Fear

Converting Fear to Love

The inadequacies of the ego self
Fear often originates from a sense of not being in control. We use control to manage people and situations that we do not understand or that threaten to expose our lack of self-love. If we accepted people and situations for what they are, we would be back to the universal definition of love - which is "Love is the opposite of fear". Love is at the level of the higher self while fear is an emotion, and all emotions exist at the lower self - the personality level. We trade the experience of love for the emotion of fear and inhibit our abilities to co-create and manifest. We cannot simultaneously experience love and fear together.

We need to love more and fear less. The first step is to identify when fear is present. We've all experienced extreme fear at sometime in our lives. It can paralyze. A more subtle type of fear can be expressed in emotions such as anger, suspicion, frustration, anxiety etc. Trace the source of these emotions and you'll find fear at work. Fear is fear, whatever its label, subtle or otherwise.

For example, a neighbor comments that he thinks that you could do a better job of keeping your front lawn tidy in "conformance to neighborhood standards." You feel a rush of adrenaline, a quickening respiration, and thoughts about driving across his lawn in the middle of the night with a truck. Most of us would describe this emotional state as anger. Now, consider where the anger comes from. You are being criticized because someone else doesn't like your lawn. What does it mean about you, the person? It takes on the meaning for most of us that we are inferior because our lawn is judged as being inferior. We fear that our lack of self-love has been exposed. Now "they" see behind the facade of our fortress walls. Our cover is blown.

Distraction
The fact is that our insecure ego fears the exposure of our self-imposed inadequacy. Our anger over the criticism of our lawn became a focal point to draw attention away from our lack of self-love. This dynamic occurs time and time again, and the greater your reactions, the more it reflects on the level of your self-imposed inadequacy.

To convert fear into love, try these steps:

1. Recognize the negative emotion and trace it back to fear. Write down your initial emotion (if it is not fear, then trace it to its root in fear) and record what you are fearing. Understand what you are fearing is really your lack of self-acceptance being revealed or discovered by someone else.

2. Look into your past as far back as you can for the event that originally attacked your self-love. This is often referred to as a psychic wound. Describe what happened to create the wound. Understand that what you are fearing is really your lack of self-love being revealed or being discovered by someone. Write down your thoughts about that possibility.

3. Understand that whatever caused the wound was ego-generated and independent of your true self. Understand also that the people involved were acting out their own feelings of self-inadequacy, a process that had nothing to do with who you are. You may have had a role in the play, but what happened was not your fault. You were perfect then and have been perfect ever since. Describe your thoughts about your understanding.

4. Forgive yourself for having suppressed your self-acceptance in favor of someone else's opinion about who you are. What others believe has nothing to do with you. If you truly experience the sense of self-forgiveness, then you will have healed that particular wound and can now love and accept what happened instead of suppressing it through fear. This is one example of transformation. Write, then say aloud, "I forgive myself for suppressing my Self-love in the matter of…"

5. To make this transformation complete and permanent, you will need to break the habits surrounding the old wound, i.e., catch yourself becoming angry because of the conditioned beliefs you've attached to that type of event. If you identify the negative emotion and remember the healing, you can instantly transmute fear to love. The more you practice this, the old fear-based habit will give way to a loving acceptance of life.

Fight or Flight
The methods described above will enable you to change (not eliminate) your relationship to fear. Fear is wired into the biochemistry of our bodies. Fear has been a necessary part of physical survival. Fear provided that extra amount of strength, speed, and agility to save our pre-history ancestor from being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. (The Fight or Flight Syndrome). Those same physiological reactions are present in our modern-day bodies which respond just as strongly to psychological fears as they do to physical fears.

The tiger was real - our psychological fears are not. Our bodies, not knowing the difference, treat them as one and the same. Thus, if we are to change our relationship with psychological fear, it is necessary to find the source of our fear and heal it.

Healing your past is the greatest gift that can you give to yourself and to the world.

Experience the fear
Choose one area of your life in which you frequently experience fear. Write it down. Now write down what triggers the fear. For example, if you fear speaking in public, are your feelings of fear triggered by the idea of speaking in front of others (the thought), or does the fear occur when you are actually at the front of the room aready to speak? (the action).

Validation
Begin the habit of carrying a small notebook with you. Record in this notebook every conscious instance of when you felt a negative emotion. You need not try to heal the emotions - simply be aware of them and write them down as they occur.

The next day, preferably in the morning, read your entries of the previous day. See each negative emotion as an opportunity to contribute to your understanding of your current belief system. By making a conscientious effort to record your negative emotions, you'll create the opportunity to heal your past by gaining valuable insights into your ego's limiting belief system.

Each negative emotion can be traced back to fear - the ego's fear that its lack of self-love is about to be exposed. Ego fears that someone will see past the mask it presents to the world. Your fearful ego wants to project to the world an image of a perfect person, but in fact it believes the opposite to be true. It believes you are imperfect. These fears about its perceived inadequacies are what prevents the real you from shining through. Its fears prevent it from seeing the perfection that already resides within.

When you realize and accept the perfection of your own true self, there is no need to project. Your perfection shines as a light from within.