Last update: December 23, 2014
What causes us fear and fear can paralyze us, but most of the time this feeling isn't really real. We can stop being blocked by fear if we make the decision to face it and understand it.
Understanding fear is better than trying to eliminate it
Sometimes fear acts as a alarm signal, driven by the need for security: we want everything to go as we planned, we are afraid of facing something we do not know or that we thought we knew, but which did not turn out as we had imagined it at the beginning. However, if we do not face this fear, we will hardly be able to learn from it. Perhaps our mistake is to want to eliminate or dominate fear, while the appropriate answer would be to understand it. Questions like "What is fear?", "Where does it come from?", "How does it come from?", "What message does it want to send us?" they will help us in the path of understanding it.
Fear and desire
Fear is often related to a desire. You have a purpose in mind and when you start taking action to achieve it, fear arises. What if I don't succeed? What's going to happen? Fear takes hold of you. Fear, therefore, can be related to the desire to possess, whether of an object, a person or an attitude. If you don't want to go somewhere, if you don't want to become someone in the future, you won't be afraid. Because of this, when you feel fear arise, try to understand where it comes from, from what desire it is arising, and you will understand how useless it is. It is also important to understand that we can own things, but not people. Osho emphasizes this by saying that people are beautiful because they are free, like a bird flying in the sky. When we lock him up in a cage he is no longer the same, and so also for people when we snatch their freedom. The fact of examining the characteristics of our fears will already be able to produce a first change in ourselves.
Total security does not exist, accept uncertainty
Probably with the passage of time you will understand that total security does not exist, something can always happen that we had not even remotely imagined. Because of this, learning to accept uncertainty in our life is necessary to be able to move forward; the merit lies in trying to get what we propose. Being afraid is natural and understanding it is the only way to deal with it. If we are afraid, our choices decrease, while if we understand fear and face it our choices mature, and we with them.
So let understanding be your weapon against fear.
Image courtesy of Mario Inoportuno and shridhar devalla
