Today's
Meditation:
It's
hard to see fear as something that we do to ourselves.
After all, when I try to climb up on the roof of our house,
my entire body reacts in a rather negative way due to my
"fear" of heights. I feel like I have no
control over that fear, but I always have to wonder-- why do
I let the fear take control of me so much when I'm faced
with such situations? Fortunately, I'm able to deal
with the fear and actually climb up on the roof and take
care of whatever work needs to be done there. If I
weren't able to do so, I'd have to hire some fearless
10-year-old to go up there and do things for me.
What
does fear do to us to make us react as we do? I don't
know. Can we really control our fears and still
function in spite of them? I do believe so. Our
tendency, though, is to do what our fears tell us to do, and
then blame that fear for our failures or our lackings.
In my own life, I recall how my fear of people caused me
many times to avoid social situations; I was the one who did
the avoiding, obeying my fear, yet I blamed the lack of
social contact on my fear.
I
don't believe that we can free ourselves completely from our
fears. We probably always will fear something.
But we can accept our fears for what they are and learn to
live with them, learn to find ways to compensate for the
ways they make us think and act. Awareness of our
fears helps us to know when and how they'll affect us and
can help us to come up with techniques to deal with our
fears effectively so that they don't control us so
strongly. Personally, I'm still afraid of people, and
I always will be. Now, though, I don't let that fear
keep me from doing things that I want to do, for I know that
the fear is a part of me that I've created myself, and I
don't want to allow it to control me.
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