Fear
Fear
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Fear
Once fear enters your life… it will take you in one of two directions: empowerment or panic. (Georges St-Pierre) Can you imagine an animal reacting to the gift of fear the way some people do? With annoyance and disdain instead of attention. No animal in the wild, suddenly overcome with fear, would spend any of its mental energy thinking "oh, it's probably nothing". But people, instead of being grateful to have a powerful internal resource, grateful for the self-care, instead of entertaining the possibility that our minds might actually be working for us and not just playing tricks on us, we like to ridicule the impulse. We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore - and even to ignore - survival signals. The mental energy we use searching for the innocent explanation to everything could more constructively be applied to evaluating the environment for important information. Every day, people engaged in the clever defiance of their own intuition, become, in mid-thought, victims of violence and accidents. (Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear audio tape, side one, 35m12s) With fear blood goes to the large skeletal muscles, such as in the legs, making it easier to flee – and making the face blanch as blood is shunted away from it (creating the feeling that the blood “runs cold”). At the same time, the body freezes, if only for a moment, perhaps allowing time to gauge whether hiding might be a better reaction. Circuits in the brain’s emotional centers trigger a flood of hormones that put the body on general alert, making it edgy and ready for action, and attention fixates on the threat at hand, the better to evaluate what response to make. (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p.6) When you are able to control your breathing you will never fall apart. Whatever the phobia, sit down and breathe into it, and eventually the breathing will conquer. Of course, fears that have built up over many years – many lives even – are deeply established, and dealing with them is not easy. So we must have patience and perseverance. Many people confirm that after a year or so of breathing exercises and of controlling their physical bodies through yoga or some other form of exercise their phobias disappear. (Lilla Bek, in one of her books, probably To the Light) The ability to imagine what we dread most is an evolutionary tool that nature has given us to transcend what we fear. I do not believe that imagining the worst makes it happen. Imagining the worst might be one of the factors that makes us prevent it from happening. That is the function of dystopias and utopias: one to make real to us a destination we must not follow, the other to imagine for us a future that is possible. Fear of poverty has made many people rich. Fear of death has kept many people healthy and sensible in how they live. (Ben Okri, The Guardian, posted and accessed 12 November 2021) Normal fear motivates us to improve our individual and collective welfare; abnormal fear constantly poisons and distorts our inner lives. Our problem is not to be rid of fear but, rather to harness and master it. (Martin Luther King Jr.) Resources
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This is part of a series on Emotion Also see:- Emotion Emotion Index Violence & The Gift of Fear |
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