Most people understand fear to be the negative emotions that generate action of some sort within an individual. Unfortunately, most individuals are only able to recognize the strongest fear-based emotions, and can only relate to those being as fear.
But what if there were another 10 fold worth of fear based emotion levels and thoughts that you haven’t ever considered? That’s what we want to open for discussion.
Much of what we fear is derived from our own interpretation of life events we experience each day. The core beliefs and interpretations gathered as children are what really drives our experiences and judgments.
For example, in my own life I grew up having to experience moving around a lot and having my parent’s divorce and remarry. (more than once…) So as such, I became very fearful of change since it always meant something bad was happening. By the time I was in 6th grade, I had attended 8 different grade schools in 4 different states. Each year I had to make new friends, which became more of a routine to fit in than creating friends to just have fun with.
As I got older, it became more important to fit in and be accepted, instead of just “being” me, and not worrying about what others thought about my clothes, speech, actions, and more.
I lived my life this way until I got to a point where life wasn’t very fulfilling. It felt like everything was a bore with no enjoyment or hope for development and growth.
I finally started to ask questions about why I wasn’t happy, and what I could do about it. These questions lead to a revealing journey that continues to this day.
The journey began by learning how to recognize what I was afraid off. It was something that took help from a life coach, but it was one of the most rewarding experiences. I was taught to pay attention to my emotions throughout the day, and determine what they were telling me. This may not make sense, so here’s another example.
If you are hungry, you’re body tells you this through a series of feelings that you know very well. Your body also tells you if you are afraid or dislike something too. The challenge is these feeling are very subtle, or you have already programmed your mind to interpret those feelings as something that’s not really the truth.
So the process became an ongoing “watching” of what I feel throughout the day and then without judgment, listening to why I was feeling that way, for both positive and negative feelings. Positive and negative being defined as whether I feel good or bad.
Soon I started to remember experiences I had in the past and how I had judged them as good or bad, happy or sad, loving or fearful. And from each of those experiences came feelings that would replicate themselves whenever I would come across new experiences of with unknown outcomes. Thus for each experience that I couldn’t foresee the outcome, I would experience a fearful feeling.
So back to the question, “What is fear?” It’s the negative emotion you feel throughout the day. It’s as plain and simple as that. The challenge, as we mentioned above, is being able to recognize it and then identify why you feel that way. From there, you can begin to transform the fear into love (which we will talk about in a future post)
So begin today, but sitting back and just watching what you feel throughout the day. Nothing more, nothing less, just watch.
To your success!
