Weekly Tidbit: Fear

[Charly Hill]

A young couple won a contest and were awarded an all expense paid vacation to a resort on an island in the Caribbean. They were very excited and happy until a friend told them that this particular island was known for having a lot of snakes. Not being fond of snakes, they had some emotional pause, and being brave, they decide to go anyway. But on the flight to the island their concern about running into snakes grew into fear. So they did not sleep very well that first night, fearful that they would see snakes. The next afternoon, as they were coming back from the beach, they came upon a snake. Seeing the snake, their fear abruptly changed from fear of meeting a snake to an even bigger fear of being bitten by a snake. And the snake picked up on the fear vibe and got scared that he might be in danger himself, so he bit Sally. (Yes, fear is contagious.) So their fear once again moved forward in time. No longer is it about seeing a snake, or getting bit by one, but the fear now is that Sally might die.

This is a made up story; nobody really got snake-bit. But it illustrates how fear manifests with the negative anticipation of something bad happening, not in the present moment, but in the future. One acronym of FEAR is Future Evidence Appearing Real. We deal with fear all the time; "what does being an adult teach you, daily, if not how to function in the face of fear?" (Everything Matters by Ron Currie, Jr.) I believe that we were given all of our emotions for a reason. Our evolutionary choice with fear is whether we feed it with more scary thoughts or just notice it as 'the call to attention' that it is and take a next step to address what is calling to you.

Paying attention and taking action in the here and now is therefore an antidote to fear; it is the giving of loving energy either to yourself and/or another. The Laws of Attraction state that we attract what we give attention to, so if we live with a lot of negative anticipation, we are likely to draw that which we fear most. And there are always snakes in paradise. Yes, we do need to pay attention to avoid stepping on them, but if we feed the fear with our thoughts we are inviting them to a starring role in our reality. As Abraham / Hicks says, "Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don't want". Fear gives us another opportunity to observe, inhibit, and redirect, to choose how we create our lives.

Charly Hill
www.conversationsforchange.com