“From the Ancient Wisdoms to Quantum Physics,
It's All About the Energy!”
Facing Your Fears©
Dennis L. Dossett
(All Rights Reserved)
During last week’s Maitreya meditation with Margaret McElroy, I was “instructed” by Spirit what to write about this month for the blog. The topic was to be “Facing Your Fears.” Since Maitreya teaches us that “there are no accidents,” I knew that something was up and that it had to do with me. You see, I believe that everything in my life is all about me. For some time I’ve been saying that, “someday I’m going to write an article about the spirituality of selfishness” because I truly believe that my life is all about me—facing my fears, learning my lessons, repaying my karma, graciously receiving any karma owed me, and learning to become master of my own life. I also know that sometimes Spirit has a sneaky way of making us “put up or shut up” when it comes to our lessons, a.k.a. “testing.”
So do I have any fears? Am I human? Of course! And to all the people I’ve worked with as clients over the past several years who said that they didn’t have any fears, I say, “Baloney!” Yes, there have been a few who began our sessions with that statement, but I can’t think of any one of them who didn’t have to admit that there are some things they are very reluctant to do, and that the underlying reason was fear in one form or another.
Fear is such a pervasive phenomenon. It is no wonder that the Lower Self uses fear and doubt (a form of fear) to try to rule our lives; is it so easy! For example, I asked Karen (my wife) on a recent radio show what percentage of clients that she has worked with over the past several years with the Bach Flower Essences had one or more issues with fear? She said that she had done a rough count on this several months ago, and it was over 98%.
In my own work with the Emotion Code (which categorizes 60 primary emotions according to the major organs in which they tend to lodge), 47 of the 60 emotions in the original Emotion Code chart—over 78%—have an underlying basis of fear. I don’t have a count of specific emotions that have come up during past-life regressions, but I’d have to say that by far the vast majority of clients have needed to clear at least one specific fear, and generally more.
It is easy to find statements from a wide variety of people about both the nature of fear and the importance of facing it. For example:
• “You can conquer almost any fear if you will make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.” ~ Dale Carnegie (1888-1955; author and trainer)
• “FEAR is False Expectations Appearing Real.” ~ Dr. John Maxwell (1947-; author, speaker, and pastor)
• “Many of our fears are tissue paper thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.” ~ Brendan Behan (1923-1964; Irish poet, novelist, & playwright)
• “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ~ Marie Curie (1867-1934; physicist & first female Nobel Laureate)
• “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945; 32nd U.S. President)
And then there is the recent statement by the figure skater, Gracie Gold (2012 World Junior silver medalist, 2014 U.S. national champion, & 2014 Olympic bronze medalist in the team event). A television interviewer asker her about what her coach, Frank Carol, said just before her Olympic medal-winning performance: “Enjoy your skating, love your skating.” When asked, “How important is it for you to embrace that?” she said “. . . when you let go of all the fear, that’s when you find the love for, not just sports, but anything in life, and so you have to love it and just let go of all the fear.”
Some, or even all, of these observations may be true, but they don’t feel like it when we are gripped with fear in any given moment. If it were so easy, we’d all learn that fear is generally just an illusion created by the Lower Self for its own purposes. I read a great quote just last week by Iyanla Vanzant, an inspirational speaker, author, & television personality: “People can talk you in and out of philosophy, but they can’t talk you out of your experience.” Unfortunately, I think she’s absolutely right about our own experience. When it comes to fear, we tend either to forget or to disbelieve the advice of others. It is our own experience that we pay attention to.
So how can we “face our fears”? How can we overcome our own past experience?
A couple of years ago I heard a true story about the ordeal of Margaret Hastings, a corporal in the Women’s Army Air Corps during World War II. One of only three survivors when their airplane crashed on a mountainside in New Guinea, the story of their survival and rescue is quite remarkable. Many years later, Hastings told an audience that “When you have no choice, you have no fear—you just do what has to be done.”
I understand what Margaret Hastings is saying. We tend to run from our fears until we absolutely have no other choice. But that often requires a desperate situation, and it has to be the most difficult way to face our fears that I can think of. Isn’t there a better way? (I was tempted to write “easier” rather than “better”, but I know that there is no “easy” way.)
After meditating about this for almost a week, the only advice I received from Spirit is simply to step into your fear and keep going, one small step at a time. That’s it. Sounds simple enough—until you try it.
Tom Payne, a career development expert, says “We can't fear the past. Fear is a future thing. And since the future's all in our heads, fear must be a head thing.” I agree in principle, but in practice I say: “Fear may be a head thing, but facing it, healing it, is a heart thing.” Fortunately, there are some wonderful tools that can help us to deal with this “heart thing”, the emotion of fear we learned in the past so that we can better deal with it in the present. These include Past-Life Regression, Matrix Reimprinting, and the Bach Flower Essences. These tools can be of immense help, and I highly recommend them. But at some point, we still have to take that first step into the fear ... and then keep going.
There are two questions I think we can ask ourselves to help us decide whether to take that first step:
1. “What is the absolutely worst thing that could happen if I do it?”
2. “Will I feel better if I do it or will I feel as badly as I do now (with my fear) if I don’t do it?”
Abraham, the collective consciousness of Spirit channeled by Esther Hicks tells us that we should always do what makes us feel better. Not great; not necessarily wonderful; just better than we feel right now. That is our barometer for guiding our actions. If it would feel better having done it than not, by all means just do it. I leave you with the advice of three other well-known people who faced their fears:
• “Believe in yourself. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face ... You must do the things you think you cannot do.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962; American First Lady, columnist, lecturer, & U.S. ambassador to the United Nations)
• “If you hear a voice within you say, 'You cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890; Dutch post-Impressionist painter)
• “Of all the liars in the world sometimes the worst are our own fears.” ~ Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936; Indian-born British author)
I look forward to meeting you on the other side of fear.
Have a great month!
Dennis