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The human mind is limited in its perception of reality as it’s filled with fears, worries, and doubts. Fear is a poison that contaminates the subconscious mind, which can destroy the willpower of the conscious mind. Fear is a negative, destructive energy that disconnects, contracts, destroys and harms. It blurs the vision, and it’s a cause of wrong decisions and actions that eventually may lead to failure and suffering. Fear ordinarily produces negative outcomes.
For example, fear of loss of a relationship leads to jealousy. Jealousy, in turn, can result in lying, manipulation, or even in aggression and violence. A person who is fearful is also greedy. Greed, which results from the fear of not having enough, can result in competitiveness, impatience, selfishness, and using others. Unfortunately, when energy leaves you in fear, it will bring only discomfort or pain to your body. If you choose to live with fear, resentment, jealousy, or greed, you’ll learn your lessons in life through pain, suffering, and a sense of loss.
Importantly, fear produces a toxic magnetism that draws to itself the objects of fear, as a magnet draws to itself pieces of iron. Therefore, you don’t need to fear accidents, unpleasant situations, or diseases if you’ve had them in the past. Rather, be afraid of fear itself, for fear may bring repeated accidents, undesirable situations, and illnesses to you. Hence, your work is to drive out your self-imposed enemies -your fears from your mind.
Fear has a detrimental impact not only on your physical health but also on your mental health, debilitating your motivation, courage, common sense, and will power. Here’s one example from my counselling practice of how negative thoughts and feelings based on fear interfered with one’s life: Belinda, a thirty-one-year-old representative, received excellent feedback from the team for her presentation at work, but one colleague gave her mildly critical feedback. For days she was thinking only on the negative opinion of her colleague, ignoring all the positive feedback received from others. This real-life example illustrates how our negative assumptions based on fear can foster a negative view of everything around us by focusing only on the negative.
To overcome your fears, first, you need to understand the root cause of the fear. Fear is an emotional state resulting from an error in the process of thinking. It’s a consequence of a subjective judgement, of an unrealistic perception of things, events and people.
Your personal judgements and perceptions have a root in your limiting beliefs about yourself and the world acquired from significant others in your life or your previous experience. Hence, through the lens of your unexamined beliefs and perceptions, you perceive yourself and the world around you. Therefore, it’s important to examine your unrealistic beliefs about yourself and others that cause fears in you with the help of a wise counsellor and replace them with healthy, realistic beliefs that will bring you peace and joy within.
Also, it’s important to understand that most situations in life can be looked at in more than one way. Instead of focusing all your attention on the single negative aspect of the situation, you need to ask yourself: ‘What’s great about this problem? What else could this mean? What can I learn from this?’ In this way, you can see the situation from another perspective, hopefully, in a more positive light.
Returning to the above example, I asked Belinda the following questions: ‘Is it possible that your colleague’s feedback has some validity? Can you learn something from him?’ These questions helped Belinda understand that her colleague’s feedback was useful as he pointed out some important issues that she could learn from and apply them to her next presentation. Instead of continuing to dwell on her negative thoughts that made her feel frustrated and miserable for days, she expressed sincere gratitude to her colleague for his constructive feedback. In this way, she made peace with herself while strengthening the relationship with her colleague.
Remember that you have a choice to challenge your own perceptions behind your unpleasant experiences in life, to try to see beyond the illusion created by your fears. As Robin Sharma wrote, ‘Most fears are nothing more than the illusion. And yet, they rule our lives. They keep us small. They keep us chained and fill our lives with limitation rather than possibility.’
To overcome your fears, you need to take the courage to face each of them and look at the situations with no judgement. Non-judgemental perception allows you to see the world and all life experiences without engaging in negative emotions based on fear. When the subjective judgement is replaced with total and unconditional acceptance of the situation, the fear will dissolve itself.
When you erase all your fears from the subconscious, you will achieve inner peace within. Freeing yourself from all your fears will help you to see the true nature of your soul and the real beauty within yourself. When you become familiar with your true nature, allowing your authentic self to shine, you will realise that you are the most magnificent creature in the world, and you will see yourself and the world with loving eyes.