Today I would like share an excerpt from my book Spiritual Reality: Transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
It is from Chapter 9: Trusting in Life
Release of Fear
The release of conscious or subconscious fear is a liberating experience. It is hard not to go through life without some sort of fear raising its head. In a way, it is easier to deal with if it is a conscious fear with a reason that is understandable and acceptable. It is harder to deal with a fear when it is subconscious. It is like a fish swimming in water, or us breathing air: it is just there, and so it’s not seen or acknowledged. The news media promotes many forms of fear one disaster after another, repeated till the scenes are embedded in the subconscious. In one sense, there seems to be a fascination with disaster viewed from a distance. Possibly it is the “better them than me” syndrome. Or it could be that it helps people to value their own lives—the realization that they are in fact finite and they could be worse off.
The only problem with this is that the fear created affects the people watching subconsciously. The subconscious is always looking to protect us. In doing so, it incorporates the messages of fear and potentially dangerous events. These events tend to get blown out of proportion, both in society and in the subconscious.
I have lived in Chile for years. It was a bit baffling for me to see how some people feared the country and the water simply because it was in South America. Bad press for the continent lingered, coloring the present and all the countries in South America. I felt safe traveling in Chile alone, and I thought the water where we lived was excellent. As with any country in the world, obviously dubious areas are not recommended, and accidents can happen anywhere.
Fear robs us of joy, love, peace, and confidence. In effect, it takes away all the things that make life worth living. Ignoring it is not an option that works successfully. How can we release fear?
Stay tuned for the answer in my blog next week.
