Your Fear Is in Your Mind
When you are thinking about fear-management, the one thing you have to steadily keep in mind is that fear is something that is universal. You aren’t the only one who fears something, however inconsequential the fear might seem. If you are frightened of butterflies, you should know that you aren’t the only one who does so. But, at the same time, the vast multitude of people aren’t frightened of butterflies at all. They, in fact, think of them as beautiful. They hold them, touch them and play with them too. And the same applies for any kind of fear. Are you frightened of snakes? Or bungee jumping? Why are these things scaring you? Don’t you see so many nature experts dauntlessly allowing snakes to slither on their shoulders? Or don’t you see so many seemingly frail people just letting themselves go off a cliff? Fear, though it is universal and claims a lot of people’s way of living, is, after all, an individual thing. It is a state of mind. It is your state of mind. When you were born, you did not have any fear. Look at infants. They would readily and playfully go near a snake if they were allowed to. There is no fear at that stage. Where does it come in then? It develops later in life. We condition ourselves to think that a cockroach is dirty and fearsome and hence we have to be frightened of it. We deem that driving is difficult and people die on account of that, and we become paranoid of driving. Every fear stems in the way we condition ourselves to think. If that weren’t the case, all of us would have been frightened of the same things. Now, that does not happen, does it? Someone is frightened of corpses but then there are people who would live with them very easily and without the slightest shred of fear in them. Or, there are people who are frightened of fire and then there are firefighters who do anything to overcome it and save people. Fear resides in our minds. And, it is possible for us to condition our minds in such a way that we can overcome that fear. It is possible to go around our fear and even remove it from our mind completely so that we can live a fuller, more balanced life. But, we all to all make a beginning. The beginning is through taking action and improving the way in which we lead our lives.