Today's Quotation:

Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck.  The problem in fear is our response -- the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us. . . . Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways.

Dan Millman

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 it 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.

Questions to ponder:

1.  What are you afraid of?  What caused that fear originally?
Are the same factors still in place now as when the fear was created?

2.  What do we do to fear when we accept it
for what it is instead of fighting it?

3.  Have you ever considered trying to make friends with your fears?

Nothing in life is to be feared.  It is only to be understood.

Marie Curie