Fear – Get Rooted In Your Life, Not Your Mind
Fear is because you are not living with life, you are living in your mind. Fear is always about what is going to happen next, that means your fear is always about that which does not exist. Therefore if your fear is about what doesn’t exist, then your fear is imaginary. It is a level of insanity, a socially acceptable level of insanity. People are always suffering from what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow, suffering is always about what does not exist simply because you are not rooted in reality, you are always rooted in your mind. One part of your mind is memory, the other part your imagination. Both parts are really just your imagination, but if you are rooted only in your reality there will be no fear – Sadhguru
Fear is a thief, it robs everything bad that has happened to us in the past and presents it in our perspective of the future. This is how most of us live and remain in fear.
Fear is a toxic and corrosive poison flowing threw just about every channel of our lives. It is the mighty sword of the ego and the indestructible shield of pride and the alcoholic is driven by a hundred forms of fear.
Alcoholics don’t lie because they are liars, they lie because they are afraid. Afraid of being found out, afraid of consequences, afraid of being exposed as a fraud and therefore being rejected and abandoned.
Fear owned me! I allowed no one on God’s given earth to know everything about me. I would present to the world the edited version of myself at his best, Myself without his hidden secrets stashed in his closet. After all if you got to know everything about me, then you would feel the same way about me as I feel about me and I don’t like myself very much. So I can never ever present the honest version o myself to you or you will dislike me and reject me. Just to walk this earth feeling okay about myself, I desperately needed to feel loved and adored. I would wake up every morning, look in the mirror and think “loser!” Fear would then consume me as who would ever like or love a loser? I had no option but to role play once out there in the big bad world. My life was a lie of living a double life just to get through the day. I was a walking contradiction of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde split personality. No wonder I had no chance of deploying honesty. I had to live a life of dwelling in underground behaviour and deceit to feed the beast in me that demanded a chemical that delivered sanctuary from the fear that drove me close to the edge every day.
We put our fears down on paper. For many of us we thought we didn’t have many fears to list. However when prompted a little the fears came oozing out of my petrified soul. Here are a few possible fears you may have:
- Fear of rejection/abandonment
- Fear of ending up alone
- Fear of never being loved
- Fear of what others think of you
- Fear of the future/the unknown
- Fear of growing old alone
- Fear of terminal illness
- Fear of being found out to be a fraud/liar
- Fear of economic insecurity
- Fear of the consequences of your wrong doings to others
- Fear of the dark
- Fear of failure/success
- Fear of losing a loved one
- Fear of your kids leaving home
- Fear of not providing for your family
- Fear of missing out
When all is said and done, fear was usually just my defective defence mechanism when I felt threatened, exposed or hard done by.
What is anger? It is my defective mechanism to defend my fear when threatened.
What is guilt? My defective mechanism that defends my fear of consequences.
What is lust? My defective mechanism that defends my fear of not having possession of what I so desperately desire.
What is greed? My defective mechanism that defends my fear of not getting what I want, need or desire out of life.
Fear drives low self-esteem and it’s almost like my self-esteem and my ego are diametrically opposed. When my self-esteem is low, my ego is way high and that’s not a good thing. Low-self esteem + huge ego = separation from God and other people.
So let us make a thorough examination of our fears in order to be rid of this resident evil.
Paul Nobes – Author and Addictions Specialist