  As a very young child she had no fear of snakes, and one crawled in her lap and went to sleep.  Her mother came by and reacted hysterically.  From that time on, a well-entrenched fear of snakes was established.  Another similar story was told to us about a young girl at a church picnic.  It seems that a bat (most likely flying around her for mosquitoes) landed in her hair.  When the well-meaning church ladies saw the bat, they tried to remove it, but their haphazard efforts and accompanying shrieks and screams resulted in more entanglement.  With both of these stories a choice was made to accept someone else’s perception (judgment), which came from a place that was anything but peaceful.

Fear can also take more subtle forms as anger and guilt.  Certainly no one can deny that fear, anger, and guilt give all of us tunnel vision, which can block creative solutions to the “problem.”  The only thing that removes fear is knowledge that we experience on a personal level.  With knowledge comes understanding, then peace.  Any decision made when not in a state of peace is not a good one, and we can test that statement with our own experiences.

Fear destroys more relationships in marriage, business and countries than any other cause.  If we want to lessen the negative happenings in our lives, we need to examine our thoughts, feelings and belief systems.  We also need to replace our negative thoughts with positive ones.  Could it be that we get everything we ask for by our own moment by moment thinking?  Even “idle” thoughts have power, especially when we add emotions of fear or joy to these thoughts.

To put it another way: “Our thinking reflects our choice of what we want to see.”  What we see in the world around us is not only a reflection, but also a projection of ourselves.  More often than not, we project our own unresolved issues on those closest to us.  Our relationships are really all about resolving our own unresolved issues.  These issues, of course, are based on fear.  Wouldn’t our lives be much better if we choose JOY instead of the fear from which all attack thoughts follow?

Flip Wilson, a television comedian who played the character Geraldine, would always get a big laugh when saying:  “What you see is what you get.”  Could it be that we are not only 100% responsible for our own thoughts, but also responsible for our own feelings and whatever happens to us in life?  (But does anyone really want to hear that?  Or that Joy is letting go of fear?) 

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